Little Hans’ parents did not like Hans' enigmas. “We find it very unpleasing that Hans started with questions this soon…” writes Hans’ father to Freud.
In 1905 Freud studies and proposes a theory of sexuality.
This theory represents and supports the theoretical framework of psychoanalytic clinic.
It’s a mark that constitutes the corner stone of a fundamental dis-covery.
What is this mark that situates the specificity of a practice?
There is no such thing as an adequate, natural sexuality.
Put it in terms of enigmas, confirms that what is of the order of desire and jouissance is tributary to a series of operations that, coming from the Other, produce efficacies.
On Seminar 4, Lacan will speak of the adventures and misadventures of the Oedipus complex and castration complex.
When an adjustment is demanded by the parents a traumatic real breaks into in the child.
When a madurative evolution adapted to the chronological time of a daily life is expected, psychopathology is outlined: sexuality is trauma.
It is, then, a dimension, the drive, that fractures the narcissism, a dimension that leaves out everything that comes to disrupt the harmony, the illusion of the One.
The polymorphous, perverse sexuality pierces the dimension of being and the imaginary of love.
The real of sexuality situates at the origin what concerns to the drive running over the ego, the profoundly conflictual aspect of sex, the impossible to process, the impossible of the sexual relation.
What does this lacanian statement mean, other than stating that there are sexual relations but what’s lacking, as a possibility of the structure, is a necessary object convenient for the drive?
The child begins to ask questions for narcissistic reasons. The collapse of the unity of the narcissistic position sets off the psychical apparatus, founding the origin of research and curiosity.
The threat by the appearance of a new baby along with the fear of loss that this event may cause with regard to the care and love of those around the child, make him to think and to tackle the problem of the origin of life, an issue concerning the question of the father.
But is just a question of the appearance of a little brother in the real? Or is it instead, like in Hans, what “das Klein” begins to produce drafts of the first sexual awakening, there, where something of the order of the father starts to anticipate his efficacies while opening to desire and jouissance?
It’s the phallic jouissance that disturbs the narcissistic-phallic mother cell, on which the child relied as partial object for the jouissance and desire of the primordial Other.
Let’s go back to our first question. Why parents can’t stand the enigma of children's questions?
What of the lack of knowledge should not be written? At the same time, what is the demand of the child by structuring their questions?
For children their parents are the source of all knowledge. The child attributes them a know-it-all, a whole-knowledge without a crack.
The children address their questions there, towards the parents as objects, for the message to be articulated.
Is this the direction that a cure will be directed?
The child demands the ability to continue processing his questions, questions concerning the nuclear complex of neuroses.
Sayings that need the help of the analyst to be articulated, constituting a subject of word, not only a subject which is being spoken of.
From the repetition of the questions to the possibility of a question able to go beyond that first knowledge in which the infantile sexual theories come to a halt.
What is this first knowledge?
Also, for what structural reasons the questions come to a halt?
Let’s take a detour.
The first erections of Han’s penis anticipate the fracture of the cell phallic mother-narcissism. It is an anticipated efficacy of the Name of the Father.
An instance of cut is announced and the anxiety overcomes at the point of the possibility that the lack is missing, and the presaged freedom doesn’t occur.
In this sense, the horse phobia endures a solution to the crisis. It’s a symbolic resource to escape from a jouissance that keeps Hans in the small maternal circuit.
The symptom, then, comes to the place of supporting the instance of the cut.
In Han’s case we read: On Sunday March 1st the following conversation took place:
I try again to explain to Hans that horses don’t bite, says the father.
Hans talks about Lizzie's father who had warned her friend that “she shouldn’t run the fingers over the white horse, otherwise it would bite.”
Listen, says the father, I think what you have in mind is not a horse, but a pee-maker, which cannot be touched.
Hans says, but a pee-maker doesn’t bite.
There’s a footnote underscoring the multi-voice of the signifiers, which accounts for one dimension of the logic of the symptom.
It reads: "The sensations of itching on the glans, which moves children to touch, are regularly described as follows: It beisst mich, it itches me, literally, it bites me."
Therefore, the pass-word, the word-bridge is biting, which the agent of the bite executes.
In addition, Hans' father writes to Freud: “The fear of being bitten by a horse in the street sems to be linked somehow to the fact that he fears a big penis. As you know, at the time he noticed the big penis of the horse, he jumped in to the conclusion that his mother, also big, would have, by force, a pee-maker like a horse.”
Han’s father, from a position of “hooked” into the matriarchy, is not able to perform the wound he son is demanding.
Analytic practice with children outlines, at this point, some specificity since the child is brought by his parents.
The analysis of the child also touches their parents.
They are present through their questions, requests and complaints. There is, therefore, the presence of the parents and the work to be done with them within the framework of the transference.
Hans’s father supposes knowledge in Freud.
The transference also reaches the parents of the child.
It is also a question of working the place that a child has in the discourse of his parents, the significant [signifier] value, graspable, heard, when a parent comes for a consultation: the place in the parent’s discourse for the question about a child.
During childhood, symbolic resources develop progressively in order to put away the jouissance that keeps the subject trapped in the demand of the Other.
This requires the real support of toys that build a fiction in the real, which is the scene to be played.
The presages of the phallic jouissance outline a new dimension: the phallic [faloforo] objecting the identification of the entire-whole to the imaginary maternal phallus.
It is necessary that the collapse of the first knowledge occur. What is this first knowledge that should fall? The one that propose at the level of the phallic mother: "everyone has penis."
As for the Oedipus complex of Hans’s mother, she sustains "to have it." The place from which the fall should occur, reinforces even more this knowledge:"all of us get to have the little thing”. If she has it, it’s because he is it.
For Freud, children observation was a way of corroborating his theories in order to determine the validity of the material documented in the analysis of the adult.
Nonetheless, clinical analysis with children makes room for the enigmas they present to be displayed and processed. It’s not that the analyst responds to the enigmas, but the enigmas themselves are put to work within the framework of the analysis.
Freud advises us: "We will not make ours the understandable concern of the father, nor his attempts for explanations, but we will evenly study the communicated material."
Our task is not to understand.
The analyst's position concerns sustaining the lack in knowledge in two ways: the Preconscious knowledge and the unknown-knowledge of the Unconscious, and the lack in knowledge, as there is no possible knowledge about the object of the drive.
For this to happen, it is also necessary that the narrative of the parents do not come to the place of reference, a resistance that would impede that the sayings and enigmas of the children to be displayed.
It is the child being able to subjectivize the history that precedes him, that is to say, to make the history his, situating himself in it.
From the desire of the Other to the desire of the subject.
From object to subject by way of the detachment from the sayings and jouissance of the Other, moving forward with his questions.
Liliana Paula Cohen. .
Translated by: Pablo Xavier Benavides.
