How The Interpretation of Dreams drew on The Brothers Karamazov
A documented line of influence: Sigmund Freud demonstrably engaged Fyodor Dostoevsky’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
The Brothers Karamazov
Fyodor Dostoevsky · 1880
The Age of the NovelThe influenced
The Interpretation of Dreams
Sigmund Freud · 1900
ModernRelevance
7/10
On The Interpretation of Dreams’s page
- Standing behind Freud's parricide thesis is Dostoevsky — Freud cites The Brothers Karamazov by name inside The Interpretation of Dreams
- He ranks it with Oedipus Rex and Hamlet as the three masterpieces all turning on the same subject: the killing of the father
- Reading the novel first shows you what Freud was theorizing — the sons' guilt and desire toward Fyodor Karamazov, rendered as drama before it became doctrine
On The Brothers Karamazov’s page
- Freud reached for Dostoevsky inside The Interpretation of Dreams itself, naming The Brothers Karamazov one of "three masterpieces of the literature of all time"
- He bracketed it with Oedipus Rex and Hamlet as works that "deal with the same subject, parricide" — the killing of the father he placed at the center of the psyche
- Dostoevsky dramatized the murderous son before Freud had a theory for it; the novel became evidence in the new science of the mind