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. Sigmund Freud Sigmund Freud (May 6, 1856 – September 23, 1939; IPA pronunciation: []) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of the psychoanalytic school of psychology. ... Oedipus the King (also known as Oedipus Rex and Oedipus Tyrannos, Oι̉δίπoυς τύραννoς in Greek) is a Greek tragedy, written by Sophocles in 428 BC. The play was the second of Sophocles three Theban plays to be produced, but comes first in the internal chronology of the plays, followed... The third quarto of Hamlet (1605); a straight reprint of the 2nd quarto (1604) The Tragical History of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark is a tragedy by William Shakespeare and is one of his best-known and most-quoted plays. ... For other uses, see The Brothers Karamazov (disambiguation). ...

(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 Frazier's The Golden Bough.) Totem and Taboo: Resemblances Between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics was a book written by Sigmund Freud published in German as Totem und Tabu: Einige Ãœbereinstimmungen im Seelenleben der Wilden und der Neurotiker in 1913. ... The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion is a wide-ranging comparative study of mythology and religion by Scottish anthropologist Sir James George Frazer (1854-1941), first published in 1890. ...