AFTER DISCUSSING FREUD AND DEMONOLOGY, the Karpes go on an interesting tangent. They report that on his trip to central Italy Freud did not get as far south as Rome—a surprising omission for a tourist who had traveled all the way from Vienna. He did, however, reach Orte, some fifty miles north of the Eternal City.
Three years later, Freud wrote about the trip and mentioned “asking the way” to Rome in a narration of one of his own dreams in the 1900 The Interpretation of Dreams. Freud informs us that the point closest to Rome that he reached was Lake Trasimene. This was not so; Orte was nearer. In pointing out this discrepancy, the Karpes let us know that Lake Trasimene is eighty miles north of Rome.
My parents’ diligent friends attach great significance to the reason for which Freud picked Lake Trasimene and used it to replace Orte in his account. That large body of water was where “the Carthaginians under the leadership of Hannibal imposed an important defeat on the Romans.” Freud, they tell us, was “an avid admirer of the Semitic hero Hannibal.” In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud writes, “I had actually been following in Hannibal’s footsteps. Like him, I had been fated not to see Rome. Hannibal . . . had been the favorite hero of my school days.” On the trail of Freud’s boyhood crush on a military figure, the Karpes then produce another rich nugget. On December 3, 1897 (less than three months after looking at the Signorellis), Freud wrote Fliess, “My longing for Rome is deeply neurotic. It is connected with my school boy hero-worship of the Semitic Hannibal, and . . . I have no more reached Rome than he did from Lake Tramisene.” The Karpes elegantly present the facts without overstating Freud’s manipulation. But the reader is led to see that, when writing for publication three years after the fact, Freud conveniently made the jump from knowing he had gotten thirty miles nearer to Rome than Hannibal did to declaring that he had reached the exact same place as Hannibal and stopped his journey without going farther.
The Karpes reproduce a map to show both Freud’s actual travel route and the one he had intended. When we study it, we realize that, while Freud had initially planned to follow the shoreline of Lake Trasimene, he changed his program. In fact, he went from Chiusi to Orvieto, then south to Orte, and then north to Assisi via Spoleto, and from there to Arezzo, which meant that he did not even bypass the large body of water. His claim in The Interpretation of Dreams was a fabrication; he had not even seen the lake. (That map also serves to make it seem almost inevitable that Freud saw the Giottos in Assisi and the Pieros in Arezzo. Yet while most knowledgeable tourists visiting central Italy would have focused more on these fresco cycles than on the Signorellis, Freud did not even comment on them in any of his letters or published writing.)
Then Richard and Marietta drop another bombshell. After years of claiming he wanted to go to Rome but was unable to do so, “It was finally his courageous behavior in facing the anti-Semitic crowd at Thunsee which gave him the courage to overcome his ambivalence and to visit Rome.” They quote Martin Freud saying that this trip, which Freud made with his brother, was “the fulfillment of a long and cherished wish and . . . a high spot in his life.”
What’s going on here? Hannibal was a Semite? Did Freud worship him because he proved that a Semite could be a tough guy? Why did it take his standing up to anti-Semitism to liberate him to go to the city where the Popes are resident? Was he really that sensitive to the issue of Catholic power? Or was it the pre-Christian Romans, rather than the Catholics, who intimidated him—because of their decadence?
Why did he falsify history and invent a stop in Lake Trasimene when he had not been there? Was it really because of his craving to be like Hannibal? Is this why the Signorellis moved him so much, because they present the masculine might that was the object of what he called his “school boy hero-worship”?
I decided to pursue Freud and Hannibal a bit further in a 1938 edition of Freud’s writing that belonged to Dr. Bettina Warburg. Bettina was my wife’s great-aunt and, like Dr. Solnit, a psychoanalyst of the old school. Her Freud volume was translated by Dr. A. A. Brill—himself a brilliant doctor—who treated several members of the family of a rich cousin of Katharine’s grandfather and Bettina’s (who were brother and sister).
Freud mentions Hannibal in the same paragraph of The Interpretation of Dreams where he tells the story about his father and the cap. In Brill’s translation, Freud’s account has novelistic poignancy. The occasion of little Sigmund’s learning about his father’s encounter with the anti-Semite was when Sigmund was “ten or twelve years old” and on a walk with his father. Jacob’s goal, Sigmund writes, was “to show me that I had been born into happier times than he.” Jacob explains that he “was well-dressed, with a new fur cap on my head” when a Christian knocked the cap off his head and instructed Jacob, whom he addressed as “Jew,” to get off the pavement. Sigmund asks his father how he responded. Jacob replies that he “went into the street and picked up the cap.” Here Sigmund Freud continues in a way that I think has great bearing on his responses to the Signorellis:
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 sentiments—the scene in which Hannibal’s father, Hamilcar Barcas, made his son swear before the household altar to take vengeance on the Romans. Ever since then Hannibal has had a place in my fantasies.
In the shadow of his father’s death when he went to Orvieto, Sigmund Freud surely relived those feelings of his father’s being insufficiently strong. With the memories that accompany mourning, he would have concomitantly seen himself again as “a little fellow”—yearning for a “big, strong” role model after being brought up by the opposite. What he saw in the Cappella Nova must have ignited those simmering feelings into a conflagration. The powerful men in Orvieto would have fueled his “deeply neurotic” feelings and “hero-worship”—Freud’s own words—for Hannibal. He would have considered again how Hannibal gained his Herculean attributes from having a strong father. His sense of diminution and disappointment, coupled with the longing to be like Hannibal and have a father like Hamilcar, would have made him dissatisfied to be Sigmund Freud.
ONE CAN UNDERSTAND WHY FREUD MADE THE BARCA FAMILY his ideal. If the notion that they were Semitic is debatable—they were Carthaginian—at least they were safely pre-Christian, having become powerful in the third century B.C. (Hamilcar’s dates are thought to be approximately 275–228 B.C.; Hannibal’s are 248–182 B.C.)
What boy wouldn’t want a father like Hamilcar? A general and statesman, he excelled at both. The family name meant “thunderbolt,” and he lived up to it. In the First Punic War, Hamilcar succeeded in guerilla combat against Roman troops in Sicily, and he later led the Carthaginian invasion of Spain. Under his rule, Carthage expanded its territory significantly.
Halmilcar’s success in Sicily came in spite of his having only a small mercenary army. When he assumed its command, he whipped it into shape in a way that conjures some of the scenes in Orvieto. To punish those who had recently mutinied because they had not yet been paid, he murdered the worse offenders at night, drowned others at sea, and shipped to Africa those guilty of only minor infractions. But Hamilcar was more brave than cruel, inspiring rare spirit and discipline in his troops of limited number. In Sicily, he wedged a position on Mount Eryx between Roman forces at both the summit and the base, and moved on from there. Even as he had vanquished those of his soldiers who actively rebelled, he had such a spirit of loyalty to the ones who were killed by the Romans, even though they had disobeyed him by plundering the local population, that he asked for a truce, during which he could give them proper burials. The Romans denied his request, instructing him that the only justification for a truce would be to save those of his soldiers who were still alive; shortly thereafter, when he was inflicting casualties on the Romans and they now begged for a truce to bury their dead, he granted it, claiming his only enemies were soldiers still alive. The man had style as well as compassion.
In 241 B.C., Hamilcar’s army retreated from Sicily. The Romans suspended their normal practice of requiring a token of submission under such circumstances; that rare gesture toward a defeated enemy testified to their particular admiration for Hamilcar. He became a hero in Carthage, all the more so when, with Hasdrubal the Fair, who would become his son-in-law, he headed to the Strait of Gibraltar and began to move into Hispania. Here he compensated Carthage for having lost Sicily and Sardinia by conquering territory that would provide a base for future wars against the Romans. Hamilcar’s military skills, diplomacy, and patriotism, as well as his will to stand up to the Roman Empire, were renowned, outdone only by his son Hannibal.
As for Freud’s obsession: Besides having such a manly father, Hannibal, who was born in 248 B.C., was blessed both with his own stunning abilities as a military commander and courage as a political reformer. On that trip when he reached Lake Trasimene—which, some twenty-one centuries later, would inspire Freud to pretend the same—he had led his army, complete with war elephants, over the Pyrenees and the Alps en route from Iberia. He and his troops occupied a considerable amount of Italian territory for fifteen years.
Even if there was no Jewish-Gentile issue in Hannibal’s story, his coming from Carthage, settled by the Phoenicians on the north coast of Africa (in what is today Tunisia), made Hannibal seem like the exotic outsider in his efforts to move into the Roman Empire. Freud latched onto a hero whose hallmark was that he had led an affront to the establishment. Besides the aspects of Hannibal with which he identified, there were those he envied. For me, one aspect of maleness that Hannibal had and that I still wish I had—and I have to believe this was true for Freud, as well—is the alliance of powerful, supportive brothers. His brother Hasdrubal (not to be confused with his brother-in-law Hasdrubal the Fair) held Carthaginian ground in Spain when Hannibal led the forces to Italy, and his two other brothers would also help him command.
Sigmund Freud’s own siblings offered no such alliance or support. As the firstborn child of Jacob and Amalia, he grew up aware of two half brothers who were about his mother’s age, some twenty years more than his own. Minor merchants, they were a world apart from him. As a child, he was often reminded that the brother who would have been closest to him in age, a full brother, Julius, died as a baby, just weeks before Sigmund turned two; even if he had no direct memory of the event, the loss burned. He had one other younger brother and five younger sisters, but they played no major role in his life.
Hannibal was deemed “the father of strategy”; many historians consider him unequaled as a military strategist and technician. He was known to have said, “I will either find a way or make one”; I picture Freud’s glee at the words. The story to which Freud often referred, that Hannibal swore to his father he would always oppose Rome, comes from Livy. Hannibal was a boy at the time, and made the agreement after begging Hamilcar to let him join him in the Punic War. In one version of the tale, Hamilcar was holding young Hannibal over a roaring fire in a sacrificial chamber when the boy cried out, “I swear as soon as age will permit . . . I will use fire and steel to arrest the destiny of Rome.”
What a way to become manly! What a perfect image for Freud to have had in mind as he looked at Signorelli’s frescoes! Whatever allure there is to sadistic hazing as a way of imbuing male strength on the boy who can stand up to it and emerge triumphant had had its impact on Freud. To have had a commanding, effective father instead of the meek, unsuccessful Jacob was central to the fantasy.
Livy makes clear the qualities that Hannibal had acquired from his male parent and role model. Following Hamilcar’s death in battle, Hannibal’s brother-in-law (Hasdrubal the Fair) took command of the Carthaginian army, but then Hasdrubal the Fair was assassinated—in 221 B.C.—and twenty-seven-year old Hannibal was appointed commander in chief. Livy tells us that as soon as he appeared before the troops, “The old soldiers fancied they saw Hamilcar in his youth given back to them: the same bright look, the same fire in his eye, the same trick of countenance and features. Never was one and the same spirit more skillful to meet opposition, to obey, or to command.” Reading these words, which were presumably the same ones Freud read in German, I, too, would like to have been Hannibal—and to have had a father like Hamilcar. The things he did! Crossing the Alps, when confronting a rockfall, he broke through it with a mixture of vinegar and fire. In Trebia, to vanquish the Roman infantry, he managed an ambush on the flank that cut them to pieces. In Etruria, in the spring of 217 B.C. (one pictures a balmy day on the Italian plains), he calculated that in order to lure Rome’s main army, commandeered by Flaminius, into battle, he needed to devastate the territory Flaminius was protecting; the tactic worked, and Hannibal managed to cut Flaminius off from Rome in what military historians consider the first moment in all of time when a mass of soldiers were forced to reverse direction. It was after this that Hannibal reached Lake Trasimene, where he destroyed many of Flaminius’s retreating troops in the water and killed Flaminius himself.
Freud must have loved this stuff. And he must also have thrilled to the way that Hannibal, joined by Spanish and Gallic heavy cavalry, led by his brother Hanno (yet another brave man in the Barca family), managed to hem in the much larger Roman army in Apulia. Not all went Hannibal’s way—his brother Hasdrubal eventually had his head cut off by the Romans, and his brother Mago Barca was defeated in Liguria—but by the time Hannibal sailed back to Africa from Italy in 203 B.C., he was, at age forty-five, an esteemed statesman. Even though Carthage lost the Second Punic War and had its empire reduced, he became a chief magistrate on his return to his homeland.
Hannibal had the proper amount of difficulty, and wit, to make him more suitable as a Freudian hero than would have been a leader who never experienced defeat and just kept acquiring medals. As Carthage became more prosperous, the Romans grew alarmed, and he was forced into exile. It was then that, according to Cicero, he responded to a lecture given by the philosopher Phormio by publicly announcing that he had witnessed many old fools in his life but that Phormio beat them all. He spoke out similarly against Roman greed. By the time he died (either in 183 or 182 B.C.), he had made his mark not just for his physical courage but for his outspokenness.
So Freud had latched onto someone known both for the originality of his words as well as the cleverness of his battle tactics. Moreover, Hannibal was famous for his personal bravery. He was said to ask nothing of his soldiers he would not do himself. Standing in the Cappella Nova, Sigmund Freud surely felt some of that same intoxication with sheer strength and effectiveness that thoughts of Hannibal inspired in him.
Brill, who translated the revised Interpretation of Dreams rather than the original, includes a footnote Freud added after the sentence with the name Hamilcar and ending in “vengeance on the Romans.” Freud writes, “In the first edition of this book I gave here the name ‘Hasdrubal,’ an amazing error, which I explain in my Psychopathology of Everyday Life.” There was something about the name Hamilcar that was like the name Signorelli. Both evoked issues that made Sigmund Freud go haywire.