Spätere Schriften zu Dichtung und Mythos

(lit.: Later Writings on Literature and Myth)

Why Bassanio chooses lead and Lear's silent daughter stands for death, and why the young Goethe threw the family crockery into the street.

by Sigmund Freud43 passages held

German, the original language

First published: 1913(aged 57)
Original language: German

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Overview

In the two essays gathered in this volume on the site, Sigmund Freud reads a great writer for what the writer did not say; each first appeared on its own in Imago, the journal for applying psychoanalysis beyond medicine. "The Theme of the Three Caskets" (1913) sets a cheerful scene from Shakespeare beside a tragic one. In The Merchant of Venice Portia must marry the suitor who picks the right casket of three, and Bassanio wins her by choosing lead over gold and silver; in King Lear the old king divides his kingdom among three daughters, and the youngest, Cordelia, refuses to praise him and is cast out. Freud adds Paris choosing among three goddesses and Cinderella, the overlooked third sister. What marks the third woman each time is plainness or silence, and silence in dreams and myths, he argues, stands for death. The third sister is the third of the Fates, the one who cuts the thread; human fantasy, unable to bear that, turned the goddess of death into the most desirable of women, and a necessity into a choice. Old Lear, Freud concludes, reaches for a woman's love in vain, and only the silent third will take him in her arms. "A Childhood Recollection from Dichtung und Wahrheit" (1917) begins with an anecdote from the opening pages of Goethe's memoir: as a small boy, egged on by three brothers who lived opposite, he threw the family's crockery into the street. Freud had heard the same story from a patient who, jealous of a new baby brother, had once attacked the infant in its cradle. Goethe's brother Hermann Jakob was born when Goethe was three and died at six, and the memoir barely mentions him. Freud reads the broken plates as a child's magic for getting rid of an intruder, and the memoir's opening as the confidence of a man who had kept his mother's love to himself.

Key concepts

What does Freud mean by replacement by the opposite?

It is the mind's habit of expressing something through its contrary, driven by a motive Freud calls reaction-formation. Myths, he argues, do this with what people cannot bear. The goddess of death becomes the goddess of love, and the death no one escapes is retold as a choice, the most beautiful woman freely picked. Interpretation gains most by finding the motive behind such a reversal.

Who are the Fates, and why do they matter to the caskets essay?

The Fates, the Greek Moirai, were three sisters who spun, measured and cut the thread of each life. Freud traces them from goddesses of the seasons to goddesses of inexorable law. The third, Atropos, the inexorable one, is death. He finds her behind every third woman in his stories, so that the choice of the third sister is a disguised meeting with death.

Why does Freud treat an autobiography's first memory as significant?

Because memory keeps nothing by accident. What a person still recalls from earliest childhood, out of all that happened, was preserved for a reason, even if the scene looks trivial, and it often stands for something more important near it. A writer who opens his life story with such a scene has, without knowing it, put a key at the front door.

What is a child's magic act, in Freud's reading of Goethe?

It is an action that stands in for a wish it cannot fulfil directly. Throwing objects out of the window, Freud suggests, is how a small child expresses, and in its own way tries to bring about, the removal of an unwanted newcomer. The act is symbolic: the child cannot throw the baby out, so it throws out other things belonging to the house.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

The Silent Third Sister

What is a man really choosing when he picks the third of three women? "The Theme of the Three Caskets" finds death hidden inside a scene of courtship.

Bassanio's lead casket, Cordelia's refusal to flatter, Cinderella hiding, the goddess Paris prefers: in each set of three the winning third is plain or mute, and muteness in dreams means death. Freud reads the three as the Fates, the third being the one who cuts the thread. Unable to bear that necessity, human fantasy turned it into its opposite, making the goddess of death the loveliest of women and inevitability a free choice. Old Lear, seen this way, is being carried off by death.

death
mythology
fate
symbolism
tragedy
literary motifs
wish fulfillment
self-sacrifice
literary interpretation

Enter a dialogue

Plates Thrown into the Street

Why does Goethe's memoir open with a toddler smashing crockery? "A Childhood Recollection from Dichtung und Wahrheit" treats the first memory a life records as a key to the rest.

The scene seems harmless: little Goethe, cheered on by neighbours, throws the household's dishes out of the window. Freud had heard the same story from a patient who had attacked a newborn brother, and he reads both as a child's magic for throwing an unwanted intruder out of the house. Goethe's younger brother, who died in childhood, barely appears in the memoir. The jealousy succeeded, Freud concludes, and its success left the confidence of a mother's favourite.

childhood
sibling rivalry
jealousy
family
memory
aggression
destructiveness
interpretation

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 43
distinct concepts: 60
by passages held, corpus-wide: #672

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “childhood” and “sibling rivalry”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 20 pairings. 29 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
childhood	sibling rivalry	12
death	mythology	8
childhood	psychoanalysis	7
death	symbolism	4
psychoanalysis	sibling rivalry	4
psychoanalysis	symbolism	4
childhood	family	3
childhood	symbolism	3
family	sibling rivalry	3
interpretation	mythology	3
sibling rivalry	symbolism	3
childhood	interpretation	2
death	interpretation	2
interpretation	psychoanalysis	2
mythology	symbolism	2
death	family	1
death	psychoanalysis	1
interpretation	sibling rivalry	1
interpretation	symbolism	1
mythology	psychoanalysis	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1900 The Interpretation of Dreams (Die Traumdeutung)
Begun from his own dreams in the 1890s and enlarged in edition after edition, this is where Freud sets out the method of interpretation that his later books apply to slips of the tongue, jokes and myths.
DE
1901 The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens)
The dream book's method carried into waking life; its slips and forgettings became the opening part of the lectures Freud later gave to beginners in Vienna.
DE
1905 Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewußten)
Freud's only book-length study of comedy, and the one most built from borrowed material: puns, anecdotes and Jewish jokes, each taken apart in turn.
DE
1907 Frühe Schriften zu Religion und Dichtung
Two early excursions from the clinic, gathered here in one volume: the seed of Freud's later books on religion, and his short account of where a writer's stories come from.
DE
1910 Zur Theorie des Unbewußten
Four theoretical papers written between 1910 and 1915 and gathered here in one volume, on the road from the dream book to the metapsychological essays of 1915 — the last of the four is one of those essays.
DE
1913 Spätere Schriften zu Dichtung und Mythos you are here DE
1913 Totem and Taboo (Totem und Tabu)
The first of Freud's books on society and religion, where he moves from the patient to the human species; Group Psychology, The Future of an Illusion and his last book, on Moses, all build on its story of the murdered father.
DE
1914 On Narcissism: An Introduction (Zur Einführung des Narzißmus)
A short essay written as Jung was breaking with Freud, and the hinge between his early theory of the drives and the later picture of ego and super-ego.
DE
1915 Instincts and their Vicissitudes (Triebe und Triebschicksale)
The paper that opens Freud's 1915 theoretical series by defining its basic term; the companion essays on repression and on the unconscious build on it.
DE
1915 Schriften aus dem Weltkrieg
Freud's direct responses to the First World War, gathered in one volume on this site: a long essay of 1915 on disillusionment and death, and a short one of 1916 on transience and mourning.
DE
1915 The Unconscious (Das Unbewußte)
Freud's fullest account of what he meant by the unconscious, written in wartime Vienna eight years before The Ego and the Id redrew his map of the mind.
DE
1917 Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse)
Freud's own introduction to his work, and the closest thing he wrote to a textbook: his books on dreams and on everyday slips retold for listeners, then carried on into a general theory of neurosis.
DE
1919 The 'Uncanny' (Das Unheimliche)
A rare venture by Freud into aesthetics, a field he says psychoanalysts seldom feel drawn to, written in 1919 beside the first draft of Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
DE
1920 Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Jenseits des Lustprinzips)
The hinge of Freud's later work: the 1920 book that introduces the death drive, followed within three years by the new map of the mind in The Ego and the Id.
DE
1921 Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse)
The bridge between Freud's speculations on prehistory and his new model of the mind: its chapter on a "grade in the ego" sets out the ego ideal that The Ego and the Id would rename two years later.
DE
1923 The Ego and the Id (Das Ich und das Es)
The book in which Freud's later model of the mind takes its final shape; the essays and books that follow it, on anxiety, religion and civilisation, all speak its language of ego, id and super-ego.
DE
1924 Späte Schriften zur Ich-Psychologie
Three short papers of the mid-1920s, gathered here in one volume, in which Freud tests the model of The Ego and the Id on psychosis, on memory and on laughter.
DE
1926 Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (Hemmung, Symptom und Angst)
Written three years after The Ego and the Id, it rebuilds the theory of neurotic symptoms in that book's terms, starting from the difference between a symptom and an inhibition, a restriction the ego places on itself.
DE
1927 The Future of an Illusion (Die Zukunft einer Illusion)
Freud's most direct case against religion, written fourteen years after Totem and Taboo had traced it to the murdered father, and the opening of the late cultural writings that continue in Civilization and Its Discontents.
DE

— or open another of their works