The Little Hans Assemblage

Author(s): Ian Buchanan

Source: Visual Arts Research , Vol. 39, No. 1 (Summer 2013), pp. 9-17
Published by: University of Illinois Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/visuartsrese.39.1.0009

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 Visual Arts Research 9

The Little Hans Assemblage Ian Buchanan

University of Wollongong-New South Wales,
Australia

1. Anti-Interpretation

There is no straightforward way to say to what schizoanalysis is. It can’t even be

said that it 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. Unwill-
ing 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 provid-
ing 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.
In Dialogues, the conversational piece Gilles Deleuze produced in collabora-
tion 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

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10 Visual Arts Research Summer 2013

allow the patients 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 recognizes, according to Deleuze, and this
leaves it incapable of apprehending, much less understanding, genuine produc-
tions 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 operat-
ing. 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’s case, he simply put words in the boy’s mouth (the boy’s fa-
ther 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 psy-
choanalysis can be when it comes to listening to children. They list Little Hans’s
statements side by side with what Freud says he “hears,” thus making it abundant-
ly 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 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 himself. 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
mouths. Analysis would then take the form of a slow wearing down of the pa-
tients’ 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 afterward 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

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 Ian Buchanan The Little Hans Assmeblage 11

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 anti-interpretive trajectory
in contemporary aesthetics, which holds that interpretation is impossible because
the true “meaning” of a text is necessarily ineffable, thus putting them in 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).
It is useful to think about Deleuze and Guattari’s work in terms of their
position with regard 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 his or her life 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.2 Our
marvel at psychoanalysis’s 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.
My point though is that if we allow 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, but they also appear
to foreclose on the possibility of creating any alternative interpretive system,
psychoanalytic or otherwise. In spite of appearances to the contrary, 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

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12 Visual Arts Research Summer 2013

the reading of texts.”3 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.”4
Schizoanalysis, I would suggest, is precisely that, the attempt (albeit,
incomplete) to create a new and more adequate, immanent, or anti-transcendent
model of interpretation. The task of schizoanalysts today is not to multiply the
points of difference in every case they 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 “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’s 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 organization 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 eighteen 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 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” that 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.5 Freud did not treat Little Hans

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 Ian Buchanan The Little Hans Assmeblage 13

directly, though he did have occasion to meet him and speak with him; rather, he
supervised Little Hans’s “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’s 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’s case might be described as forensic because
what really interests Freud about this case is 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.6 By doing so, he hoped to shore up his theory about infantile sexuality
and convince skeptics of its significance by providing “direct evidence from the
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.”7
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.”8 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 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

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14 Visual Arts Research Summer 2013

no association, however distant, random, or arbitrary, was irrelevant; it was just

a matter of 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’s 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, but 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: “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.”9 As this brief exchange illustrates, Hans’s statements are crushed beneath the
weight of psychoanalytically inflected judgments 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 hors-
es; they must be symbols of something. Because horses bite, they must be castrat-
ing, 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 bed-
room, “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.”10 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 (flat-
teringly) long necks, and it is only that aspect of the animals that determines their
function in Hans’s 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

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 Ian Buchanan The Little Hans Assmeblage 15

famous case, the Wolfman, saying: “You trying to tell me my ass isn’t a Wolf?”11
Freud wants to reduce every creature in his patients’ dreams to symbols, to objects
that stand in the place of something else, and as a consequence, loses sight of the
specificity of the symbols themselves. Why a giraffe and not a flamingo, if all that
matters is that its 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, nondecomposable distanc-
es. A swarming, a wolfing.”12 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, produc-
tions of particles, particulate paths, as elements of molar multiplicities.”13 The only
aspect of the wolf that is significant to Deleuze and Guattari is its known charac-
teristic as a “pack” animal, which is to say, it is an agent of multiplicity. They use
this characteristic to challenge Freud’s Oedipalized and Oedipalizing 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 of its parts, in
this case, a behavioral 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.14
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.15 Even if we share their skepticism here that five wolves in a tree must
necessarily refer to Daddy—and I do—we must still observe that their own pro-
cedure 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 in-
terested 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

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16 Visual Arts Research Summer 2013

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 a population of objects rather than a single
object—wolves not wolf; second, they privilege the functional aspects of the pop-
ulation—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 ag-
gregate whose elements vary according to its connections.”16 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.”17
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 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 that 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 horse’s 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’s feelings “becom-
ing-horse,” it isn’t because Hans is thinking about horses or is in danger of becom-
ing 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.’”18
As should be clear from the foregoing, Deleuze and Guattari’s war against
Freud’s representational model of analysis does not mean they are anti-interpre-

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 Ian Buchanan The Little Hans Assmeblage 17

tation, 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.

Notes
1. Deleuze (2006, pp. 89–112).
2. Jameson (2009, pp. 55–60).
3. Jameson (1981, p. 22).
4. Ibid. (p. 23).
5. Freud (2002, p. 17).
6. Ibid. (p. 3).
7. Ibid. (p. 4).
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid. (p. 23).
10. Ibid. (p. 29).
11. Deleuze and Guattari (1987, p. 31).
12. Ibid. (p. 32).
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid. (p. 31).
15. Ibid. (p. 38).
16. Ibid. (p. 256).
17. Ibid. (p. 257).
18. Ibid.

References
Deleuze, G. (2006). Two regimes of madness: Texts and interviews 1975–1995. (A. Hodges &
M. Taormina, Trans.). D. Lapoujade (Ed.). New York, NY: Semiotext(e).
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. (B Massumi,
Trans.). London: Athlone.
Freud, S. (2002). The ‘wolfman’ and other cases. (L. Huish, Trans.). London: Penguin.
Jameson, F. (1981). The political unconscious: Narrative as a socially symbolic act. London: Rout-
ledge.
Jameson, F. (2009). Valences of the dialectic. London: Verso.

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