enemy's girl. A taunt or an insult sometimes spurs the victim of it to
towering ambition to show the world and especially the abuser better, and to
be able to despise him in return; and there are those who have been thus
stung to attempt greatness and find the sweetest joy of success in the
feeling that by attaining it they compensate for indignities they suffered
in youth. In fact, when we analyze ambition and the horror of
Minderwertigkeit that goes with it, we shall doubtless find this factor is
never entirely absent, while if we were to apply the same pertinacity and
subtlety that Jung in his "Wandlungen" has brought to bear in working over
the treacherous material of mythology, we might prove with no less
verisimilitude than he has shown the primacy of the libido that in the
beginning was anger, and that not Anaxagoras' love or the strife of
Heraclitus was the fons et origo of all things, that the Ichtrieb is basal,
and that the fondest and most comprehensive of all motives is that to excel
others, not merely to survive, but to win a larger place in the sun, and
that there is some connection between the Darwinian psychogenesis and Max
Stirner and Nietzsche, which Adler has best evaluated.

III. Anger has also its dreams and reveries. When wronged the imagination
riots in fancied humiliation and even tortures of an enemy. An object of
hate may be put through almost every conceivable series of degradation,
ridicule, exposure and disgrace. He is seen by others for what our hate
deems him to be. All disguises are stripped off. Children sometimes fancy a
hated object of anger flogged until he is raw, abandoned by all his friends,
an outcast, homeless, alone, in the dark, starving, exposed to wild animals,
and far more often more prosaic fancies conceive him as whipped by a parent
or stronger friend, or by the victim himself later. Very clever strategies
are thought out in detail by which the weaker gets even with or vanquishes
the stronger, and one who suffers a rankling sense of injustice can hardly
help day-dreaming of some form of comeuppance for his foe, although it takes