Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

60
William Shakespeare
in miniature, as though it were a picture; this distancing of the material
into art corresponds to the experience of drama, as the father’s part
here corresponds to that of Caesar. The “wish embodied in the dream,”
whose attribution slides in the course of analysis from Freud himself
to a female patient, is stated thus: “To stand before one’s children’s
eyes, after one’s death, great and unsullied” (464). Strangely, it is
formulated as the father’s wish, although both Freud and his patient
dream as children. The wish is projected, in other words, onto the
parent from the child. Reattributed to the dreamer, the wish expressed
in the dream is that of “filial piety”—to have one’s father stand after
his death, great and unsullied, heroic, statue-like. This dream, like the
previous dream, concerns the formation of a stable image of the dead
father, the memory of whom is conceptualized in terms of art.
Freud next turns specifically to dreams of the dead returning to
life. To illustrate his discussion of absurdity in dreams, he recounts
one in which a dead man returns to call his grandson to account
(465), and another in which a dead man returns to life unaware that
he is really dead (466). These dreams rehearse the motif familiar
from the second half of Julius Caesar, in which Caesar’s ghost walks
and his influence over the men of Rome continues to be pervasive.
If some such ghost threatens Freud, he quickly wards it off: although
the content of the following dream (Freud’s own) does not concern
fathers, its interpretation—encapsulated as, “It is absurd to be proud
of one’s ancestors; it is better to be an ancestor oneself ” (470)—
expresses the ambivalence of a struggle with the patriarchal bond. Yet,
as Freud writes in Totem and Taboo, “The law only forbids men to do
what their instincts incline them to do” (160); so here the repudiation
of patriarchy would be unnecessary were it easy or instinctual to
disclaim pride in one’s ancestors.
Without acknowledging his own emotional involvement, Freud
recognizes the pattern at work in this series of reported dreams.
Dreams involving a dead father are especially likely to exhibit absurdity,
he maintains, because of the degree of censorship necessarily
exerted over feelings about the father.
The authority wielded by a father provokes criticism from his
children at an early age, and the severity of the demands he
makes upon them leads them, for their own relief, to keep their
eyes open to any weakness of their father’s, but the filial piety