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Freud, A. (1926) An Hysterical Symptom in a Child of Two Years and Three Months Old.
Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 7:227-229

An Hysterical Symptom in a Child of Two Years and Three Months Old

Anna Freud

The little incident which I shall report here did not come under my own observation. The
child's mother, Frau Hilda Sissermann, told me about it and gave me leave to publish it. She
vouches for the correctness of the observation. Her story is as follows:—
At the time of the occurrence she and her children were living in Tula, in a house in the
courtyard of which there was a deep well. She had repeatedly told all the children that they
were not to go near the well by themselves or even to play by it and, in order to deter them
from doing so, she had vividly described to them the danger of falling in. One day she
happened to be standing near the well with one of the children, a little boy of two years and
three months old, when a full bucket of water which had just been drawn broke away from the
chain and crashed down into the well. The incident obviously made a profound impression on
the baby. He spoke of it as follows (as far as he could speak plainly at all): 'Bucket was
naughty; bucket fell into the well'. He continued to talk of it with excitement, making the
bucket into a child, and finally he himself became the child that fell in. After his mother and
he had gone back into the house, while she was

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beginning to take off his little coat, he suddenly began to scream and cry, calling out that his
arm hurt him, that they must not touch it, for he had 'broken it to bits' when he fell into the
well. His mother was convinced that it must be simply a phantasy and tried, first gently and
then sternly, to make him obey her, but without success. At last she became frightened at the
look of his arm, which he kept rigidly bent, so that the baby-fat bulged out all round and made
it look swollen. She began to wonder if, in leading him in, she could really have strained or
sprained his arm, and so she sent for the doctor. He was a clever physician, with much
experience of children. He gave it as his opinion that there was no evidence of a fracture, but
was inclined to think that there was a very painful strain, and prescribed poultices. Whilst the
arm was being examined the child screamed as if in torments. His little coat had been cut
away. He was put to bed and sat up in his cot and played, without ever moving his arm; when
anyone tried to touch it he screamed. When he was asleep in the afternoon his mother tried to
touch the arm, and immediately he woke up. Nevertheless she still felt a doubt about the
reality of the injury. When the baby woke up from his afternoon sleep, she sat down by his
bed with a friend and played with him so long and in such a diverting way that he gradually
became more lively and forgot everything, and finally stretched, lifted, turned and dropped
both arms, whilst playing at being a bird and flying. From that moment nothing more was
heard of his arm hurting him.
This is the mother's account, and she adds that in his later development the child never again
showed a tendency to symptom-formation of this sort.
I think that in this case a large part of the mechanism of symptom-formation is plainly
evident. Probably the little boy had often wished to disobey his mother and go near the
tempting well. On the basis of this wish feelings of guilt arose, which enabled him to put
himself in the place of the bucket and to transfer to himself what he imagined to be the
bucket's punishment.
But I think we may venture to supplement this with a further stage in the mechanism. We are
probably justified in supposing that the feelings of guilt, which related to playing by the well,
were reinforced by other, more serious feelings arising from the actual, and not merely
phantasied, transgression of a prohibition; I refer to the prohibition of onanism. If this were
so what the child saw happen at the well—the breaking away of the bucket from the chain and
its fall into the

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depths of the water—must have signified to him a symbolic execution of the threat of
castration: the loss of a guilty and highly prized bodily organ—first of all the penis itself, and
then, by a process of displacement, the arm and the hand which had shared the forbidden
activity.
From this point of view the child's symptom had a double meaning. The stiffness and
immobility of his arm would represent the action of moral tendencies, since these symptoms
would constitute a direct punishment for onanism and a renunciation of the habit. The way in
which he held his arm tightly pressed to his body and anxiously shielded it from every
interference from outside would represent an instinctive defence and precautionary measure
against the castration which threatened him.
Of course, from a distance and without any possibility of testing one's supposition, it is
impossible to decide how far the explanation I have suggested is really correct.

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Article Citation:
Freud, A. (1926). An Hysterical Symptom in a Child of Two Years and Three Months Old.
Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 7:227-229