In "The Ordeal of Civility", John Murray Cuddihy describes what he calls “the primal scene” in the life of Sigmund Freud. This is how Freud himself describes it:
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 me 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 new 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.
Freud goes on to describe his disappointment and shame at his father’s weak response. Cuddihy relates this moment to much of Freud’s work—his ambivalent relationship with Jews and non-Jews, his theory of the Oedipus complex, and his strange assertion in Moses and Monotheism that Moses was not a Jew but an Egyptian. Is this reading too much into too little? Or is it actually the case that the course of our lives is often tilted this way or that by such moments, which lend a particular color—proud or shameful, confident or embarrassed—to our image of ourselves?
