Taking the Piss Out of Little Hans: A Metabolic Reading for the Anthropocene

When writing about what he called the nonhuman environment over sixty years ago, Harold Searles decried how psychoanalysis had “skeletally limit[ed] itself to a portrayal of human beings alone […].” A fateful, even fatal, limitation, this schism between the human and what I describe as the more-than-human lies at the heart of psychoanalysis and our era of the Anthropocene. My essay addresses this illusory if powerful split by returning to one of Sigmund Freud’s foundational cases, the “Analysis of a Phobia of a Five-Year-Old Boy” (1909) or Little Hans. In it, I work with metabolism, waste and excrement as material and psychic realities as well as metonyms for our permeability with the more-than-human, asking how we endlessly incorporate, circulate, transform and excrete a world of infinite, mutual embeddedness. Using metabolism to think allows us to re-contextualize psychoanalysis and Freud’s key case about Little Hans in terms of the more-than-human and our fears about it. Reading Freud with and against himself, I show how our fundamental permeability with the more-than-human has always already been hiding in plain, precarious, unconscious sight. I argue that attending to this reality can help us make better use of psychoanalysis and its potential as we collectively teeter off the edge of planetary destruction.