“All men are brothers”
The Interpretation of Dreams“All men are brothers” is the phrase Freud uses to identify a Cain fantasy behind a patient’s obsessive fear that he might have killed someone. In Freud’s account, the phrase’s universal brotherhood sits in stark tension with the patient’s imagined capacity for violence; that conflict also supplies material for Freud’s dream of changing carriages unconsciously.
The phrase and the Cain fantasy
Freud describes a highly cultivated, tender-hearted man who, shortly before his parents’ deaths, began accusing himself of murderous desires. The phrase “all men are brothers” is named as part of a Cain fantasy underlying those accusations. Rather than a general statement about brotherhood, it appears here as a clue to the patient’s imagined guilt and his anxiety about the people he encountered.
A belief turned into compulsion
The patient’s concern became inseparable from ordinary walks. He felt compelled to account for everyone he met; if someone moved away from his gaze, he was left fearing that he might have done away with that person. Because he could not satisfy this impossible demand for certainty, he stopped going out and remained inside his home.
From isolation to imagined unconscious action
News reports of murders nevertheless reached the patient in his room, prompting new doubts that he might be the murderer being sought. For a time, the certainty that he had not left his apartment for weeks reassured him. That safeguard failed when he considered whether he could have left the building unconsciously and committed a murder without knowing it. He then locked the house door, entrusted the key to his housekeeper, and insisted that she not give it back, even if he demanded it.
Reappearance in the dream
Freud links the patient’s imagined unconscious departure to his own dream of changing carriages without awareness. He says this explanation was transferred into the dream from the dream-thoughts and served to identify him with the patient. The phrase “all men are brothers” thus belongs to a chain of associations that connects the patient’s Cain fantasy and obsessive self-accusation with the dream’s image of unconscious action.
