This chapter is a critical examination of Deleuze and Guattari's writing on Little Hans, the young boy at the centre of Freud's case study of the ‘Oedipus complex’. There is no doubt that the concepts developed by Freud remain useful for clinical psychiatric and psychoanalytic practice. The discussion contained within this chapter is a scholarly and conceptual critique, not a clinical critique. I am interested in the theoretical work Deleuze and Guattari undertake both implicitly and explicitly through their representation of Hans. In what is to follow, I demonstrate the allegiances between Deleuze, Guattari and Freud that are performed through their work on Little Hans. In so doing, I also argue that Freud's work on Hans is very much an artefact of the time in which it was produced, a Victorian model for sexual organisation that is characteristic of the social forms of repression that were embedded in culture. In developing this argument, I engage with Foucault's work on the history of sexuality, and discuss resonances between Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari's project, while arguing that Deleuze's work on Hans illustrates the problems identified by Foucault's critical thought on sexuality rather than further performing Deleuze's critique of the politics of the family and psychoanalysis.

Who Is Little Hans and Why Does He Matter?

Freud's theory of the Oedipus complex, while open to considerable criticism because of its heterosexually exclusive account of child sexual development, can be regarded as definitive of popular cultural understandings of the way gender and sexual identity develops in boys. The theory of the Oedipus complex itself, as Freud named it, was central to his work. Freud was attracted to Greek myths because he believed they gave access to the unconscious, and that they embodied central truths about the nature of the human psyche (Buxton 2004: 237). However, Freud's interpretation of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex has been questioned by scholars for numerous reasons. These include that fact that Oedipus could not have been suffering any form of ‘jealous’ rage when he killed his father because, at the time of the murder, Oedipus did not know the identity of his biological father.