Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

68
William Shakespeare
In searching the mythic equivalent of Oedipal guilt, Freud is engaged
in the opposite act of translation, working backward from psychology
and its “language of abstract thought” to the “outward projection of
inner perceptions,” the demonized spirit of the father. The salient
model was Julius Caesar, resonant from Freud’s own past.
Freud, no animist himself, accounts for the invincible power of the
taboo, and tacitly for the power of Caesar’s ghost, not by supposing that
spirits of the dead are a priori more potent than spirits of the living,
but by detecting projection at work. In order to accommodate their
ambivalent emotions, the murderous sons project their own hostile
impulses onto their victim(s). Thus Caesar’s revenging ghost responds
to Brutus’ command, “Speak to me what thou art” by attaching itself to
Brutus, naming the mechanism of projection: “Thy evil spirit, Brutus”
(4.3.280–81). Hostility may be disclaimed, but only at the price of
creating a demon; hostility is
detached from our person and attributed to the other. Not we,
the survivors, rejoice because we are rid of the deceased, on the
contrary, we mourn for him; but now, curiously enough, he has
become an evil demon who would rejoice in our misfortune and
who seeks our death. The survivors must now defend themselves
against this evil enemy; they are freed from inner oppression,
but they have only succeeded in exchanging it for an affliction
from without. (83)
Freud’s assumption of the first person pronoun is telling, 21 as it is a few
pages later when he normalizes the discovery of hostility:
The analysis of dreams of normal individuals has shown that
our own temptation to kill others is stronger and more frequent
than we had suspected and that it produces psychic effects even
where it does not reveal itself to our consciousness. (92) 22
Here, at some distance from the mystification practiced in The Interpretation
of Dreams, he tacitly acknowledges murderous impulses.
Apparently the disclosure is possible because Freud’s aim is to
valorize the ambivalence of Oedipal emotions, as the root cause not
only of social behavior but of inner awareness, of conscience, and of
consciousness itself. “Taboo conscience” he calls the “oldest form” of