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Julius Caesar 61
called up in our minds by the figure of a father, particularly
after his death, tightens the censorship which prohibits any
such criticism from being consciously expressed. (471)
The comment renders his mystification of the following dream, in
which he exempts himself from the rule of relations with the father,
all the more astonishing. The dream imputes a number of transgressions
to Freud’s father: unpaid hospital fees, drunkenness requiring
detention, and a suspicion that Freud himself was born early, in the
year following his father’s marriage. 13 In the subsequent analysis Freud
discloses anxieties about his own career, his marriage, his mortality—
but steadfastly denies the existence of doubts or hostilities towards
his father. “Whereas normally a dream deals with rebellion against
someone else, behind whom the dreamer’s father is concealed, the
opposite was true here” (472). His father is merely the “man of straw”
hiding the figure of “a senior colleague.” Freud insists on his father’s
perfection: “the dream was allowed to ridicule my father because in
the dream-thoughts he was held up in unqualified admiration as a
model to other people” (473). As Hamlet would put it, “Hyperion to
a satyr.”
Issues so effectively censored by “filial piety” would be expected to
return, according to Freud’s own insights into the economies of repression.
Both of the dreams that explicitly concern his father resurface
for further consideration in the course of the chapter (484, 486). And
as he has promised, Freud returns to the dream that originally evoked
the ghost of Brutus, the dream in which his friends dissolve into
apparitions. Although he never identifies his “tyrannous,” “superior”
nephew with his father, a further reference to Shakespeare implies as
much: “Wherever there is rank and promotion the way lies open for
wishes that call for suppression. Shakespeare’s Prince Hal could not,
even at his father’s sick-bed, resist the temptation of trying on the
crown” (522). 14 One is reminded of a footnote earlier in The Interpretation
of Dreams: “A Prince is known as the father of his country;
the father is the oldest, first, and for children the only authority, and
from his autocratic power the other social authorities have developed
. . .” (251n). 15 With the reference to Prince Hal, Freud comes close to
an admission of feeling a “temptation” such as that “of trying on the
crown”; he continues, “But, as was to be expected, the dream punished
my friend, and not me, for this callous wish. ‘As he was ambitious, I