Brutus kills Julius Caesar

Brutus kills Julius Caesar is the decisive action in the episode Freud cites from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: Brutus presents the killing alongside his affection, grief, and respect for Caesar, setting each positive response against the judgment that Caesar was ambitious. Freud turns this antithetical justification into a literary parallel for a dream in which affection for a friend and hostility toward him coexist.

The Shakespearean Parallel

Freud describes Brutus’ speech as placing opposing reactions to one person in parallel, each presented as justified without canceling the other. Its structure matters as much as its subject: love and grief stand beside the decision to kill, while honor and political condemnation occupy the same balanced construction. The action is therefore recalled not as an isolated act of violence but as a compact example of divided allegiance expressed through rhetoric.

Freud’s Dream Interpretation

The allusion arises from Freud’s analysis of a dream about his friend P. The dream’s phrase “Non vixit” allows, in Freud’s interpretation, both a hostile thought—that the friend has no right to interrupt because he is dead—and an affectionate one, associated with raising a memorial to a talented friend who died too early. Freud identifies the two currents as represented in the same words: he honors the friend’s service to science, yet also imagines annihilating him for a malevolent wish.

The Role of the Allusion

Recognizing the pattern of Brutus’ justification, Freud says that he is playing Brutus’ part in the dream. He proposes a further confirming trace in the unexplained appearance of his friend Fl. in Vienna in July: July bears the name of Julius Caesar and can thus allude to the Brutus role. The episode makes the classical action a template for reading the dream’s simultaneous affection and antagonism, rather than evidence that Freud’s dream reproduces the events of the play.

Literary and Psychological Significance

The comparison joins Shakespearean tragedy to Freud’s account of dream formation. In the dream, contrary attitudes are not reconciled; they are brought together through a verbal construction that lets each retain its force. Brutus’ killing of Caesar supplies Freud with an unusually clear literary analogue for this doubleness, making the allusion a link between a culturally familiar dramatic action and the hidden conflict he seeks to uncover in personal dream material.