Thought as the desire to know: The Little Hans case

Résumé 0

Within the pedagogical field, there exists the hegemonic idea that thought is a derivative of the development of intelligence, understood as an innate ability to adapt to the physical and/or social environment of the human organism. This idea leads professionals interested in the transformations of children’s thought to restrict themselves to examining an evolutionary program considered natural and normal, from which every child’s response that differs from what is expected will be reduced to a form of deviation or disorder. In order to question this idea, we revisit the Freudian clinical case of Little Hans, and Lacan’s reinterpretation of it, to highlight the importance of the anguish of castration in the unfolding of thought. In this sense, we propose to consider children’s formulations as the result of a signifying path, an operator of thinking, caught in the dialectic between the demand for love and the desire to know. The accomplishment of this path involves the unconscious inscription of the signifier of the lack in the Other through which the impossibility of knowing about desire defines the desire to know as the cause of thought.