The HANS Project: A Case Study, Re-examined

“Hans’ mother is a dim presence in Freud’s text; but she is a forceful, often frightening figure in HANS”

The HANS Project, Elsa Carette (Hans), during his therapy session with Freud, 2011.  Theatrical performance. Photo Credit: Eric P. Laverty

The HANS Project: A Case Study, Re-examined
Rebecca Goldfine

When Sigmund Freud published “Little Hans,” the first-ever psychoanalysis of a child, he elicited both worldwide accolades and condemnation for revealing the sexual lives of children. His 1909 case study branded Freud’s iconic reputation and laid the foundation for child psychoanalysis.

In September 2011, writer/director David Pilot brought the historic case to the stage at New York’s West End Theater. “The HANS Project” developed over a four-month collaboration with actors, musicians, artists, and Freudian scholars. The ensemble explored the hidden dimensions of the case in an improvisational environment, creating an expressionistic, dreamlike play that conjured the imaginary and real world of little Hans.

The play goes where Freud did not, by diving into the family’s inner dynamic. For despite Freud’s pioneering work to bare the subconscious, his study of Hans was an act of suppression of sorts. While Freud chipped away at the mysteries of childhood, he also obscured the truth of the child at the center of the case, Herbert Graf. According to later interviews with Herbert and his father, Max–that were made public only 15 or so years ago–Freud either missed, or ignored, the abuse and trauma that raged in the Graf family. Hans’ mother, Olga, suffered from a psychotic postpartum depression and beat her second child Hanna, Hans’ only sister, who committed suicide in her twenties. While this back-story does not appear in Freud’s case, except as the faintest of shadows, it is jolted forward in Pilot’s “HANS.”

Hans’ mother is a dim presence in Freud’s text; but she is a forceful, often frightening figure in HANS, at times stalking the stage in a silk cape and top hat, or lurking in a seductive corset. Sympathetically portrayed by Jenna Bourgeois, Olga is a talented musician thwarted by her roles as wife and mother.

Pilot reveals the secrets the Hans case even while his script never strays from Freud’s text. With Freud orating from a lit balcony above the audience, the play develops according to the doctor’s clinical exposition and, at the same time, along the tragic lines of the family story. The words are Freud’s, but the acting, imagery and music belong to Pilot’s ensemble and their contemporary retelling of the case.

Pilot credits the participation of several Freudian scholars for “helping us break into the hidden world of Hans — his fantasies, feelings, and fears.” His cast and crew “were able to bring a whirlwind of stimuli recreating a surreal diorama of a little boy’s fantasy life.”

The ensemble deconstructed the case through months of exploratory rehearsals before roles were assigned, music written, and dances choreographed. “Rehearsals were full of improvisation and exercises that were quite free from constraints of time, or even a precise result in mind,” Bourgeois says.

The outcome was unorthodox and affecting. Women performed every role with the exception of Freud, who was played by a series of male actors: André De Shields, Austin Pendleton, Valery Oisteanu, and John Munder Ross. Pilot’s ensemble brought a modern, female perspective to the case, and moved the play “into the dark waters of the human psyche,” says De Shields, where gender is oftentimes blurred.

The live score, composed by the Complex Electra Orchestra and written only in the last two weeks of rehearsals, accentuated the fantastical, emotional quality of Hans’ imagination. Composer David Cieri says, “Musically, what we tried to do was go into places that weren’t being acted by the actors.”

The HANS Project, Dana Marcolina (baby Hanna) struggles to emerge from her placental encasement, 2011. Theatrical performance. Photo Credit: Eric P. Laverty

The play’s pivotal scene is Hanna’s birth, which Freud describes as the “great event of Hans’ life.” Freud never mentions, however, that he had persuaded Olga, his long-standing patient, to have a second child to cure her of her neurosis. Yet baby Hanna drove Olga into deeper despair, unmooring the family. This narrative emerges strongly in HANS, helped improbably, by a parachute. (The parachute functions as a transformational object throughout the play — from hanging as a boudoir curtain to being stuffed into the frustrated mother during the father’s rage-filled act of sex.) Pulled from Olga’s loins as placenta, the parachute is then spread across the floor where Hanna, played by Dana Marcolina, emerges from underneath – her wriggling body helpless and alone. The scene darkens as a desperate Hanna holds her arms out for a mother who never appears.

Pilot is now working on a film version and his next theatrical production of Hans, which he says will look more closely at Herbert Graf, who survived his analysis and childhood traumas to become a legendary opera producer. “HANS is a hero’s tale, ripe with poetic imagery — a Freudian dreamscape of mythical proportions we continue to harvest.”

This article was published by NY Arts Magazine, 2011. NY Arts Magazine is published by Abraham Lubelski. Sponsored by Broadway Gallery, NYC and World Art Media.