LITTLE ARPÅD, THE BOY PECKED BY A COCK

"Ein kleiner Hahnemann" (a little cock-boy) is the fictitious name Sándor Ferenczi, in 1913, gave to little Arpåd, a previously well-balanced five-year-old boy who suddenly decompensated, the pathology comprising a set of perversions and regressions associated with modifications in language and behavior. The case is an example of an on-going psychotic phase after trama: "A chicken or a capon with yellow feathers (sometimes he said brown) bit his penis and Ilona, the chamber maid, dressed the wound. Then they cut the cock's throat and it 'dropped dead"' (Ferenczi, 1927).

Little Arpåd's pathology became manifest after a latency period of one year without any apparent disorder except perhaps a compulsion to masturbate. (This compulsion called for an investigation into any threats made to little Arpåd.) During his consultation with Ferenczi, little Arpåd was hypomaniac, with sadistic fantasies about the cruel punishments he imposed on himself, religious ruminations, and megalomaniac plans to marry all the women around him, like a veritable "village cock" (identification with the aggressor). In Totem and Taboo (1912-1913a), Freud takes this description as an example of "positive totemism," comparable to the case of "little Hans," where we find displaced manifestations of ambivalent affect and identification with the totemic animal.

This story, a clinical illustration of genital trauma experienced prior to puberty, is paradigmatic in Ferenczi's work. But alongside the sexual wound acting as a trigger ("We think of fruit that becomes too quickly ripe and sweet when injured by the beak of a bird, and the precocious maturity of a worm-eaten fruit," as Ferenczi was to later write in 1949), there is a threat of castration coming from the family environment prior to the trauma.

Pierre Sabourin

See also: Child analysis; Identification.

Bibliography

Freud Sigmund. (1912-1913a). Totem and taboo. SE, 13: 1-161.

Ferenczi Sándor. (1927). Ein kleiner Hahnemann. In his Bausteine zur Psychoanalyse : Vol. 2, Praxis (pp. 185-195). Leipzig: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag. (Original work published 1913)

——. (1949). Confusion of tongues between adults and the child: The language of tenderness and of passion. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 30, 225-230. (Original work published 1933)