The Medusa Complex: Silence the Name of the Mother

This chapter is a close reading of the case of Little Hans, Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy, and presents the case history as a young boy’s initiation into androcentric fantasy. Freud’s case histories often privilege the role of the father and leave the mother in the shadows, and the case of Little Hans is exemplary because Freud uses it as confirmation of his castration theory and the Oedipus Complex. Little Hans has a phobia: he is afraid that a horse is going to bite him. Despite Little Hans’ repeated identification of the horse as his mother in the case history, Freud and Hans’ father craft a narrative that gives the phallus primacy and subverts the role of the mother in the creation of children. Hans is made to accept, as his initiation into the patriarchal culture, the ‘fact’ of female castration and to believe in male parthenogenesis—precisely the symbolic patterns that were explored in the Ancient Greek myths in Chap. 2 .