The Ordeal of Civility

The Primal Scene

Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams, in the course of analyzing the infantile matrial in his own dreams, speaks of Paris and Rome as goals of his early longings.¹ Many of his dreams took him to Rome. As a boy, when he studied the Punic Wars, he had identified with the Carthaginians against the Romans and, he writes, “to my youthful mind Hannibal and Rome symbolized the conflict between the tenacity of Jewry and the organization of the Catholic church,” adding that “the increasing importance of the effects of the anti-semitic movement upon our emotional life helped to fix the thoughts and feelings of those early days.”² The wish to go to Rome, like Hannibal’s lifelong wish, had become in Freud’s dream life “a cloak and symbol for a number of other passionate wishes,”³ one of which Freud immediately recounts as follows:

At that point I was brought up against the event in my youth whose power was still being shown 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 in his talk his views upon things in the world we live in. Thus it was, on one such occasion that he told me a story to show how much better things were now than they had been in his days. “When I was a young man,” he said, “I went for a walk one Saturday in the streets of your birthplace [Freiberg, in Moravia]; I was well dressed, and had a mew cap on my head. A Christian came up to me and with a single blow knocked off my cap into the mud and shouted:”Jew! get off the pavement!" “And what did you do?” I asked. “I went into ’the roadway and picked up my cap,” was his quiet reply. This struck me as unheroic conduct on the part of the big, strong man who was holding the little boy by the hand. I contrasted this situation with another which fitted my feelings better: the scene in which Hannibal’s father, Hamilcar Barca, made this boy swear before the household altar to take vengeance on the Romans. Ever since that time Hannibal had had a place in my phantasies.⁴ [My emphasis]

The shout that Jacob Freud heard was probably the ancient command that a Jew frequently heard when he encountered one of the goyim in a narrow street or defile—“Machmores Jud!” (“Mind your manners, Jew!”)—whereupon the Jew would obediently step into the gutter, allowing the Gentile to pass.⁵ Did Jacob Freud use this ancient phrase when he told his son this story? We do not know. If he did, and it is not unlikely, the son by 1900 had “forgotten” it. But the meaning of the event was clear, and its sting rankled. A later talk Freud had with his half-brother “had the effect of softening the criticism. of his father over the cap-in-the-gutter episode,” Ernest Jones notes, but “his father never regained the place he had held in his esteem after the painful occasion…. The lack of heroism on the part of his model man shocked the youngster who at once contrasted it in his mind with the behavior of Hamilcar.”⁶ The young Freud was shocked, indignant and, far more important, ashamed—ashamed of his own father.

It was only a year after publishing The Interpretation of Dreams containing the aforementioned episode that Freud published The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), in which we read the following: “Occasionally I have had to admit to myself that the annoying awkward stepping aside on the street, whereby for some seconds one steps here and there, yet always in- the same direction as the other person, until finally both stop facing each other, that this ‘barring one’s way’ repeats an ill-mannered, provoking conduct of earlier times and conceals erotic purposes under the mask of awkwardness”⁷ (my emphasis). What does this cryptic allusion to “an ill-mannered, provoking conduct of earlier times” mean? Nowhere are we told. But we are told that manners conceal libido when they do not conceal aggression (the two “faces” of the repressed “id”).

Later in the same work, he devotes part of the chapter on “Errors” to the motivated errors of his own Interpretation of Dreams of the previous year. We read:

On page 165 [of the first edition of Interpretation] Hannibal’s father is called Hasdrubal. This error was particularly annoying to me…. The error Hasdrubal in place of Hamilcar, the name of the brother instead of that of the father, originated from an association which dealt with the Hannibal fantasies of my college years and with the dissatisfaction of my father towards the “enemies of our people.” I could have continued and recounted how my attitude toward my father was changed by a visit to England, where I made the acquaintance of my half-brother, by a previous marriage of my father.⁸ My brother’s oldest son was my age exactly. Thus the age relations were no hindrance to a fantasy which may be stated thus: how much pleasanter it would be had I been born the son of my brother instead of the son of my father! This suppressed fantasy then falsified the text of my book at the point where I broke off the analysis, by forcing me to put the name of the brother for that of the father,⁹

the father who had so meekly submitted to the insult from the “enemies of our people” he had encountered on the street in Freiberg long ago.¹⁰

Now let us turn to Freud’s Oedipus complex. On June 16, 1873, the seventeen-year-old Freud, fresh from graduating summa cum laude from the Sperl Gymnasium, writes his friend Emil Fluss about his Matura, the final exam:

In Latin we were given a passage from Virgil which I had read by chance on my account some time ago; this induced me to do the paper in half the allotted time and thus to forfeit an “exc.” [i.e., “excellent”]. So someone else got the “exc.,” I myself coming second with “good.” … The Greek paper, consisting of a thirty-three verse passage from Oedipus Rex, came off better: [I was] the only “good.” This passage I had also read on my own account, and made no secret of it.¹¹

Twelve years later, in 1885 in Paris, Freud goes to see Oedipus Rex. “Oedipus Rex, with Mounet-Sully in the title role, made a deep impression on him.”¹² Why? We are not told. But twelve years after that (in 1897), in the midst of his self-analysis and the writing of The Interpretation of Dreams, he attempts to make sense of “the gripping power of Oedipus Rex.” He writes to his friend Wilhelm Fliess that only one idea of general value has so far occurred to him in the course of his attempt at “being entirely honest with oneself”: “I have found love of the mother and jealousy of the father in my own case too, and now believe it to be a general phenomenon of early childhood…. If that is the case, the gripping power of Oedipus Rex … becomes intelligible, and one can understand why later fate dramas were such failures.”¹³ It is of capital importance that we do not miss what is occurring in this letter, the “very matrix of psychoanalytic theory construction. Freud is putting forth a theory. A theory is offered in explanation of some fact or set of facts, some experience. What does this nascent theory purport to explain? Freud offers to Fliess an explanation of why he, Freud, finds reading and viewing Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex such a”gripping" experience. (If you will, Freud is resuming Aristotle’s task, in the Poetics, of exploring why Oedipus is the exemplary tragedy in its power to evoke the audience’s pity and terror.¹⁴) Freud’s explanation is that the Greek myth which supplies the plot of the play—the logic of its episodes—“seizes on a compulsion which everyone recognizes because he has felt traces of it in. himself. Every member of the audience was once a budding Oedipus in phantasy, and this dream-fulfilment played out in reality causes everyone to recoil in horror, with the full measure of repression which separates his infantile from his present state.”¹⁵ Almost a month passes. “You have said nothing about my interpretation of Oedipus Rex,’¹⁶ he complains in a letter to Fliess. Once more we must note that Freud is not trying to explain infantile material, about his early relations to his father and mother, dredged up in the course of his self-analysis and dream analysis. He is offering an”interpretation of Oedipus Rex," a play, and proposes a theory to explain the play’s power over him and to make “intelligible” why he should identify so deeply with its hero, Oedipus. It is in the course of that effort that the core of the theory of psychoanalysis is born.

Now let us examine the play itself. Using the Loeb Classical Library translation of F. Storr, let us turn straightway to the climactic soliloquy of Oedipus, where for the first time he reveals to his queen consort, Jocasta—and to the listening audience—the story of his past, the plot of the play. He relates how, having left Corinth for Delphi, where the oracle warns him that he will slay his father and marry his mother, and thus resolved not to return to Corinth and to his foster parents—whom he believes to be his real parents—he sets off with his staff down the road leading in the opposite direction:

Then, lady,—thou shalt hear the very truth—
As I drew near the triple-branching roads, ¹⁷
A herald met me and a man who sat
In a carriage drawn by colts—as in thy tale—
The herald in front and the old man himself
Threatened to thrust me rudely from the path,
Then jostled by the driver in wrath
I struck him, and the old man, seeing this,
Watched till I passed and from his carriage brought down
Full on my head his two-pointed goad.
Yet was I quits with him and more; one stroke
Of my good staff sufficed to fling him clean
Out of his seat and laid him prone.
And so I slew them every one. ¹⁸ [My emphasis]

This passage is from the play the seventeen-year-old Freud busily boned up on to pass his Matura, and saw enacted in Paris in 1885, and read many times, and, avid to break the secret of its hold over him, returned to in the late nineties in the course of plumbing dreams and early memories. The story his father had told him at ten or twelve, I shall argue, bears an uncanny resemblance to the event that precipitated the Oedipus story: the chance meeting on the street, the incivility of the threat o “thrust [one] rudely from the path.” This time the son doesn’t “take it lying down” but, when “jostled,” strikes back in anger at the driver. Then, just as with Freud’s father years back, Oedipus is struck “full on the head” (μέσον κάρα), but this time, instead of the “unheroic conduct” of his father meekly fetching his cap out of the muddy gutter, Oedipus in his fury strikes back again and kills … his father.

Sir Richard Jebb in his note on this passage writes as follows:

I understand the scene thus. Oedipus was coming down the steep narrow road when he met the herald (to be known for such by his stave, κηρύκειον) Walking in front of the carriage (ἡγεμών). The herald rudely bade him stand aside; and Läius, from the carriage, gave a like command…. The driver (τροχηλάτης), who was walking at his horses’ heads up the hill, then did his lord’s bidding by actually jostling the wayfarer (ἐκτρέποντα). Oedipus, who had forborn to strike the sacred herald, now struck the driver: in another movement, while passing the carriage, he was himself struck on the head by Läius. Oedipus dashed Läius from the carriage; the herald, turning back, came to the rescue; and Oedipus slew Läius, herald, driver, and one of two servants who had been walking by or behind the carriage; the other servant (unperceived by Oedipus) escaped to Thebes with the news.)¹⁹ [My emphasis]

And it is the fateful arrival on the scene of this last surviving witness to the murder that is awaited as Oedipus offers his version of his past. This servant will tell Oedipus whether it was a stranger he slew or his father, Läius.

An important structural parallel should be noted: the insulting language and the murder on the road are not part of the spectacle of Oedipus Rex: the episode is not seen, but heard related. Strictly speaking, as Aristotle noted, these events lie “outside the tragedy” (έξω τῆς τραγωδίας).²⁰ So also, the young boy Freud only heard the hat-in-the-gutter episode from his father’s mouth, years after it happened; he did not witness it. When his young son asks him, “And what did you do?” Jacob Freud astounds him with his “quiet reply.” Contrast with Oedipus’s account of his retaliation—“and then some”—against his aggressor. C. M. Bowra notes how Oedipus tells of his “fatal encounter with Läius: ‘But I / When one led the horses jostled me, / Struck him in anger,’ and no doubt he slew Läius in the same spirit. Even in his account of the episode to Jocasta we can see the excitement with which a man of action feels in recounting his exploits, and the thrill of battle which the memory of them revives.”²¹

It is the contention of my theory that Freud’s fantasy of himself as a “conquistador,” though early in his life identified with Hamilcar and Massena, later, when he came to read, see, and understand Oedipus Rex, identified with Oedipus. The superego and its ideal is formed, as Freud taught, to compensate for the loss of the parental “object-cathexis.” Freud, on the day he heard from his father’s lips the story—to him, ignominious—of his father’s encounter with an “enemy of our people,” at that moment in his shame and rage he “slew” his father, adopting the more heroic ego-ideal of Hamilcar Barca. To be ashamed of a father is a kind of “moral parricide.” Freud presumably experienced not only this rage and shame, but guilt about the rage and shame.²² He quickly “censored” these unacceptable feelings, unacceptable to a dutiful son ostensibly proud of his father; he “repressed” them. Years later he encounters Sophocles’ tragedy and it lays a spell on him. As he ponders the strange grip it has on him, he comes to believe that its power lies in the secret correspondence between the play’s manifest, overall plot design—the son unwillingly kills the father, marries the mother—and the repressed desire of every son to do just that, to kill his father because he desires his mother. But the idée fixe that Oedipus was to become for Freud, I maintain, hinges on a small detail (small, but structurally indispensable for the action of the Story) that Freud never mentions in all the countless times he retells the “legend”;²³ the whole plot starts from a social insult, a discourtesy on the road, stemming from someone in a position of social superiority (King Läius to the unknown wayfarer, Oedipus, just as the Christian in Freiberg who forced Jacob Freud into the gutter). In both cases the inferior person is “called on his manners” by those who have no manners themselves and who use manners as a mask for violence or lust. (Recall Freud’s unmasking of the “stalemate of good form” in the street, with each party moving simultaneously from left to right—like Gaston and Alphonse—as, “in reality” concealing “erotic: purposes.”²⁴) Behind decorum Freud finds violence. In both stories, the head is struck.

Clearly, Oedipus does what the young Freud wished his father had done. It is a forbidden wish, one that Freud cannot admit into con- sciousness except in “sublimated” form. He will unmask these goyim. Like Hamilcar’s son Hannibal, he will storm Rome seeking vengeance. He will control his anger, as his father had done, but he will use it to probe relentlessly beneath the beautiful surface of the Diaspora to the murderous rage and lust coiled beneath its so-called civilities. Imagine Freud’s fascination as he watches Oedipus Rex: “There is in Oedipus,” notes C. M. Bowra, “a tendency to uncontrolled anger…. This appears in his pride of kingship, even in his relentless pursuit of what he believes to be the truth…. He is the man who retaliates with force and does not shrink from killing an aggressor.”²⁵ Finally, Freud reaches Rome. He liked the first Rome, ancient Rome, which he contemplated undisturbed. Not so “the second Rome,” medieval, Catholic Rome, superimposed on the first. “I was disturbed by its meaning,” he writes Fliess on September 9, 1901, “and, being incapable of putting out of my mind my own misery and all the other misery which I know to exist, I found almost intolerable the lie of the salvation of mankind which rears its head so proudly to heaven.”²⁶ As we shall see subsequently, for Freud this “lie of salvation” assumed protean forms.

In mid-December of 1883, on the train between Dresden and Riesa, an event occurred which duplicated all the essential elements—except the ending—of Freud’s father on the street. Freud opened a window on the windy side of the train to get some fresh air. There were shouts to shut it. An argument ensued. A shout from the background was heard. “He’s a dirty Jew!” And with this, Freud writes his fiancée from a Leipzig hotel, “the whole situation took on a different color. My first opponent also turned anti-Semitic and declared: ‘We Christians consider other people, you’d better think less of your precious self,’ etc.” Freud held his ground, challenged one man to a fight. Soon “the anti-Semite, this time with ironic politeness, renewed his request [that I close the window]. No, I said, I’d do nothing of the kind” (my emphasis). The conductor refused to take sides. Finally, another railroad official “decided that in winter all windows had to be closed. Whereupon I closed it. After this defeat J seemed to be lost—a storm of jeers, abuses, and threats broke out.” Freud turned and again yelled a challenge at the ringleader, who declined to take it up. Then all was quiet.²⁷ All the essential elements of the paternal encounter repeated themselves: the public place, the dispute about the propriety of certain behavior in a public place, the charge of incivility itself made incivilly (like shouting at a child to be quiet), the physical challenge, and the “ironic politeness” of the Gentile’s renewed request—all with one important difference: Freud’s calling their bluff by an open challenge to stand up and fight.

Years later, Freud will write his book on Moses, with whom he identifies. Bestowing on Moses all the indignation and fury conspicuously absent from his father’s behavior and prominent in the behavior of the Greek goy, Oedipus, Freud writes: “The Biblical story itself lends Moses certain features in which one is inclined to believe. It describes him as choleric, hot-tempered—as when in his indignation he kills the brutal overseer who ill-treated a Jewish workman.”²⁸²⁹ The impact of such impassioned and indignant conduct—a far cry from the ignominious Diaspora passivity of Jacob Freud—which recalled the fury of Oedipus, was reason powerful enough for Freud to “offend the Jewish people” by declaring Moses a Gentile.

One further detail should be mentioned: the “narrow defile”³⁰ in which Oedipus slayed his father reappears in the life of another of Freud’s heroes, Hannibal, son and avenger of Hamilcar Barca against the Romans in the Second Punic War (218-201 B.C.). Hannibal in the spring of 217 crossed the Apennines and advanced through the uplands of Etruria, provoking the main Roman army to a hasty pursuit: “Catching it in a defile on the shore of Lake Trasmenus [Hannibal] destroyed it in the waters or on the adjoining slopes.”³¹ In more detail: the Roman consul C. Flaminius following, Hannibal occupied the heights on the north, “commanding the road from Cortona to Perugia … so that when the Roman army had entered the valley … there was no escape except by forcing a passage.”³²

Only Karl Abraham among psychoanalysts, to my knowledge, ever developed a public interest in the actual Sophoclean scene of the parricide, and this was a by-product of exploring the ways the wish to murder the father is concealed in its opposite, the desire to rescue him. In his paper, “The Rescue and Murder of the Father in Neurotic Phantasy-formations” (1922), he notes that the murder of Läius by Oedipus does not occur in the royal palace “but in the road. This detail … cannot be without significance,” he writes, and he goes on to suggest that what the road signifies is the female genitalia. In his search for elements in the Oedipus legend which “have hitherto passed unnoticed,” the “road over which father and son quarrel hardly needs further commentary,” he writes. All the concrete details which, to us, cry out for a sociocultural interpretation illuminating why Freud was so drawn to the play are subsumed under the rubric of universal Freudian symbolism. The king and the driver “attempt to push away the approaching Oedipus,” Abraham writes, in the very area where the text invites the interpretation of social insult (common sense invites it: two people in one another’s path, each refusing to move, trading insults, passions mounting). The king strikes Oedipus. “The symbolical language here is transparent,” Abraham writes. “The blow on the head is a typical castration symbol…. [All such symbolism] is easily recognizable to the initiated.”³³ But what did Freud originally feel when he read or heard the son speak of the blow on the head? When his father’s new fur hat was knocked into the gutter by a blow on the head, his father was not castrated. He didn’t react with courage, that’s all. It wasn’t the blow to the head that demeaned the father in the child’s eyes, but his “unheroic response.”

It so happens that Abraham, in August 1921, sent a copy of this paper to Freud (before publication) for his advice. In his reply Freud carefully refrains from any overall estimation of the paper, but draws Abraham’s attention to

an awkward feature of the Oedipus passage which has already caused me a great deal of trouble. You write of the “hollow way” as the place of meeting [between Läius and Oedipus], and that is just as suitable to us as a symbol of the genitals as it is suitable as a spot for giving way…. But the Greek text known to me [was this the same text the seventeen-year-old had used to pass his Greek exam at the Sperl Gymnasium?] talks of a σχιστὴ ὁδός, which means, not “hollow way,” but cross-roads, at which one would suppose giving way would not be difficult. Would it not be as well to consult a scholar before you publish?³⁴ [My emphasis]

I like to think that Freud’s scruple, here, for the actual Greek text of Sophocles represents, at a deeper level, his fidelity to those detailed elements in the encounter of Läius and Oedipus that repeated those of his father with the “kingly” goyim back in Freiberg and that, indeed, accounted for the play’s grip on him, which is what, in the first place, the Oedipus “complex”—on my theory—was designed to explain: the congruence, namely, between the story his father (in life) told him about the past and the story Oedipus would tell him (on stage, in print) about an event in his (Oedipus’) past. “If Freud had lived and carried on his inquiries in a country and language other than the German-Jewish milieu which supplied his patients,” Hannah Arendt writes, “we might never have heard of an Oedipus complex.”³⁵ If we recall that Freud’s first patient was Freud, that psychoanalysis began with Freud’s self-analysis Arendt’s statement becomes, I think, in an unsuspected way true.³⁶