Fourth Commandment (Honor Your Parents)

The Fourth Commandment: Honour thy father and mother is presented not simply as a rule of filial duty but as an ideal that can blunt recognition of family conflict. In Freud’s account, the commandment’s sanctity stands against evidence that parental authority and children’s frustrated independence may give rise to hostility, including wishes that cannot pass the mind’s censorship.

The Commandment and Family Reality

Freud argues that the cultural demand to honour parents must be distinguished from what daily observation shows about relations between parents and children. He considers the commandment’s authority a reason people may fail to notice how often parental respect gives way to other interests, at every social level. The norm therefore does not disprove hostility; it can make that hostility harder to acknowledge.

This contrast matters to Freud’s account of dreams about a parent’s death. Such dreams, he says, most often concern the parent of the dreamer’s own sex, a pattern he connects to rivalry within the family. The commandment’s moral prohibition and the child’s possible antagonism belong to different registers: the former expresses a social demand, while the latter may emerge in wishes kept from conscious approval.

Paternal Authority and Conflict

Freud depicts the father–son relationship as a historically charged struggle over power and succession. Myths and legends offer stark images of paternal violence: Cronus devours his children, while Zeus castrates his father and takes his place as ruler. In this account, the more absolute the father’s authority, the more the son is positioned as a rival and potential successor, with reason to desire the father’s removal.

The conflict persists, Freud argues, in middle-class families. A father who denies his son independence and the means to support it helps cultivate enmity. The physician may encounter a son whose grief at his father’s death coexists with satisfaction at having gained freedom. That mixed response exposes a limit of the commandment as a description of actual feeling: reverence and resentment need not exclude one another.

The Commandment’s Narrative Significance

Freud also points to literature as evidence of the enduring force of this conflict. Writers such as Ibsen can bring the ancient struggle between father and son to the foreground and make it compelling to readers. The commandment thus functions in his discussion as a measure of the gap between prescribed family respect and the rivalries generated by authority, dependence, and the pursuit of independence.