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Hannibal … had been the favorite hero of my later school days. Like so many boys of my age, I had sympathized
in the Punic Wars not with the Romans but with the Carthaginians. And when in the higher classes I began to
understand for the first time what it meant to belong to an alien race, and anti-semitic feelings among the
other boys warned me that I must take up a definite position, the figure of the semitic general rose still
higher in my esteem. To my youthful mind Hannibal and Rome symbolized the conflict between the tenacity of
Jewry and the organization of the Catholic Church.13
This passage is a favorite of Freud’s biographers, because it provides one of the major pieces of support for the standard interpretation of Freud as an enemy of Christianity in general and of Catholicism in particular. In some respects, of course, it is a useful quotation for them. But is it really as advantageous as has been argued? Let us look at the situation a little more carefully. To begin with, one might recall that Hannibal was ultimately not an especially successful general: He was finally thoroughly defeated by the Roman general Scipio Africanus, who avenged his own father’s earlier defeat at the hands of the Carthaginians. In the end, Hannibal committed suicide, and Roman power was greatly increased.14 Freud was certainly familiar with this outcome, which makes of Hannibal a far from strong choice as an anti-Roman hero. As the psychoanalysts Gedo and Wolf, to whom I owe this insight, have put it: “It is all very well to admire good losers, but adolescents need to identify with bigger battalions.”65 Gedo and Wolf quote Freud’s letters to show that as a young man he quite consciously identified with the very man who defeated Hannibal Scipio himself! We [Freud and a fellow student, Edward Silberstein] became friends at a time when one doesn’t look upon friendship as a sport or an asset, but when one needs a friend with whom to share things. We used to be together literally every hour of the day…We learned Spanish together, had our own methodology and secret names, which we took from the dialogues of the great Cervantes.…in writing as well as in conversation he was known as Berganza! I as Cipio. How often I have written: Querido Berganza! and signed myself Tu fidel Cipio.66 Gedo and Wolf come to a conclusion that overturns the standard view of Freud’s “Hannibal complex”: “Freud’s choice of the secret pseudonym Cipion for himself betrays that his openly declared identification with Hannibal…was ambivalent at best and more probably stood as a thin screen hiding his partisanship for Rome.”61 This issue of a strong, hidden partisanship for Rome will surface again and again as we look closely at other biographical material. |