And now for the first time I happen upon the youthful experience which,
even to-day, still manifests its power in all these emotions and dreams.
I may have been ten or twelve years old when my father began to take me
with him on his walks, and to reveal to me his views about the things of
this world in his conversation. In this way he once told me, in order to
show into how much better times I had been born than he, the following:
“While I was a young man, I was walking one Saturday on a street in the
village where you were born; I was handsomely dressed and wore a new fur
cap. Along comes a Christian, who knocks my cap into the mud with one
blow and shouts: “Jew, get off the sidewalk.” “And what did you do?” “I
went into the street and picked up the cap,” was the calm answer. That
did not seem heroic on the part of the big strong man, who was leading
me, a little fellow, by the hand. I contrasted this situation, which did
not please me, with another more in harmony with my feelings—the scene
in which Hannibal’s father, Hamilcar[BC] Barka made his boy swear at the
domestic altar to take vengeance on the Romans. Since that time Hannibal
has had a place in my phantasies.”
I think I can follow my enthusiasm for the Carthaginian general still
further back into my childhood, so that possibly we have here the
transference of an already formed emotional relation to a new vehicle.
One of the first books which fell into my childish hands, after I
learned to read, was Thiers’ _Konsulat und Kaiserreich_ (Consulship and
Empire); I remember I pasted on the flat backs of my wooden soldiers
little labels with the names of the Imperial marshals, and that at that
time Masséna (as a Jew Menasse) was already my avowed favourite.
Napoleon himself follows Hannibal in crossing the Alps. And perhaps the
development of this martial ideal can be traced still further back into
my childhood, to the wish which the now friendly, now hostile,
intercourse during my first three years with a boy a year older than
myself must have actuated in the weaker of the two playmates.
The deeper one goes in the analysis of dreams, the more often one is put
on the track of childish experiences which play the part of dream
sources in the latent dream content.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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