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52
William Shakespeare
Freud’s “writings are haunted,” writes Marjorie Garber, “by the
uncanny reappearance of Julius Caesar” (53). Freud is a central player
in Garber’s perceptive account of historical and literary idealizations
of “the idea of Rome” (52). Thus she sees Rome itself, the historical
“embodiment of fantasy and desire” (53), as inspiring the passage
near the beginning of Civilization and Its Discontents where Freud
considers “the Eternal City” (69) as an image of the human mind.
Freud is seeking an analogue for the mind’s capacity to preserve its
past, to retain “all the earlier phases of development . . . alongside the
latest one.” But he quickly abandons the attempt, noting how “historical
sequence” cannot logically be represented “in spatial terms” (70).
“Only in the mind,” he writes, is it possible to preserve “all the earlier
stages alongside of the final form.” In fact, Freud enacts in the text the
preservative “phenomenon” under discussion: by retaining the aborted
attempt to “represent this phenomenon in pictorial terms” (71), he
illustrates his early effort to create a picture of the mind as well as his
later abandonment of the task. 1 He creates both a historical record of
his mind at work (the narrative sequence) and a spatial representation
(the textual artifact).
Freud repeatedly inscribes himself in the text when responding to
Rome and to the preeminent Roman story, that of Julius Caesar. The
Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and Totem and Taboo (1912–13), in
particular, exhibit a distinct debt to Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. In The
Interpretation of Dreams—the work with which he so self-consciously
established his reputation—Freud, notoriously, cites Brutus as an
example of ambivalence, then discloses that he once played the part
of Brutus himself. The sections of the text immediately following
this revelation, which constitute the textual response to Julius Caesar,
manifest a paternal anxiety that suggests a certain Roman dimension
in the role Freud accords to the Oedipus complex in his formulations
about culture and society. Totem and Taboo contains no explicit reference
to Julius Caesar, yet Freud’s concept of the taboo culture, the
primitive banding together of brothers for the purpose of overcoming
the father, recreates Shakespeare’s picture of Roman society. Considering
these three texts in conjunction affords an opportunity to read
Freud’s articulations of Oedipal theory and of repression in light of
his own inscribed experience. Freud’s avoidance in The Interpretation of
Dreams of the biographical significance of his “Caesar,” together with
the strongly overdetermined Oedipal conclusion of Totem and Taboo,