- Dostoevsky and Parricide
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Dostoevsky and Parricide is a 1928 article by Sigmund Freud that argues that the greatest works of world literature all concern parricide: Oedipus the King, Hamlet, and The Brothers Karamazov. Freud repeats an untrue rumour that Fyodor Dostoevsky's epilepsy was a function of guilt he bore at having wished for the death of his tyrannical father who was purportedly murdered by his own serfs. A similar rumour alleges that Dostoevsky's first seizure occurred upon his receipt of the news of his father's death. Dostoevsky himself however claimed that his first seizure occurred in Siberia during his exile. Whatever their origins, upon completion of the Brothers Karamazov, his seizures stopped and had not returned at the time of his death a year later.
Freud also describes latent homosexual tendencies existing in Dostoevsky, alongside his overt heterosexuality, and explains this condition in terms of the Oedipus complex. Freud attributes a deep neuroticism to Dostoevsky due to his unresolved Oedipal complex, claiming that it prevented him from becoming one of the great liberators of mankind. Ultimately, Freud claims that Dostoevsky's works are diminished by their weak Christian endings.
(Freud's first extensive writing about parricide was in Totem and Taboo (1913), widely seen as his watershed work away from clinically oriented subject matter to philosophy. In it, parricide is the great crime at the base of all social evolution. [Freud drew extensively on Frazer's anthropological work The Golden Bough.)
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