The aim

1. Freud set out to describe the course of a five-year-old boy's phobia and how it was eventually resolved.
2. The boy is known as Little Hans, a name Freud used to protect his identity.

How the case was carried out

1. It was a case study of one boy, followed from the age of three to the age of five, with reports on him beginning in 1906 and three of his dreams recorded from 1907.
2. His father wrote the reports and sent them to Freud, who interpreted them at a distance and met the boy himself only once.
3. In the first dream Hans was going back to Gmunden, a place he had been happy, in the company of a girl called Mariedl.
4. The second dream contained no pictures at all, only the sound of being told to widdle, the family's word for going to the toilet.
5. In the third dream, at four and three-quarters, he woke in tears having dreamt that his mother had gone.

What Freud made of them

1. He read the Gmunden dream as a straightforward wish, since Hans plainly wanted to be back there.
2. He read the dream of voices as a sign of the boy's growing curiosity about his own body, which Freud saw as part of normal early development.
3. He read the dream of his mother leaving as a fear of losing her.
4. Shortly after that dream the fear was displaced onto horses, and the horses came to stand for his father too.

Conclusion

1. Freud concluded that the phobia ended in 1908, once Hans had worked through what Freud called the Oedipus complex, his idea that a young boy is possessive of his mother and rivalrous with his father before growing into identifying with him instead.
2. The dreams are offered as evidence that dreams carry a hidden meaning from the unconscious in children as well as in adults.

Strengths of the study

1. A strength is that it produced rich, detailed data on one child over two years, which no short laboratory task could ever gather.
2. A second strength is that the dreams were written down close to the time they happened rather than recalled years later, so the record does not depend on adult memory.

Weaknesses of the study

1. A weakness is that it rests on a single boy whom Freud himself described as unusual, so it generalises badly.
2. A second weakness is that the interpretations are subjective, because someone else could read the same three dreams in a completely different way.

Turning this into marks

1. Name Freud and Little Hans, and say that the father wrote the reports while Freud met the boy only once.
2. Pair each of the three dreams with the meaning Freud gave it.
3. The mark most often lost is writing the interpretations as facts rather than as Freud's readings of the dreams.