t the parental subsystem did not delineate sufficient boundaries between parent and child. Hans' parents overindulged him and as a result Hans had difficulty achieving a healthy sense of separateness from the family unit. This difficulty is evident by the phobia that he developed regarding horses and also by the depression he experienced when lying in his own bed at night.
Freud (1963) at first believed that Hans was developing normally despite his parents' overindulgence, "The experiment of letting him [Hans] grow up and express himself without being intimidated went on satisfactorily" (p. 48). Later, even Hans' father attributed the boy's phobia to dysfunction related to structural family theory, "No doubt the ground was prepared by sexual over-excitation due to his mother's tenderness" (Freud, 1963, p. 63). Freud (1963) lent credence to the father's assumption that the mother exhibited an "excessive display of affection for [Hans]" (p. 68).
The splitting of a family unit into two camps such as occurred in Hans' case is typical of the covert coalitions
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