Dostoevsky and Parricide

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 claims that 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. 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 The Golden Bough.)