Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

Julius Caesar 69
“the phenomenon of conscience,” that which “we know most surely,”
that which “in some languages . . . is hardly to be distinguished from
consciousness” (89). In guilt and in its presupposing condition, ambivalence,
Freud finds the source of self-awareness. Curiously though, as
if uneasy with the instability inherent in the very concept of ambivalence,
Freud ends by grounding it too in the “father complex.” Near
the conclusion of the book, expressing “great surprise” that his questions
about the origin of society, religion, and culture could be “solved
through a single concrete instance, such as the relation to the father,”
he raises “another psychological problem”—the origin of ambivalence.
His answering formulation(s) at once enact ambivalence and further
emphasize the scope of Oedipal theory:
[Ambivalence] may be assumed to be a fundamental phenomenon
of our emotional life. But the other possibility seems to me also
worthy of consideration: that ambivalence, originally foreign to
our emotional life, was acquired by mankind from the father
complex, where psychoanalytic investigation of the individual
to-day still reveals the strongest expression of it. (202)
Freud manages to have it both ways—to assert the child’s independence,
his self-creation (ambivalence is “fundamental”), and to pay the
parental debt (half of it, anyway) that no human creature can logically
deny (ambivalence is attributed to “the father complex”).
If Freud’s nephew John “was a revenant” when he played the part
of Caesar, we might well ask, “whose ghost was he?” and find in the
whispered reply, “Thy evil spirit, Brutus,” the historical site of Totem and
Taboo. Freud says his nephew returned from England “as the playmate
of my earliest years,” but his ghostliness includes his signification, as
Caesar, of the father—not simply of Freud’s real father, for the point
here is not merely biographical speculation, but of that which Lacan
(himself adumbrating the views of the father of psychoanalysis) terms
the “name-of-the-father” (199). Caesar, more potent in his ghostly
than his mortal manifestation, is the Law, the dead Father, he whose
significance is predicated on his death. As pure signifier, the name-ofthe-father
does not exist on the literal level at all. So too with Caesar;
Shakespeare shows Caesar the man playing with some discomfiture the
role of Caesar the emperor, and in the fragment from Schiller Caesar’s
existence is entirely posthumous. The ghostliness of Freud’s nephew in