The 14-year-old Sigmund Freud recites from Schiller's 'The Robbers': An exploration of literature and the unconscious

This hermeneutic dissertation explores the ramifications of the day when the 14- year-old Sigmund Freud and his nephew John performed an excerpt from Schiller's drama The Robbers in the family's living room. Freud's own writings on art and literature contained the idea that the fantasies artists and poets create are born out of current conflicts that resemble an earlier conflict in that person's life. Viewers or readers of the artist's creation are drawn to the work because similar conflicts and fantasies exist in their own unconscious as well. This basic formula of Freud's is applied to his selection of the text and suggests that the play provided an outlet for conflicted feelings that Freud and Schiller felt towards their individual fathers.;Jacob Freud was by all accounts a remarkably loving and kind man, but his son's self-analysis described an oedipal complex fraught with conflict, rivalry, and murderous impulses. After watching his play for the first time Schiller remarked that he was surprised by the weak father character he had created even though he had intended a much stronger figure. Alongside biographical and textual information, such narrative inconsistencies and slips provided a glimpse below the surface, where a common theme emerged of a conscious desire to maintain the image of a perfect and omnipotent father that was at odds with a repressed realization that their fathers were instead regular human beings with imperfections and weaknesses.;With Freud's relationship to The Robbers in mind, two of his later works, Totem and Taboo and Moses and Monotheism, were revisited. Reflections of his conflicted image of his father stand out in these works. Freud's own writing appears to have provided him opportunities to work through his own father complex. Overall, the research illustrated the ways literature and psychoanalysis can inform each other and underscores Freud's point that artists, especially poets, provide important insights into the unconscious.