Antagonist

Character Role Analysis

The Father

"Every fairy tale needs a good, old-fashioned villain," says Jim Moriarty, and Sigmund Freud's antagonist is as good and old-fashioned as it gets. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud comes up with an early model of the Oedipus complex, a psychological theory that suggests our fathers are the first targets of our hatred and hostility because they stand between us and our first love-objects—our dear old mums.

Freud felt that this model applied in his own life just as it did in the lives of his neurotic patients, and The Interpretation of Dreams is chock-full of examples of Freud's ambivalent relationship with his father, Jakob Freud. On top of that, the book also reveals Freud's conflicted relationships with other father-figures in his life, such as his senior colleagues Josef Breuer and Ernst Wilhelm von Brücke.

Trust us, folks: had Freud lived long enough to see Darth Vader lording over Luke Skywalker, he would have had a field day.