Copyright © 2012
Avello Publishing Journal
ISSN: 2049 - 498X
Issue 1 Volume 2:
The Unconscious
THE LITTLE HANS ASSEMBLAGE
Ian Buchanan, University of Wollongong, Australia.
1. Anti-interpretation
There is no straightforward way to say to what schizoanalysis is. It can’t even be said that is
wholly opposed to psychoanalysis. In fact, Deleuze and Guattari only offer to re-engineer
psychoanalysis, not repudiate it or replace it. The problem isn’t so much that the question
isn’t answered by Deleuze and Guattari or that it is somehow unanswerable; rather the
problem is that it has several answers. Unwilling to provide any kind of ‘formula’ or ‘model’
that would enable us to simply ‘do’ schizoanalysis as a tick-box exercise in which everything
relates inexorably to one single factor (e.g., the family), which is what they thought
psychoanalysis had become, Deleuze and Guattari observe a quite deliberate strategy of
providing multiple answers to the questions their work raises. Deleuze and Guattari’s
elaborate system of new terms and concepts is of a piece with this strategy of providing
multiple answers to basic questions and should be seen as deliberately guarding against the
reductive tendencies of the ‘practically-minded’. This isn’t to say schizoanalysis is either
incoherent or impractical, as many of its detractors are quick to claim, but to insist that its
practice cannot be divorced from its theory and that to engage with one it is necessary to
engage with the other.
1
In Dialogues, the conversational piece Gilles Deleuze produced in collaboration with Claire
Parnet while he was working on A Thousand Plateaus with Félix Guattari, Deleuze claims
that he and Guattari only ever had two things against psychoanalysis: (1) that it breaks up the
productions of desire and (2) that it crushes the formations of utterances. In Deleuze’s view
psychoanalysis does not allow the patient to speak for themselves – it only listens for slips, he
argues, if it listens, and all too often it doesn’t listen at all. Slips are the only productions of
the unconscious that psychoanalysis recognises, according to Deleuze, and this leaves it
incapable of apprehending, much less understanding genuine productions when they do in
fact arise. This is evident in the way it mangles the rich and vibrant articulations of desire it
does encounter, reducing them all to a handful of tropes that show no appreciation for the
specificity of desire’s actual way of operating. In Deleuze’s view, the most egregious
examples of these two tendencies are to be found in psychoanalysis’ handling of children. As
I will discuss in more detail below, Freud seemed neither to listen to nor ‘hear’ what his
younger analysands said. In Little Hans’ case, he simply put words in the boy’s mouth (the
boy’s father was no less guilty of this as we’ll see). Deleuze and Guattari also single out
Melanie Klein for being similarly deaf to her patients.
In a wonderful counter-study, Deleuze and Guattari (with the assistance of Claire Parnet
and André Scala) demonstrate quite precisely just how poor psychoanalysis can be when it
comes to listening to children. They list Little Hans’ statements side by side with what Freud
says he ‘hears’, thus making it abundantly clear just how at odds the analyst and analysand
really are in a clinical regime governed by the dictates of Oedipus.1 They repeat the same
1
Deleuze 2006: 89-112.
2
procedure for Melanie Klein’s patient Little Richard. In both cases it soon becomes clear that
insofar as Oedipus is taken as the starting point for all analyses, the patient is doomed never
to be able to speak for themselves. Horses can’t just be horses for Little Hans and trains can’t
just be trains for Little Richard, they must both represent the phallus and if the boys say
otherwise they are simply overruled. That said, we shouldn’t let it blind us to the fact that
Deleuze and Guattari’s own analysis of Little Hans offers very little by way of a concrete
alternative to Freud. My point here is that Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of psychoanalysis
is not the key issue in thinking about what schizoanalysis means, it is really only a starting
point; rather, what we should be focusing on is their proposed alternative to psychoanalysis.
Even if one does not agree with Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of Freud on all
points, it cannot be denied that Freud had the unfortunate tendency to simultaneously ignore
what his patients said to him and put words in their mouth. Analysis would then take the form
of a slow wearing down of the patient’s resistance to the idea that they in fact know
themselves, that they know their own desire. As I said above, my purpose here isn’t to raise
questions about their critique of Freud; what concerns me, rather, is what comes afterwards
and -- to me, at least -- it isn’t clear what Deleuze and Guattari’s critique leaves in its wake.
Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of Freud ultimately destroys what for many of his readers is
most useful in psychoanalysis, its ability to find meaning in both the most banal of
phenomena (such as nervous tics and verbal slips) and the most obscure (dreams, fantasies
and obsessions). This is encapsulated in the slogan most often associated with Deleuze and
Guattari’s work, namely that we can no longer ask what things mean, but can only ask how
they work. Critical theory has turned Deleuze and Guattari into figureheads of the antiinterpretive trajectory in contemporary aesthetics which holds that interpretation is
impossible because the true ‘meaning’ of a text is necessarily ineffable, thus putting them in
3
the same category as people like Susan Sontag and Ihab Hassan (this fact alone should be
enough to make us suspicious of this particular take on their work).2
It is useful to think about Deleuze and Guattari’s work in terms of their position with
regards to interpretation because, putting things very simply, their critique of Freud ultimately
boils down to them saying Freud made things too easy for himself when he decided that all
psychic formations followed the path described by Sophocles in his tragedy Oedipus Rex.
From that moment on he stopped seeing difference in the productions of the unconscious and
instead saw only repetition, endless repetition, as though every human on the planet
regardless of race, gender, sexuality or nation, lived their lives according to the dictates of the
same script. As countless psychoanalytic studies since testify, it is this facility to see
repetition rather than singularity that makes psychoanalysis so attractive. The ever-expanding
universe of Slavoj Žižek’s writings are a constant reminder and demonstration of just how
versatile psychoanalysis can be as an interpretative tool. But as Fredric Jameson has
remarked regarding Žižek’s work, one cannot but help feel that psychoanalysis deployed in
this way is too formulaic, too quick somehow in its ability to detect the real meaning of
actions, statements and events.3 Our marvel at psychoanalysis’ ability to penetrate the fug of
things and see the truth lurking beneath or behind appearances becomes in this sense a
suspicion that we have simply created a new form of self-deception.
2
See for example Jameson 1981.
3
Jameson 2009: 55-60,
4
My point is that if we admit that Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of Freud is robust, then
from a practical or interpretative point of view, they seem to leave us with nothing at all. Not
merely do they seem to wreck the psychoanalytic interpretive system that had been working
so well for so long, they also appear to foreclose on the possibility of creating any alternative
interpretive system, psychoanalytic or otherwise. In spite of appearances to the contrary, I
want to suggest that neither of these claims can be true. They don’t wreck the psychoanalytic
interpretive system altogether, they retool it. And they don’t foreclose on interpretation tout
court either. There would be no point in simply destroying the very possibility of interpreting
texts, if out of the ashes of that destruction some new interpretive system was not to arise.
And though many readers of Deleuze and Guattari are stridently opposed to this view, I agree
wholeheartedly with Jameson’s observation in The Political Unconscious, that Deleuze and
Guattari’s repudiation of psychoanalysis is “coupled with the projection of a whole new
method for the reading of texts”.4 As he goes onto say, their dismantling of a hermeneutic
system like Freud’s “amounts less to a wholesale nullification of all interpretive activity than
to a demand for the construction of some new and more adequate, immanent or
antitranscendent model”.5
Schizoanalysis, I would suggest, is precisely that, the attempt (albeit, incomplete) to
create a new and more adequate, immanent or antitranscendent model of interpretation. The
task of schizoanalysts today is not to multiply the points of difference in every case they
4
Jameson 1981: 22.
5
Jameson 1981: 23.
5
encounter, so as to build a picture of every case as being both unique and finally
uninterpretable, but to figure out the new patterns of repetition (or assemblages as Deleuze
and Guattari would come to call them) and learn to understand them in an agile and flexible
manner, rather than in Freud’s fixed and authoritarian fashion. The Oedipal complex on this
view is simply one assemblage among many. Our job is to begin the task of sorting out that
nebulous of ‘many’ and start to identify and understand the variety of other assemblages at
work in the world today. In their own analysis of Little Hans, which I’ll explore in more
detail in what follows, Deleuze and Guattari argue that Hans’ fear of horses and associated
agoraphobia needs to be understood in terms of what they call a street-assemblage, by which
they mean a symptomal complex consisting of Hans, the street, horses, and the station across
the road. The street-assemblage stands in the place of Freud’s Oedipal complex, naming a
very particular organisation of desire. It is the logic underpinning this interpretation, which I
will only be able to unpick in a very preliminary way here, that we need to understand if we
are to ‘do’ schizoanalysis.
2. Little Hans
Freud frequently wrote about what he referred to as infantile sexuality, but he only published
one full-length psychoanalytic case study of a child, ‘Little Hans’. His other case histories,
particularly the Wolfman and Rat Man cases, deal extensively with infantile sexuality, but
their perspective is always that of the adult. In the case of the Wolfman, for example, Freud
reaches right back to memories of events that most likely occurred when the Wolfman was a
mere 18 months old. It is perhaps worth noting that Freud informs us that it took some two
years of analysis to delve this far back into the Wolfman’s memory. Freud also writes about
his grandson in his famous account of the ‘fort/da’ game, which was to become central to
6
Lacanian psychoanalysis, but it is a relatively short piece, and certainly doesn’t provide the
kind of depth of attention he gives to Little Hans.
Little Hans is a five year old Viennese boy suffering from a ‘nervous disorder’, which
manifests as a fear of horses, or more precisely a fear that if he goes out on the street a horse
will bite his penis off.6 Freud did not treat Little Hans directly, though he did have occasion to
meet him and speak with him, rather he supervised Little Hans’ ‘treatment’ (such as it was),
leaving the principal analytical work to be carried out by the boy’s father, a keen disciple of
Freud’s teaching and writing, though not himself a trained analyst. While it was Little Hans’
fear of horses that Freud was asked to help treat at the father’s request, it soon becomes clear
from his writing up of the case that Freud had bigger fish to fry.
Freud’s interest in Little Hans’ case might be described as forensic because what really
interested Freud about this case was the possibility of seeing what neurosis looks like at its
origin in a child’s life. Normally, working with adults, Freud had to uncover the infantile
moment when – in his view – the seeds of all neuroses are sown by peeling away the
accumulated layers of their psychic formation, starting from the present moment of their
adulthood and working back through their memories to childhood. His speculation, in the
case of Little Hans, was that he might be able to see that childhood moment when neuroses
are formed ‘in vivo’ as it were.7 By doing so, he hoped to shore up his theory about infantile
sexuality and convince sceptics of its significance by providing “direct evidence from the
6
Freud 2002: 17.
7
Freud 2002: 3.
7
child in all the freshness of youth of those sexual stirrings and fantasies” he holds to be
“common to the constitution of all human beings”.8
As is well known, Freud’s basic hypothesis is that the child is the father of the man, as
the ancient saying has it, but since he never treated children himself and despite having had a
large family seems to have had a very limited direct experience with children, he has to rely
on adult memories to support this position. For obvious reasons, then, the importance of
memory to psychoanalysis cannot be overstated – in many ways, Freud’s whole theory hinges
on the different ways memory operates. Hence Freud’s obvious delight in discovering the
case of Little Hans, which he came across in response to a call he put out to colleagues,
students and friends to “collect observations on the sexual life of children, which is normally
either skilfully overlooked or deliberately denied.”9 With Little Hans he had an instance of
neurosis that coincided with the infantile stage of life and did not need to be recovered, as
was his usual procedure (see for example his ‘Rat Man’ and ‘Wolfman’ case histories), by
taking his patients back through their memories from the present to their earliest recollections
following a chain of more or less spontaneous associations. This therapeutic procedure
commonly referred to as ‘free association’, invented by Freud, was designed to penetrate to
the deepest layers of the unconscious by catching it unawares as it were.
Initially, Freud used hypnosis to recover ‘lost’ childhood memories and moments
(following the teaching of Charcot), but he eventually found it was unnecessary, the patients
8
Freud 2002: 4.
9
Freud 2002: 4.
8
needed only to be relaxed and to obey his ironclad rule that they must report to him whatever
they are thinking regardless of how absurd, embarrassing or irrelevant it might seem. Freud’s
working assumption was that no association, however distant, random or arbitrary was
irrelevant, it was just a matter finding the correct perspective on it such that it did make
sense. He also assumed that the patient’s history could always be relied on to provide this
vantage point; one just had to know how to dig. Instead of having to start at the end of the
thread and trace everything back, with Little Hans Freud thought he had chanced upon the
possibility of beginning at the beginning and seeing things unspool in real time. In effect,
Freud hoped to see history in the making, or what amounts to the same thing, to see history
before it is history. But instead of watching history unfold, and seeing where it takes him,
Freud puts all Little Hans’ utterances in the frame of his Oedipus complex hypothesis right
from the outset and assumes in advance that he knows which threads are which and where
they are going to go.
Coached by Freud, Little Hans’s father does the same thing as Freud, and as the master
himself would do immediately places the child’s utterances in an Oedipal frame, with the
predictable result that no matter what the poor boy says nothing of what he actually says is
ever heard. Not only do Freud and the boy’s father fail to listen to Hans they also insist on
putting words in his mouth. For example, at a train station Little Hans tells his friend Lizzi
not to touch the horses assembled there in case they bite her and his father responds by saying
to Hans by saying: “Do you know, I don’t think you’re talking about horses really, but about
widdlers that shouldn’t be touched.” Hans very smartly replies: “But widdlers don’t bite.”10
10
Freud 2002: 23.
9
As this brief exchange illustrates, Hans’ statements are crushed beneath the weight of
psychoanalytically-inflected judgements about what he’s really talking about. The assumption
is that he can’t really be talking about horses because no matter what he says it must be
Oedipally-charged, in some way or another, so the horses must represent something besides
themselves. The horses can’t just be horses, they must be symbols of something. Because
horses bite, they must be castrating, or so the father reasons, oblivious to the fact that as his
son rightly points out ‘widdlers don’t bite’.
Similarly, when Little Hans reports a dream about two giraffes in his bedroom, “a big one and
a squished one” Freud and his pupil are united in the view that the big giraffe is the father, or,
rather, his “big penis (the long neck)” and the squished giraffe is his mother, or, rather, “her
sexual member”.11 The fact that Hans enjoys seeing the giraffes at the zoo and even has a
picture of a giraffe above his bed is irrelevant except insofar as it explains the source of the
fantasy material. There is nothing about the giraffes themselves that is significant, save their
(flatteringly) long necks, and it is only that aspect of the animals that determines their
function in Hans’ fantasy in Freud’s view. One could easily substitute flamingos or any other
long-necked creature and the interpretation would be the same. This is the point Deleuze and
Guattari are making when they imagine Freud’s other famous case, the Wolfman, saying
“You trying to tell me my ass isn’t a Wolf?”12 Freud wants to reduce every creature in his
patient’s dreams to symbols, to objects that stand in the place of something else, and as a
11
Freud 2002: 29.
12
Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 31.
10
consequence loses sight of the specificity of the symbols themselves. Why a giraffe and not a
flamingo if all that matters is that it’s neck is long? Interestingly, Deleuze and Guattari only
partially resolve this problem themselves and it is perhaps worth reflecting on this aporia in
their work which, as far as I’m aware, has gone completely unremarked in the secondary
literature, because it goes to the heart of what schizoanalysis wants and needs to do
differently from psychoanalysis.
3. Schizoanalysis
For all their criticism of Freud for ignoring the specificity of patient’s dreams and deliria it is
interesting to see what short work they make of the Wolfman’s wolves. “The wolf, wolves,
are intensities, speeds, temperatures, non-decomposable distances. A swarming, a wolfing.”13
The wolf is dissolved immediately into ‘matter’, the stuff of the schizophrenic’s delirium and
treated more or less indifferently. “A wolf is a hole [the reference here is to a dentist telling
the Wolfman his gums are full of holes], they are both particles of the unconscious, nothing
but particles, productions of particles, particulate paths, as elements of molar
multiplicities.”14 The only aspect of the wolf that is significant to Deleuze and Guattari is its
known characteristic as a ‘pack’ animal, which is to say it is an agent of multiplicity. They
13
Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 32.
14
Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 32.
11
use this characteristic to challenge Freud’s Oedipalised and Oedipalising reading of the wolf
as a symbol of their father. Like Freud, Deleuze and Guattari set aside the specificity of the
object (wolf) as a whole and focus instead on one its parts, in this case a behavioural
characteristic (for the same reason they link wolves to wasps and then to butterflies), the
crucial difference being that Deleuze and Guattari highlight a functional trait rather than a
representational cue.15
Deleuze and Guattari’s most stinging criticism of Freud is to be found in their
lampooning of his interpretation of the Wolfman’s dream, whereby the five wolves in the tree
are systematically reduced to a single wolf which cannot but be daddy.16 Even if we share
their scepticism here that five wolves in a tree must necessarily refer to daddy – and I do – we
must still observe that their own procedure is no less reductive; it is just reductive in a
different way, we might even go so far as to say in a better way, but still reductive. They
aren’t particularly interested in the wolves either, what concerns them is the number of
wolves, which they apprehend qualitatively rather than quantitatively (many wolves, not
simply five wolves). Deleuze and Guattari’s reasoning is thus: wolves travel in packs, not
alone, so there is always a multiplicity of wolves and never a lone wolf whose symbolic
destiny is to stand for the father (even the lone wolf of legend is always on the edge of a
pack, albeit one that has forsaken it). Here we see the two key moves that underpin all of
Deleuze and Guattari’s own case analyses, as restricted as those often are: first, they focus on
15
Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 31.
16
Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 38.
12
a population of objects rather than a single object – wolves not wolf; second, they privilege
the functional aspects of the population – its tendency to pack, in this case – rather than its
other more visually obvious genetic characteristics.
The wolf is significant to the Wolfman not because it stands in for daddy, but because it
is one of several particles that ‘swarm’ in his unconscious. The same procedure is followed in
the case of Little Hans. Now it is the horse’s turn to vanish from the scene. “When Little
Hans talks about a ‘peepee-maker’ he is referring not to an organ or organic function but
basically to a material, to an aggregate whose elements vary according to its connections
[…].”17 Following this logic, it becomes possible to say that girls as well as boys have
peepee-makers (hence no castration), and that trains can have them too (which doesn’t make
them phallic). The point here is that it is the functional attribute of a particular semiotic
element that enables it to combine with other elements and form an assemblage. “Little Hans’
horse is not representative but affective. It is not a member of a species but an element or
individual in a machinic assemblage: draught horse-omnibus-street. It is defined by a list of
active and passive affects in the context of the individual assemblage it is part of: having eyes
blocked by blinders, having a bit and a bridle, being proud, having a big peepee-maker
…etc.”18
Deleuze and Guattari move away from Freud by shifting the domain of analysis from
representation to affect, which still has its semiotic dimension, to be sure, but it is a matter of
17
Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 256.
18
Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 257.
13
aggregated signs (populations) rather than ready-made symbols. The horse no longer stands
for something other than itself (i.e., it no longer represents daddy), it is now the aggregated
sign of a particular kind of ‘feeling’. That feeling isn’t defined by ‘horsiness’ or the sense that
one is somehow horse-like; rather, it is defined by the affects which in a particular
assemblage are associated with horses, such as having one’s eyes blocked, being restrained
with bit and bridle, the sense of pride one is nevertheless able to maintain in spite of such
restraints, and so on. It is these attributes of a horses’ working life in 19th century Vienna that
resonate for Little Hans, not the fact of its existence. Deleuze and Guattari use the term
‘affect’ to designate these feelings because they occur at a level beneath or perhaps before
ideation. If they call Hans’ feelings ‘becoming-horse’ it isn’t because Hans is thinking about
horses or is in danger of becoming one, but rather because the affects he is experiencing are
those we associate with horses, such as being restrained. “These affects circulate and are
transformed within the assemblage: what a horse ‘can do’.”19
As should be clear from the forgoing, Deleuze and Guattari war against Freud’s
representational model of analysis does not mean they are anti-interpretation, or if it does,
then it does so in Jameson’s sense that it is simply a prelude to the projection of some new
more satisfactory way of proceeding. Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘new and more adequate,
immanent or antitranscendent model’ (to borrow Jameson’s phrase) is still to be adequately
described, delineated and understood, and for that reason it remains to be deployed in full.
19
Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 257.
14
Bibliography
Deleuze, G 2006 Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975-1995, trans A Hodges
and M Taormina NY: Semiotext(e).
Deleuze, G 1987 A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans B Massumi,
London: Athlone.
Freud, S 2002 The ‘Wolfman’ and Other Cases, trans L Huish, London: Penguin.
Jameson, F 2009 Valences of the Dialectic, London: Verso.
Jameson, F 1981 The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, London:
Routledge.
15