“The Man Moses” and the Man Freud

Freud states in the “Interpretation of Dreams”, not without regret, that he found himself obliged to publish some of his own dreams and parts of their interpretation, no other way being open for the demonstration of his great discovery than by means of the dreams, and the associative material of a non-neurotic person. How much this revelation of his inner life cost him can be seen by the fact that he postponed the publication for nearly five years and by the zeal with which he suppressed everything that was not necessary in the interest of truth and completeness. All the same, this is the most personal and autobiographical of his works, even more so than his short “Autobiography”.

We are not surprised that the relation to his father—the Œdipus complex—plays a prominent part. But there is another highly personal trend. We learn, though of course not in a coherent story, but scattered about here and there, a great deal of some characteristic interests in his boyhood and adolescence.

“Hannibal had been the favorite hero of my years from eleven to fifteen ('Gymnasial-Jahre'); like many others at the same age I had given my sympathies during the Punic wars not to the Romans, but to the Carthaginians. When later, in the higher classes, the understanding for the consequences of belonging to an alien stock began to dawn on me and the antisemitic tendencies of my classmates warned that it was necessary to consider my attitude, then the figure of the Semitic leader stood even more imposingly before my eyes. Hannibal and Rome symbolized to the young man the contrast between the tenacity of the Jew and the organization of the Catholic church. The importance which the antisemitic movement gained from then on for my affects contributed to the fixation of the thoughts and emotions belonging to these early times.”1

We learn here of a wish-phantasy in the form appropriate to the ways of thinking and feeling in early adolescence: To become a