The Horse is Beaten: From Violence to Sexuality and Back Again

Abstract

This article explores and critically examines the relationship between violence and sexuality through one of the most famous clinical cases in Freud’s psychoanalysis: the case of Little Hans. In this case, Freud explains the mechanism of a common disorder — such as fear of a certain kind of animal — through a child’s sexuality, which is being formed in the context of the nuclear family. Turning to the story of the boy who is afraid of horses, Freud analyzes zoophobia as an element of the Oedipal structure, a psychic configuration in which the child undergoes gender socialization in a complex triangle of love, imitation, jealousy, and fear in relation to their parents. According to Freud, the origin of mental disorder is the displaced energy of attraction. The article revises this thesis, bringing to the fore not sexuality, but animals, violence over them, and the role of the acceptance of such violence as a norm in the formation of the human personality. The author’s hypothesis is that, on the other side of sexuality (the basis of our mental life, according to Freud), lies a violent mechanism that produces what we consider to be the social norm. This mechanism is described as the “masculinity machine”. The study of how the machine works is complemented by an analysis of Rodion Raskolnikov’s dream about beating a horse and a comparison of two characters, real and fictional, who witnessed violence over horses in childhood — Freud’s Little Hans and Raskolnikov.