Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

72
William Shakespeare
quotations from Totem and Taboo, her analysis does not
concern Freud as author and hence differs substantially from
my own.
7. Garber also discusses this dream (64–65), and although she
reaches somewhat different conclusions about it, her sense
of what the dream reveals about “the status of the revenant”
has influenced my argument. Garber writes that the dream
shows that “it is intrinsically the idea of such a person, in
contradistinction to his palpable or historical reality, that
exercises so powerful an effect upon the memory” (65). Whereas
she seems to retain a connection between the ghost and at least
“the idea of ” the nephew John, I see John as a screen for Freud’s
father.
8. Strachey’s footnote identifies the enacted scene as the “lyric in
dialogue form recited by Karl Moor in Act IV, Scene 5, of the
earlier version of Schiller’s play Die Räuber” (460).
9. Jones comments on “the pronouncedly parricidal content” of Die
Räuber, and on Freud’s own failure to mention it (Life 23n).
10. Presumably in Plutarch’s text, since Charles von Moor mentions
Plutarch in his first speech in the play. In Plutarch, of course,
reference to the rumor that Caesar was Brutus’ biological father
raises the Oedipal theme from a symbolic level to that of
possible actuality.
11. Freud’s nephew John receives important reference in this essay
as well.
12. The best example of this would be Freud’s dream of a marble
tablet commemorating his discovery of dream theory (letter to
Fliess, June 12, 1900; qtd. in Willbern 108).
13. Possibly paralleling the suspicion that Brutus was Caesar’s
illegitimate son.
14. Norman Holland observes that the allusion to Prince Hal
confirms the parricidal wish within Freud’s identification with
Brutus (64).
15. The conclusion of the note—“except in so far as the ‘matriarchy’
calls for a qualification of this assertion”—opens important
issues beyond the scope of this paper. Feminist critics are
currently challenging Freud’s effacement of matriarchy.
16. So Lévi-Strauss found it: “a vicious circle deriving the social
state from events which presuppose it” (491).