The Assassination of Julius Caesar enters Freud’s account not as a retelling of the historical event but as the decisive literary model for interpreting his Non vixit dream. Brutus’s justification of killing Caesar supplies a verbal pattern in which affection and admiration coexist with condemnation, allowing Freud to recognize that the dream stages two opposed responses to the same friend.

The Dream’s Conflicting Judgments

Freud identifies the dream scene as a meeting place for hostile and affectionate currents of thought directed toward his friend P. The hostile current is on the surface; the affectionate one is concealed. Both, he argues, find expression in the words Non vixit. His dream raises a monument to P. for his services to science, yet also annihilates him for a malevolent wish represented at the dream’s end. The same figure is therefore honored and condemned, not in separate episodes but through a single, divided construction.

Brutus as the Literary Parallel

Freud finds the closest parallel in Brutus’s justificatory speech in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Brutus gives distinct grounds for mourning Caesar, rejoicing in his fortune, honoring his courage, and killing him for his ambition. Freud notices that the speech and the dream-thoughts share both an antithetical structure and a pattern of setting opposed responses to one person alongside each other, each presented as justified without cancelling the other. The speech makes the dream’s contradiction legible: Freud recognizes himself as playing Brutus in the dream.

Traces Within the Dream

Freud then looks for a further sign that the association belongs to the dream rather than being only an interpretive resemblance. The dream says that his friend Fl. comes to Vienna in July, a detail Freud says has no support in real life: to his knowledge, Fl. had never visited Vienna in that month. He connects July with Julius Caesar, whose name gave the month its name, and takes the detail as a possible mediating allusion to the Brutus role. The otherwise unsupported month thus becomes a small clue linking the dream’s content to the assassination and its literary reenactment.

Earlier Reenactment and Significance

The parallel also reaches back to Freud’s adolescence. At fourteen, he performed the scene between Brutus and Caesar from Schiller’s Poems before an audience of children, acting with his nephew, who was one year older and visiting from England. Freud recalls that this nephew had been his inseparable companion and rival in early childhood, a relationship he regarded as formative for his later feelings toward peers. The dream’s Brutus-like division between affection and hostility consequently resonates with an earlier relationship in which love and conflict had coexisted. Caesar’s assassination matters here as the structure Freud uses to read that division: a single person may be honored for what he has given and condemned for what he has done, with neither response erasing the other.