Freud devoted an essay to the novel and its author, "Dostoevsky and Parricide," in 1928. The thesis is that The Brothers Karamazov treats parricide the way Oedipus Rex, by Sophocles, and Hamlet, by Shakespeare, do, and that this is no accident: for him, it can hardly be chance that three of the masterpieces of literature of all time treat the same subject.
Freud reads the three as increasing degrees of disguise of the same wish to kill the father. In Oedipus Rex the hero himself kills his father, though without conscious intent; in Hamlet the crime is committed by another, and the hero is paralyzed only by the guilt he feels through identification; in The Brothers Karamazov the killer is also another, Smerdyakov, but Dostoevsky gives the character his own epilepsy, as if confessing that the neurotic in him was a parricide. Freud also reads the scene in which Zosima kneels before Mitya as a sign of the author's boundless sympathy for the criminal, who would be almost a Redeemer, having taken upon himself a guilt that others should bear.
The essay also interprets the writer's life. Freud maintains that Dostoevsky's "epileptic" attacks were hysteria, not organic epilepsy, a self-punishment for a death wish against the father, and he supposes that the fits only took an epileptic form after the murder of the writer's father, when the writer was eighteen. In the mechanism he describes, the boy hates the father as a rival and loves him as a model, and what remains is deposited in a sadistic superego, before which the ego becomes masochistic; the passion for gambling, in which he never rested until he had lost everything, would also be a method of self-punishment. Freud separates four facets in the writer, the creative artist, the neurotic, the moralist and the sinner, and laments that neurosis joined him to his jailers, instead of making him the master and liberator of humanity.
It is a reading, not a fact of the book. The novel shows Smerdyakov's crime and the sons' guilt; that this comes from the Oedipus complex and the author's neurosis is Freud's hypothesis. The essay itself carries its limits: it declares, at the outset, that the creative artist escapes analysis; it assumes a worldview that is not neutral, to the point of predicting that a conservative would take the side of the Grand Inquisitor and judge Dostoevsky differently; and, according to a letter from Freud, it was written as a favor to another person and with reluctance. The novel itself admits, through Ivan's mouth at the trial, that everyone wishes for the death of the father, but draws from this a moral conclusion, not a clinical one: each one is guilty before all, and therefore no one can judge. Where Freud sees a symptom, the book sees a truth about the human condition.