Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

Julius Caesar 57
Caesar: Thou, too, Brutus? that thou shouldst be my foe
Oh, son! It was thy father! Son! The world
Was thine by heritage! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Brutus: Stay, father, stay! Within the whole bright round
Of Sol’s diurnal course I knew but one
Who to compare with Caesar could be found;
And that one, Caesar, thou didst call thy son!
‘Twas only Caesar could destroy a Rome;
Brutus alone that Caesar could withstand—
Where Brutus lives, must Caesar die! Thy home
Be far from mine. I’ll seek another land.
(4.5; pp. 245–46)
Schiller’s Brutus praises Caesar in order to have glory rebound upon
himself, as son and successor.
Freud, by recounting his memory of presenting this drama, can
attribute back to an early source, his “complicated” (461) feelings
about John, the element of hostility in his dream about P. He ascribes
central importance to the scene in the dream “in which I annihilated
P. with a look” (458). It is worth noting, however, that not only P.
but the second friend, Fleischl, is discovered to be “no more than an
apparition, a ‘revenant.’ ” The dream narrative concludes with a strange
realization: “it seemed to me quite possible that people of that kind
only existed as long as one liked and could be got rid of if someone
else wished it” (457). The dream grants Freud the capacity to exorcise
his demons—a capacity glimpsed in Schiller’s Brutus, but lacking in
Shakespeare’s character, who must kill himself to silence the ghost
of Caesar. Focusing on the relationship with P., Freud leaves unremarked
in his analysis the discovery of power over others, of a godlike
omnipotence. By tracing his ambivalence to a childhood source, Freud
historicizes his feelings but refrains from actually interpreting them.
Yet the cathexis of John, the tyrant of Freud’s childhood, itself stands
in need of analysis. Freud relates “how he was my superior, how I
early learned to defend myself against him, how we were inseparable
friends, and how, according to the testimony of our elders, we sometimes
fought with each other and—made complaints to them about
each other” (520). He does not explore the significance of the roles he
and his nephew played, nor does he comment on the curiosity of his