Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

58
William Shakespeare
father being “at the same time John’s grandfather” (460)—a situation
that casts John in a role equivalent to father, intermediary between
Freud and his actual father/grandfather.
But the context in which the dream is discussed betrays the
paternal ghost; recalling the figure of Brutus seems to evoke the
specter of problematic relationships with the father. The dream of
annihilating P., coming at the end of the section on “Calculation in
Dreams” in Chapter Six, launches discussion of a series of dreams
about fathers that extends through the three following sections. The
pattern, considered in relation to Freud himself—and after all, it is he
who “played Brutus”—suggests that John, the Caesar of his childhood,
the elder, superior figure who evokes hostility, is a surrogate for Freud’s
father, whom he scrupulously protects from the taint of Oedipal accusations.
In his essay on “Screen Memories,” 11 Freud acknowledges
the unreliability as facts of childhood memories: “It may indeed be
questioned whether we have any memories at all from our childhood:
memories relating to our childhood may be all that we possess” (322).
Childhood memories signify in different, more symbolic registers
than that of pure narrative history. A memory of dramatic play would
be particularly resonant, not only because each participant takes on a
role additional to his own, but because subsequent encounters with
the play-text become impacted to produce one’s total current response
to the play, which then colors any memory of the original event. The
resonance for Freud of Julius Caesar (a textual memory evidently
embracing the enacted passage from Schiller) is evinced in the way
the play serves as a subtext to this portion of The Interpretation of
Dreams. Noting the formal and thematic correspondences furthers
a specific understanding of how Freud connects the phenomenon of
ambivalence with the child’s (here the son’s) relation to the father, a
connection that later forms the foundation for Totem and Taboo.
Freud’s dream of playing “the part of Brutus” is followed by one
dreamed by a patient “who had lost his father six years earlier.” The
dream involves a railway accident in which the father’s “head was
compressed from side to side” (461) and the dreamer’s subsequent vision
of his father with a wound above one eyebrow. Freud makes a connection
between the dream and the patient’s dissatisfaction with a bust of
his father newly rendered by an artist. The dreamer’s—and Freud’s 12 —
concern with statuary parallels that of Shakespeare’s Romans, who