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Julius Caesar 55
not, Cassius; yet I love him well” [1.2.81]), questions his own motives
(“I know no personal cause to spurn at him/But for the general”
[2.1.11–12]). Brutus’ mind is thus divided in the act of self-scrutiny;
he is, moreover, doubly divided, since he is conscious not only of self,
but of his own conflicting impulses—ambivalent, and aware of his
ambivalence. What Freud calls repression is the belated discovery of
such an internal division. Significantly, when Brutus abandons the
habit of soliloquy—the dramatic figuration of self-awareness—after
the assassination, he becomes prey to the ghost, an external projection
of his guilt. Julius Caesar contains, enacts, and inspires ambivalence, 6
and therefore offers a rich mine for Freud.
II
Brutus appears in The Interpretation of Dreams in Freud’s discussion
of one of his own dreams, in which a dead friend (P.) sits, apparently
alive, opposite him. 7 Intending to explain this oddity to a second
friend (Fleischl) with the phrase “Non vivit” [“he is not alive”],
Freud instead says “Non vixit” [“he did not live”], and then actualizes
the death-wish by giving P. “a piercing look,” under the strength of
which “his form grew indistinct . . . and finally he melted away” (457).
Freud attributes his mistake (“vixit” for “vivit”) to “a convergence of
a hostile and an affectionate current of feeling towards my friend,”
and goes on to explain that “As he had deserved well of science I built
him a memorial; but as he was guilty of an evil wish . . . I annihilated
him.” Noticing the “special cadence” of this last sentence, Freud
searches for his “model,” “a juxtaposition like this of two opposite
reactions towards a single person,” and discovers it can be found “only
in one passage in literature . . . Brutus’ speech of self-justification in
Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar [iii, 2], ‘As Caesar loved me, I weep for
him; as he was fortunate, I rejoice at it; as he was valiant, I honour
him; but as he was ambitious, I slew him.’ ” The verbal parallel leads
Freud to the realization that he “had been playing the part of Brutus
in the dream” (459).
The admission occasions his reported memory of acting the part
of Brutus “in the scene between Brutus and Caesar from Schiller”
when he was fourteen, and to an analysis of his troubled relations
with his nephew John, who “had come to us on a visit from England”
and who played the part of Caesar. John returns as a “revenant” from