Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

Julius Caesar 65
labour” (96). Once he determines the strength of the savage experience
of ambivalence—which ultimately means (for him) ambivalence
toward the father—Freud moves to limit the stated correspondence
with civilised human beings. He distances his authorial self from
primitive hostility by objectifying and stigmatizing the “atavistic”
neurotic. Civilization and Its Discontents, valorizing both the Eternal
City and the mind’s preservative powers, does not offer this escape. Its
formulations of the behavior of men in civilised society tacitly include
Freud himself, bringing him uncomfortably close to the experience of
Rome, which he enacted as a child playing Brutus.
For Julius Caesar too is generally about the experience of the group,
most obviously in the sense that the play dramatizes a foundational
story for Western culture, a political epic anticipating and shaping
later notions of tyranny and the costs of rebellion. Brutus’ struggle,
in one view an individual Oedipal struggle, can also be construed as
the necessary accommodation of personal desires to group requirements.
Indeed, Brutus himself sees his conflict in precisely these
latter terms: “for my part, / I know no personal cause to spurn at
him, / But for the general” (2.1.10–12). Only acting in concert can
the conspirators amass the strength to overcome Caesar. Or as Freud,
borrowing the Darwinian notion of the primal horde, would put it in
Totem and Taboo, “together they dared and accomplished what would
have remained impossible for them singly” (183). Freud traced the
beginning of social organization to the banding together of a tribe
of brothers in order to kill and devour sacrificially the primal father.
The appearance of this same plot in Julius Caesar—an ancient, but not
“primal” story—historicizes Freud’s originary account, taking it out of
the realm of myth by suggesting its recurrence in civilized experience.
Moreover, his sense of youthful involvement with the Caesar story
brings the plot directly into his own experience. David Willbern calls
Freud’s youthful translation of Oedipus Tyrannus the beginning of
his “interpenetrat[ion of ] the text of the myth” (107). So here with
Julius Caesar, another version of the Oedipal myth but with more
social emphases, text and history interpenetrate: history consists of
an enacted text, while the “invented” text of Totem and Taboo reenacts
dimensions of Freud’s own history.
“Only in one passage in literature” (Dreams 459) does Freud find
the perfect statement of ambivalence. Julius Caesar functions as a
conduit between his early experience and his later theory about the