Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

62
William Shakespeare
slew him’ ” (522). So apparently he had felt a “callous wish” such as
might warrant punishment, but had suppressed his wish, his ambition,
more effectively than had his friend P., who had given “loud expression
to his impatience” (522) to have his superior out of the way. The crime
resides not in the actual desire to displace one’s father—how could it, if
the desire is ubiquitous?—but in the failure to repress it.
Freud ends the section by remarking on his “self-discipline” in
reporting and analyzing his own dreams. He exercises this discipline
once more in avoiding the matter of his father, reiterating instead the
importance of his nephew in determining the shape of subsequent
friendships. He expresses “satisfaction” at having “always been able to
find successive substitutes for that figure” and concludes that “no one
was irreplaceable” (523). The statement is problematized by the fact
that from John’s first mention he was already a “revenant,” himself a
substitute for an earlier presence. Mightn’t one suppose that John, as
Caesar, was not simply a revenant of his former self, but a reincarnation
of the original “tyrant” and “superior”—the figure of the father?
Such a connection would explain the drive from the dream realization
of mastery—“people of that kind only existed as long as one
liked”—to the comfort taken in the later statement (which follows the
series of discussions of dead fathers) that “no one [is] irreplaceable.”
These two statements, taken together, offer assurance that one may
destroy one’s superiors with impunity—as Brutus did, or rather tried
to do. For as Julius Caesar illustrates, one guise of the irreplaceable is
the inescapable.
Like Brutus haunted by Caesar’s ghost, Freud meets the reincarnation
of his nephew, his Caesar, in all his “subsequent relations with
contemporaries.” The contrast between the primarily negative terms
in which the nephew is first presented (“treated me very badly,” “my
tyrant”) and Freud’s later “satisfaction” at finding replacements for “the
friend of my childhood” (523) evinces his acknowledged ambivalence.
Nevertheless, by concluding on the positive note he reestablishes
emotional control. The remnants of “hostility” toward his “early playmate”
(460) are buried beneath a grand statement of the emotional
life’s ongoing adaptation and fluidity. The section of The Interpretation
of Dreams following Freud’s reference to Brutus is a kind of paean to
the repression of Oedipal wishes. No wonder it is filled with revenants,
returning ghosts of dead fathers; no wonder it shares numerous
elements with Julius Caesar.