PSYCHOLOGY OF THE UNCONSCIOUS
 
A Study of the Changes and Meanings of the Libido
A Contribution to the History of Thought Development

That humanity is seeking a new message, a new light upon the meaning of life, and something tangible, as it were, with which it can work towards a larger understanding of itself and its relation to the universe, is a fact I think none will gainsay. Therefore, it has seemed to me particularly timely to introduce to the English-speaking world Dr. Jung’s remarkable book, “Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido.” In this work he has plunged boldly into the treacherous sea of mythology and folklore, the productions of the ancient mind and that of the common people, and turned upon this vast material the same scientific and painstaking method of psychologic analysis that is applied to the modern mind, in order to reveal the common bond of desire and longing which unites all humanity, and thus bridge the gaps presumed to exist between ancient and widely separated peoples and those of our modern time. The discovery of this undercurrent affecting and influencing ancient peoples as well as modern serves as a foundation or platform from which he proceeds to hold aloft a new ideal, a new goal of attainment possible of achievement and which can be intellectually satisfying, as well as emotionally appealing: the goal of moral autonomy.

This book, remarkable for its erudition and the tremendous labor expended upon it, as well as for the new vilight which it sheds upon human life, its motives, its needs and its possibilities, is not one for desultory reading or superficial examination. Such an approach will prevent the reader from gaining anything of its real value; but for those who can bring a serious interest and willingness to give a careful study to it the work will prove to be a veritable mine capable of yielding the greatest riches.

The difficulties in translating a book such as this are almost insuperable, but I have tried faithfully to express Dr. Jung’s thought, keeping as close to the original text as possible and, at the same time, rendering the difficult material and complicated German phrasing as simply and clearly as the subject-matter would allow. In all this work I owe much to Miss Helen I. Brayton, without whose faithful assistance the work would never have been completed. I wish to acknowledge my gratitude to Mr. Louis Untermeyer, whose help in rendering the poetic quotations into English verse has been invaluable, and to express as well my gratitude to other friends who have assisted me in various ways from time to time.

When Professor Freud of Vienna made his early discoveries in the realm of the neuroses, and announced that the basis and origin of the various symptoms grouped under the terms hysteria and neuroses lay in unfulfilled desires and wishes, unexpressed and unknown to the patient for the most part, and concerned chiefly with the sexual instinct, it was not realized what far-reaching influence this unpopular and bitterly attacked theory would exert on the understanding of human life in general.

For this theory has so widened in its scope that its application has now extended beyond a particular group of pathologic states. It has in fact led to a new evaluation of the whole conduct of human life; a new comprehension has developed which explains those things which formerly were unexplained, and there is offered an understanding not only of the symptoms of a neurosis and the phenomena of conduct but the product of the mind as expressed in myths and religions.

This amazing growth has proceeded steadily in an ever-widening fashion despite opposition as violent as any of which we have knowledge in the past. The criticism originally directed towards the little understood and viiimuch disliked sexual conception now includes the further teachings of a psychology which by the application to it of such damning phrases as mystical, metaphysical and sacrilegious, is condemned as unscientific.

To add to the general confusion and misunderstanding surrounding this new school of thought there has arisen a division amongst the leaders themselves, so that there now exist two schools led respectively by Professor Sigmund Freud of Vienna and Dr. Carl Jung of Zurich, referred to in the literature as the Vienna School and the Zurich School.

It is very easy to understand that criticism and opposition should develop against a psychology so difficult of comprehension, and so disturbing to the ideas which have been held by humanity for ages; a psychology which furthermore requires a special technique as well as an observer trained to recognize and appreciate in psychologic phenomena a verification of the statement that there is no such thing as chance, and that every act and every expression has its own meaning, determined by the inner feelings and wishes of the individual.

It is not a simple matter to come out boldly and state that every individual is to a large extent the determiner of his own destiny, for only by poets and philosophers has this idea been put forth—not by science; and it is a brave act to make this statement with full consciousness of all its meaning, and to stand ready to prove it by scientific reasoning and procedure.

Developed entirely through empirical investigation and through an analysis of individual cases, Freudian psychology ixseems particularly to belong to that conception of Max Müller’s that “An empirical acquaintance with facts rises to a scientific knowledge of facts as soon as the mind discovers beneath the multiplicity of single productions the unity of an organic system.”^[1]

Psychoanalysis is the name given to the method developed for reaching down into the hidden depths of the individual to bring to light the underlying motives and determinants of his symptoms and attitudes, and to reveal the unconscious tendencies which lie behind actions and reactions and which influence development and determine the relations of life itself. The result of digging down into the hidden psyche has been to produce a mass of material from below the threshold of consciousness, so astonishing and disturbing and out of relation with the previously held values, as to arouse in any one unfamiliar with the process the strongest antagonism and criticism.

Although originally studied only as a therapeutic method for the sick it was soon realized through an analysis of normal people how slight were the differences in the content of the unconscious of the sick and of the normal. The differences observed were seen to be rather in the reactions to life and to the conflicts produced by contending forces in the individual.

These conflicts, usually not fully perceived by the individual, and having to do with objectionable desires and wishes that are not in keeping with the conscious idea of self, produce marked effects which are expressed either in certain opinions, prejudices, attitudes of conduct, xfaulty actions, or in some definite pathologic symptom. As Dr. Jung says, he who remains healthy has to struggle with the same complexes that cause the neurotic to fall ill.

In a valuable book called “The Neighbor,” written by the late Professor N. Shaler of Harvard University, there occurs this very far-reaching statement: “It is hardly too much to say that all the important errors of conduct, all the burdens of men or of societies are caused by the inadequacies in the association of the primal animal emotions with those mental powers which have been so rapidly developed in mankind.”

This statement, reached by a process of reasoning and a method of thought and study entirely different from psychoanalysis, nevertheless so completely expresses in brief form the very basis of the postulates developed through psychoanalysis that I quote it here. Such a statement made in the course of a general examination of human relations does not arouse opposition nor seem to be so difficult of acceptance. It appears to be the individual application of these conceptions that has roused such bitter antagonism and violent denunciations.

Rightly understood and used, psychoanalysis may be compared to surgery, for psychoanalysis stands in the same relation to the personality as surgery does to the body, and they aim at parallel results.

It is well recognized that in the last analysis nature is the real physician, the healer of wounds; but prior to the development of our modern asepsis and surgical technique the healing produced by nature was most often of a very xifaulty and imperfect type—hideous scars, distorted and crippled limbs, with functions impaired or incapacitated, resulted from the wounds, or else nature was unable to cope with the hurt and the injured one succumbed.

Science has been steadily working for centuries with the aim of understanding nature and finding means to aid and co-operate with her so that healing could take place with the least possible loss of function or permanent injury to the individual. Marvelous results have rewarded these persistent efforts, as the brilliant achievements of surgery plainly indicate.

Meantime, however, little thought was given to the possibility of any scientific method being available to help man overcome the wounds and conflicts taking place in his soul, hurts which retarded his development and progress as a personality, and which frequently in the struggle resulted in physical pains and symptoms of the most varied character. That was left solely to religion and metaphysics. Now, however, this same assistance that surgery has given to the physical body, psychoanalysis attempts to give to the personality. That it cannot always succeed is as much to be expected, and more, than that surgery does not always succeed, for the analytic work requires much of the individual. No real result can be attained if he has not already developed a certain quality of character and intelligence which makes it possible for him to submit himself to a facing of his naked soul, and to the pain and suffering which this often entails. Here, as in no other relation in life, an absolute truth and an absolute honesty xiiare the only basis of action, since deception of any kind deceives no one but the individual himself and acts as a boomerang, defeating his own aims.

Such deep searching and penetrating into the soul is not something to be undertaken lightly nor to be considered a trivial or simple matter, and the fact is that where a strong compulsion is lacking, such as sickness or a situation too difficult to meet, much courage is required to undertake it.

In order to understand this psychology which is pervading all realms of thought and seems destined to be a new psychological-philosophical system for the understanding and practical advancement of human life, it will be necessary to go somewhat into detail regarding its development and present status. For in this new direction lies its greatest value and its greatest danger.

The beginnings of this work were first published in 1895 in a book entitled “Studien über Hysterie,” and contained the joint investigations into hysteria of Dr. Breuer of Vienna and his pupil Dr. Sigmund Freud. The results of their investigations seemed to show that the various symptoms grouped under the title of hysteria were the result of emotionally colored reminiscences which, all unknown to the conscious waking self, were really actively expressing themselves through the surrogate form of symptoms and that these experiences, although forgotten by the patient, could be reproduced and the emotional content discharged.

Hypnosis was the means used to enable the physician to penetrate deeply into the forgotten memories, for it xiiiwas found through hypnosis that these lost incidents and circumstances were not really lost at all but only dropped from consciousness, and were capable of being revived when given the proper stimuli. The astonishing part about it was that with the revival of these memories and their accompanying painful and disturbing emotions, the symptoms disappeared. This led naturally to the conclusion that these symptoms were dependent upon some emotional disturbance or psychic trauma which had been inadequately expressed, and that in order to cure the patient one merely had to establish the connection between the memory and the emotions which properly belonged to it, letting the emotion work itself out through a reproduction of the forgotten scene.

With further investigation Freud found that hypnosis was unnecessary for the revival of the forgotten experiences, and that it was possible to obtain the lost emotional material in the conscious and normal state. For this purpose the patient was encouraged to assume a passive, non-critical attitude and simply let his thoughts flow, speaking of whatever came into his mind, holding nothing back. During this free and easy discussion of his life and conditions, directed by the law of association of ideas, reference was invariably made to the experiences or thoughts which were the most affective and disturbing elements. It was seen to be quite impossible to avoid this indirect revelation because of the strength of the emotions surrounding these ideas and the effect of the conscious wish to repress unpleasant feelings. This important group of ideas or impressions, with the feelings xivand emotions clustered around them which are betrayed through this process, was called by Jung a complex.

However, with the touching of the complex which always contains feelings and emotions so painful or unpleasant as to be unacceptable to consciousness, and which are therefore repressed and hidden, great difficulties appeared, for very often the patient came to a sudden stop and could apparently recall nothing more. Memory gaps were frequent, relations twisted, etc. Evidently some force banished these memories so that the person was quite honest in saying that he could remember nothing or that there was nothing to tell. This kind of forgetfulness was called repression, and is the normal mechanism by which nature protects the individual from such painful feelings as are caused by unpleasant and unacceptable experiences and thoughts, the recognition of his egoistic nature, and the often quite unbearable conflict of his weaknesses with his feelings of idealism.

At this early time great attention was given towards developing a technique which would render more easy the reproduction of these forgotten memories, for with the abandonment of hypnosis it was seen that some unknown active force was at work which not only banished painful memories and feelings, but also prevented their return; this was called resistance. This resistance was found to be the important mechanism which interfered with a free flow of thought and produced the greatest difficulty in the further conduct of the analysis. It appeared under various guises and frequently manifested itself in intellectual objections based on reasoning xvground, in criticism directed towards the analyst, or in criticism of the method itself, and finally, often in a complete blocking of expression, so that until the resistance was broken nothing more could be produced.

It was necessary then to find some aid by which these resistances could be overcome and the repressed memories and feelings revived and set free. For it was proven again and again that even though the person was not at all aware of concealing within himself some emotionally disturbing feeling or experience with which his symptoms were associated, yet such was the fact, and that under proper conditions this material could be brought into consciousness. This realm where these unknown but disturbing emotions were hidden was called the “Unconscious”—the “Unconscious” also being a name used arbitrarily to indicate all that material of which the person is not aware at the given time—the not-conscious.

This term is used very loosely in Freudian psychology and is not intended to provoke any academic discussion but to conform strictly to the dictionary classification of a “negative concept which can neither be described nor defined.” To say that an idea or feeling is unconscious merely means to indicate that the individual is unaware at that time of its existence, or that all the material of which he is unaware at a given time is unconscious.

With the discovery of the significance in relation to hysteria of these varied experiences and forgotten memories which always led into the erotic realm and usually were carried far back into early childhood, the theory of an infantile sexual trauma as a cause of this neurosis developed. xviContrary to the usual belief that children have no sexuality and that only at puberty does it suddenly arise, it was definitely shown that there was a very marked kind of sexuality among children of the most tender years, entirely instinctive and capable of producing a grave effect on the entire later life.

However, further investigations carried into the lives of normal people disclosed quite as many psychic and sexual traumas in their early childhood as in the lives of the patients; therefore, the conception of the “infantile sexual trauma” as the etiological factor was abandoned in favor of “the infantilism of sexuality” itself. In other words, it was soon realized that many of the sexual traumas which were placed in their early childhood by these patients, did not really exist except in their own phantasies and probably were produced as a defence against the memories of their own childish sexual activities. These experiences led to a deep investigation into the nature of the child’s sexuality and developed the ideas which Freud incorporated in a work called “Three Contributions to the Sexual Theory.” He found so many variations and manifestations of sexual activity even among young children that he realized that this activity was the normal, although entirely unconscious, expression of the child’s developing life, and while not comparable to the adult sexuality, nevertheless produced a very definite influence and effect on the child’s life.

These childish expressions of this instinct he called “polymorphous perverse,” because in many ways they xviiresembled the various abnormalities called perversions when found among adults under certain conditions.

In the light of these additional investigations Freud was led to change his formulation, for instead of the symptoms of the neurotic patient being due to definite sexual experiences, they seemed to be determined by his reactions towards his own sexual constitution and the kind of repression to which these instincts were subjected.

Perhaps one of the greatest sources of misunderstanding and difficulty in this whole subject lies in the term sexuality, for Freud’s conception of this is entirely different from that of the popular sense. He conceives sexuality to be practically synonymous with the word love and to include under this term all those tender feelings and emotions which have had their origin in a primitive erotic source, even if now their primary aim is entirely lost and another substituted for it. It must also be borne in mind that Freud strictly emphasizes the psychic side of sexuality and its importance, as well as the somatic expression.

Therefore, to understand Freud’s theories, his very broad conception of the term sexual must never be forgotten.

Through this careful investigation of the psychic life of the individual, the tremendous influence and importance of phantasy-making for the fate was definitely shown. It was discovered that the indulgence in day-dreams and phantasies was practically universal not only among children but among adults, that even whole lives xviiiwere being lived out in a phantastic world created by the dreamer, a world wherein he could fulfil all those wishes and desires which were found to be too difficult or impossible to satisfy in the world of reality.

Much of this phantasy thinking was seen to be scarcely conscious, but arose from unrealized wishes, desires and strivings which could only express themselves through veiled symbols in the form of phantastic structures not understood, nor fully recognized. Indeed, it is perhaps one of the most common human experiences to find “queer thoughts,” undesired ideas and images, forcing themselves upon one’s attention to such an extent that the will has to be employed to push them out of mind. It is not unusual to discover long-forgotten impressions of childhood assuming a phantastic shape in memory, and dwelt upon as though they were still of importance.

This material afforded a rich field for the searchers into the soul, for through the operation of the law of association of ideas these phantastic products, traced back to their origin, revealed the fact that instead of being meaningless or foolish, they were produced by a definite process, and arose from distinct wishes and desires which unconsciously veiled themselves in these mysterious forms and pictures.

It is conceded that the most completely unconscious product of an individual is his dream, and therefore Professor Freud turned his attention from phantasies and day-dreams to the investigation of the nightly dreams of his patients to discover whether they would throw light upon the painful feelings and ideas repressed out of xixconsciousness, and therefore inaccessible to direct revelation.

This brilliant idea soon led to a rich fruiting, for it became evident that contrary to the usual conception that the dream is a phantastic and absurd jumble of heterogeneous fragments, having no real relation to the life of the individual, it is full of meaning. In fact, it is usually concerned with the problem of life most pressing at the time, which expresses itself not directly, but in symbolic form so as to be unrecognized. In this way the individual gains an expression and fulfilment of his unrealized wish or desire.

This discovery of the symbolic nature of the dream and the phantasy was brought about entirely through the associative method and developed empirically through investigations of the dreams of many people. In this manner it became evident that certain ideas and objects which recurred again and again in the dreams and phantasies of different people were definitely associated with certain unconscious or unrecognized wishes and desires, and were repeatedly used by the mind to express these meanings where a direct form was repressed and unallowed. Thus certain dream expressions and figures were in a general way considered to be rather definite symbols of these repressed ideas and feelings found in the unconscious. Through a comparative and parallel study it soon appeared that there was a similar mechanism at work in myths and fairy tales and that the relationship between the dreams and phantasies of an individual and the myths and folk tales of a people was so close xxthat Abraham could say that the myth is a fragment of the infantile soul life of the race and the dream is the myth of the individual.

Thus through relating his dreams the patient himself furnished the most important means of gaining access to the unconscious and disturbing complexes with which his symptoms were connected.

Besides the dream analysis the patient furnished other means of revelation of his complexes—his mannerisms and unconscious acts, his opening remarks to his physician, his emotional reactions to certain ideas; in short the whole behavior and verbal expressions of the individual reveal his inner nature and problems.

Through all this work it became clear that in the emotional nature lay the origin not only of the various nervous illnesses themselves, but also of the isolated symptoms and individual idiosyncrasies and peculiarities which are the part of all humanity and that the pathogenic cause of the disturbances lies not in the ignorance of individuals, but in those inner resistances which are the underlying basis of this ignorance.

Therefore the aim of the therapy became not merely the relief of the ignorance but the searching out and combating of these resistances.

It becomes evident from even this brief description of the analytic procedure that we are dealing with a very complex and delicate material, and with a technique which needs to make definite use of all influences available for the help of the patient. It has long been recognized that the relation established between physician and patient xxihas a great effect upon the medical assistance which he is able to render—in other words, if a confidence and personal regard developed in the patient towards the physician, the latter’s advice was just so much more efficacious. This personal feeling has been frankly recognized and made of distinct service in psychoanalytic treatment under the name of transference. It is through the aid of this definite relationship which must be established in the one being analyzed towards the analyst that it is possible to deal with the unconscious and organized resistances which so easily blind the individual and render the acceptance of the new valuations very difficult to the raw and sensitive soul.

Freud’s emphasis upon the rôle of the sexual instinct in the production of the neurosis and also in its determining power upon the personality of the normal individual does not imply that he does not also recognize other determinants at the root of human conduct, as for instance, the instinct for preservation of life and the ego principle itself. But these motives are not so violently forbidden and repressed as the sexual impulse, and therefore, because of that repressive force and the strength of the impulse he considers this primary in its influence upon the human being.

The importance of this instinct upon human life is clearly revealed by the great place given to it under the name of love in art, literature, poetry, romance and all beauty from the beginning of recorded time. Viewed in this light it cannot seem extraordinary that a difficulty or disturbance in this emotional field should produce such xxiifar-reaching consequences for the individual. The sexual impulse is often compared with that of hunger, and this craving and need lying in all humanity is called by Freud libido.

With further investigations into the nature of the repressed complexes a very astonishing situation was revealed. The parental influence on children is something so well recognized and understood that to call attention to it sounds much like a banality. However, here an extraordinary discovery was made, for in tracing out the feelings and emotions of adults it became evident that this influence was paramount not only for children but for adults as well; that the entire direction of lives was largely determined quite unconsciously by the parental associations, and that, although adults, the emotional side of their nature was still infantile in type and demanded unconsciously the infantile or childish relations.

Freud traces out the commencement of the infantile attachment for the parents in this wise.

In the beginning the child derives its first satisfaction and pleasure from the mother in the form of nutrition and care for its wants. In this first act of suckling Freud sees already a kind of sexual pleasure, for he apparently identifies the pleasure principle and the sexual instinct and considers that the former is primarily rooted in the latter. At this early time commence such various infantile actions unconnected with nutrition as thumbsucking, xxiiivarious movements of the body as rubbing, boring, pulling and other manifestations of a definite interest in its own body, a delight in nakedness, the pleasure exhibited in inflicting pain on some object and its opposite, the pleasure from receiving pain. All of these afford the child pleasure and satisfaction, and because they seem analogous to certain perversions in adults they are called by Freud the “polymorphous perverse sexuality” of childhood. The character of these instinctive actions which have nothing to do with any other person, and through which the child attains pleasure from its own body, caused Freud to term this phase of life as autoerotic after Havelock Ellis. However, with the growth of the child there is a parallel development of the psychic elements of its sexual nature and now the mother, the original object of its love, primarily determined by its helplessness and need, acquires a new valuation. The beginnings of the need for a love object to satisfy the craving or libido of the child are early in evidence and, following along sex lines in general, the little son prefers the mother and the daughter the father after the usual preference of the parents.

At this early time children feel deeply the enormous importance of their parents and their entire world is bounded by the family circle. All the elements of the ego which the child possesses have now become manifest; love, jealousy, curiosity, hate, etc., and those instincts are directed in the greatest degree towards the objects of their libido, namely the parents. With the growing ego of the child there is a development of strong wishes xxivand desires demanding satisfaction which can only be gratified by the mother; therefore there is aroused in the small son the feeling of jealousy and anger towards the father in whom he sees a rival for the affection of the mother and whom he would like to replace. This desire in the soul of the child Freud calls the Oedipus complex in recognition of its analogy to the tragedy of King Oedipus who was drawn by his fate to kill his father and win his mother for a wife. Freud presents this as the nuclear complex of every neurosis.

At the basis of this complex, some trace of which can be found in every person, Freud sees a definite incest wish towards the mother which only lacks the quality of consciousness. Because of moral reactions this wish is quickly subjected to repression through the operation of the “incest barrier,” a postulate he compares to the incest taboo found among inferior peoples. At this time the child is beginning to develop its typical sexual curiosity expressed by the question, “Where do I come from?” The interest and investigation of the child into this problem, aided by observations and deductions from various actions and attitudes of the parents, who have no idea of the watchfulness of the child, lead him, because of his imperfect knowledge and immature development, into many false theories and ideas of birth. These infantile sexual theories are held by Freud to be determinative in the development of the child’s character and also for the contents of the unconscious as expressed in a future neurosis.

These various reactions of the child and his sexual curiosity xxvare entirely normal and unavoidable, and if his development proceeds in an orderly fashion then, at the time of definite object choice he will pass smoothly over from the limitations of the family attachment out into the world and find therein his independent existence.

However, if the libido remains fixed on the first chosen object so that the growing individual is unable to tear himself loose from these familial ties, then the incestuous bond is deepened with the developing sexual instinct and its accompanying need of a love object, and the entire future of the young personality endangered. For with the development of the incestuous bond the natural repressions deepen because the moral censor cannot allow these disturbing relations to become clear to the individual. Therefore, the whole matter is repressed more deeply into the unconscious, and even a feeling of positive enmity and repulsion towards the parents is often developed in order to conceal and over-compensate for the impossible situation actually present.

This persistence of the attachment of the libido to the original object, and the inability to find in this a suitable satisfaction for the adult need, interferes with the normal development of the psycho-sexual character, and it is due to this that the adult retains that “infantilism of sexuality” which plays so great a rôle in determining the instability of the emotional life which so frequently leads into the definite neuroses.

These were the conclusions reached and the ground on which Freudian psychology rested, regarding the etiology xxviof the neurosis, and the tendencies underlying normal human mechanisms, when Dr. Carl Jung, the most prominent of Freud’s disciples, and the leader of the Zurich school, found himself no longer able to agree with Freud’s findings in certain particulars, although the phenomena which Freud observed and the technique of psychoanalysis developed by Freud were the material on which Jung worked and the value of which he clearly emphasizes. The differences which have developed lay in his understanding and interpretation of the phenomena observed.

Beginning with the conception of libido itself as a term used to connote sexual hunger and craving, albeit the meaning of the word sexual was extended by Freud to embrace a much wider significance than common usage has assigned it, Jung was unable to confine himself to this limitation. He conceived this longing, this urge or push of life as something extending beyond sexuality even in its wider sense. He saw in the term libido a concept of unknown nature, comparable to Bergson’s élan vital, a hypothetical energy of life, which occupies itself not only in sexuality but in various physiological and psychological manifestations such as growth, development, hunger, and all the human activities and interests. This cosmic energy or urge manifested in the human being he calls libido and compares it with the energy of physics. Although recognizing, in common with Freud as well as with many others, the primal instinct of reproduction as the basis of many functions and present-day activities of mankind no longer sexual in character he repudiates the xxviiidea of still calling them sexual, even though their development was a growth originally out of the sexual. Sexuality and its various manifestations Jung sees as most important channels occupied by libido, but not the exclusive ones through which libido flows.

This is an energic concept of life; and from this viewpoint this hypothetical energy of life or libido is a living power used instinctively by man in all the automatic processes of his functioning; such very processes being but different manifestations of this energy. By virtue of its quality of mobility and change man, through his understanding and intelligence, has the power consciously to direct and use his libido in definite and desired ways.

In this conception of Jung will be seen an analogy to Bergson, who speaks of “this change, this movement and becoming, this self-creation, call it what you will, as the very stuff and reality of our being.”^[2]

In developing the energic conception of libido and separating it from Freud’s sexual definition, Jung makes possible the explanation of interest in general, and provides a working concept by which not only the specifically sexual, but the general activities and reactions of man can be understood.

If a person complains of no longer having interest in his work or of losing interest in his surroundings, then one understands that his libido is withdrawn from this object and that in consequence the object itself seems no longer attractive, whereas, as a matter of fact, the object itself is exactly the same as formerly. In other words, it is xxviiithe libido that we bestow upon an object that makes it attractive and interesting.

The causes for the withdrawal of libido may be various and are usually quite different from those that the persons offer in explanation. It is the task of psychoanalysis to discover the real reasons, which are usually hidden and unknown. On the other hand, when an individual exhibits an exaggerated interest or places an over-emphasis upon an idea or situation, then we know there is too much libido here and that we may find as a consequence a corresponding depletion elsewhere.

This leads directly into the second point of difference between Jung’s views and those of Freud. This is concerned with those practically universal childish manifestations of sexuality called by Freud “polymorphous perverse” because of their similarity to those abnormalities of sexuality which occur in adults and are called perversions.

Jung takes exception to this viewpoint. He sees in the various manifestations of childhood the precursors or forerunners of the later fully developed sexuality, and instead of considering them perverse he considers them preliminary expressions of sexual coloring. He divides human life into three stages. The first stage up to about the third or fourth year, generally speaking, he calls the presexual stage, for there he sees the libido or life energy occupied chiefly in the functions of nutrition and growth, and he draws an analogy between this period and that of the caterpillar stage of the butterfly.

The second stage includes the years from this time xxixuntil puberty, and this he speaks of as the prepubertal stage.

The third period is that from puberty onward and can be considered the time of maturity.

It is in the earliest stage, the period of which varies greatly in different individuals, that are fully inaugurated those various manifestations which have so marked a sexual coloring that there can be no question of their relationship, although at that time sexuality in the adult meaning of the word does not exist.

Jung explains the polymorphism of these phenomena as arising from a gradual movement of the libido from exclusive service in the function of nutrition into new avenues which successively open up with the development of the child until the final inauguration of the sexual function proper at puberty. Normally these childish bad habits are gradually relinquished until the libido is entirely withdrawn from these immature phases and with the ushering in of puberty for the first time “appears in the form of an undifferentiated sexual primitive power, clearly forcing the individual towards division, budding, etc.”

However, if in the course of its movement from the function of nutrition to the sexual function the libido is arrested or retarded at any phase, then a fixation may result, creating a disturbance in the harmony of the normal development. For, although the libido is retarded and remains clinging to some childish manifestation, time goes on and the physical growth of the child does not stand still. Soon a great contrast is created xxxbetween the infantile manifestations of the emotional life and the needs of the more adult individual, and the foundation is thus prepared for either the development of a definite neurosis or else for those weaknesses of character or symptomatic disturbances which are not sufficiently serious to be called a neurosis.

One of the most active and important forms of childish libido occupation is in phantasy making. The child’s world is one of imagery and make-believe where he can create for himself that satisfaction and enjoyment which the world of reality so often denies. As the child grows and real demands of life are made upon him it becomes increasingly necessary that his libido be taken away from his phantastic world and used for the required adaptation to reality needed by his age and condition, until finally for the adult the freedom of the whole libido is necessary to meet the biological and cultural demands of life.

Instead of thus employing the libido in the real world, however, certain people never relinquish the seeking for satisfaction in the shadowy world of phantasy and even though they make certain attempts at adaptation they are halted and discouraged by every difficulty and obstacle in the path of life and are easily pulled back into their inner psychic world. This condition is called a state of introversion. It is concerned with the past and the reminiscences which belong thereto. Situations and experiences which should have been completed and finished long ago are still dwelt upon and lived with. Images and matters which were once important but which normally have no significance for their later age are still xxxiactively influencing their present lives. The nature and character of these phantasy products are legion, and are easily recognized in the emotional attitudes and pretensions, the childish illusions and exaggerations, the prejudices and inconsistencies which people express in manifold forms. The actual situation is inadequately faced; small matters are reacted towards in an exaggerated manner; or else a frivolous attitude is maintained where real seriousness is demanded. In other words, there is clearly manifested an inadequate psychic adaptation towards reality which is quite to be expected from the child, but which is very discordant in the adult.

The most important of these past influences is that of the parents. Because they are the first objects of the developing childish love, and afford the first satisfaction and pleasure to the child, they become the models for all succeeding efforts, as Freud has worked out. This he called the nuclear or root complex because this influence was so powerful it seemed to be the determining factor in all later difficulties in the life of the individual.

In this phase of the problem lies the third great difference between Jung’s interpretation of the observed phenomena and that of Freud.

Jung definitely recognizes that there are many neurotic persons who clearly exhibited in their childhood the same neurotic tendencies that are later exaggerated. Also that an almost overwhelming effect on the destiny of these children is exercised by the influence of the parents, the frequent over-anxiety or tenderness, the lack of sympathy or understanding, in other words, the complexes of the xxxiiparent reacting upon the child and producing in him love, admiration, fear, distrust, hate, revolt. The greater the sensitiveness and impressionability of the child, the more he will be stamped with the familial environment, and the more he will unconsciously seek to find again in the world of reality the model of his own small world with all the pleasures and satisfactions, or disappointments and unhappinesses with which it was filled.

This condition to be sure is not a recognized or a conscious one, for the individual may think himself perfectly free from this past influence because he is living in the real world, and because actually there is a great difference between the present conditions and that of his childish past. He sees all this, intellectually, but there is a wide gap between the intellectual grasp of a situation and the emotional development, and it is the latter realm wherein lies the disharmony. However, although many ideas and feelings are connected with the parents, analysis reveals very often that they are only subjective and that in reality they bear little resemblance to the actual past situation. Therefore, Jung speaks no longer of the real father and mother but uses the term imago or image to represent the father or mother, because the feelings and phantasies frequently do not deal with the real parents but with the distorted and subjective image created by the imagination of the individual.

Following this distinction Jung sees in the Oedipus complex of Freud only a symbol for the “childish desire towards the parents and for the conflict which this craving evokes,” and cannot accept the theory that in this xxxiiiearly stage of childhood the mother has any real sexual significance for the child.

The demands of the child upon the mother, the jealousy so often exhibited, are at first connected with the rôle of the mother as protector, caretaker and supplier of nutritive wants, and only later, with the germinating eroticism, does the child’s love become admixed with the developing sexual quality. The chief love objects are still the parents and he naturally continues to seek and to find in them satisfaction for all his desires. In this way the typical conflict is developed which in the son is directed towards the father and in the daughter towards the mother. This jealousy of the daughter towards the mother is called the Electra complex from the myth of Electra who took revenge on her mother for the murder of the husband because she was in this way deprived of her father.

Normally as puberty is attained the child gradually becomes more or less freed from his parents, and upon the degree in which this is accomplished depends his health and future well-being.

This demand of nature upon the young individual to free himself from the bonds of his childish dependency and to find in the world of reality his independent existence is so imperious and dominating that it frequently produces in the child the greatest struggles and severest conflicts, the period being characterized symbolically as a self-sacrifice by Jung.

It frequently happens that the young person is so closely bound in the family relations that it is only with xxxivthe greatest difficulty that he can attain any measure of freedom and then only very imperfectly, so that the libido sexualis can only express itself in certain feelings and phantasies which clearly reveal the existence of the complex until then entirely hidden and unrealized. Now commences the secondary struggle against the unfilial and immoral feelings with a consequent development of intense resistances expressing themselves in irritation, anger, revolt and antagonism against the parents, or else in an especially tender, submissive and yielding attitude which over-compensates for the rebellion and reaction held within.

This struggle and conflict gives rise to the unconscious phantasy of self-sacrifice which really means the sacrificing of the childish tendencies and love type in order to free libido; for his nature demands that he attain the capacity for the accomplishment of his own personal fulfilment, the satisfaction of which belongs to the developed man and woman.

This conception has been worked out in detail by Jung in the book which is herein presented to English readers.

We now come to the most important of Jung’s conceptions in that it bears practically upon the treatment of certain types of the neuroses and stands theoretically in direct opposition to Freud’s hypothesis. While recognizing fully the influence of the parents and of the sexual constitution of the child, Jung refuses to see in this infantile past the real cause for the later development of the illness. He definitely places the cause of the pathogenic xxxvconflict in the present moment and considers that in seeking for the cause in the distant past one is only following the desire of the patient, which is to withdraw himself as much as possible from the present important period.

The conflict is produced by some important task or duty which is essential biologically and practically for the fulfilment of the ego of the individual, but before which an obstacle arises from which he shrinks, and thus halted cannot go on. With this interference in the path of progression libido is stored up and a regression takes place whereby there occurs a reanimation of past ways of libido occupation which were entirely normal to the child, but which for the adult are no longer of value. These regressive infantile desires and phantasies now alive and striving for satisfaction are converted into symptoms, and in these surrogate forms obtain a certain gratification, thus creating the external manifestations of the neurosis. Therefore Jung does not ask from what psychic experience or point of fixation in childhood the patient is suffering, but what is the present duty or task he is avoiding, or what obstacle in his life’s path he is unable to overcome? What is the cause of his regression to past psychic experiences?

Following this theory Jung expresses the view that the elaborate phantasies and dreams produced by these patients are really forms of compensation or artificial substitutes for the unfulfilled adaptation to reality. The sexual content of these phantasies and dreams is only apparently and not actually expressive of a real sexual xxxvidesire or incest wish, but is a regressive employment of sexual forms to symbolically express a present-day need when the attainment of the present ego demand seems too difficult or impossible, and no adaptation is made to what is possible for the individual’s capability.^[3]

With this statement Jung throws a new light on the work of analytic psychology and on the conception of the neurotic symptoms, and renders possible of understanding the many apparent incongruities and conflicting observations which have been so disturbing to the critics.

It now becomes proper to ask what has been established by all this mass of investigation into the soul, and what is its value not only as a therapeutic measure for the neurotic sufferer, but also for the normal human being?

First and perhaps most important is the recognition of a definite psychological determinism. Instead of human life being filled with foolish, meaningless or purposeless actions, errors and thoughts, it can be demonstrated that no expression or manifestation of the psyche, however trifling or inconsistent in appearance, is really lawless or unmotivated. Only a possession of the technique is necessary in order to reveal, to any one desirous of knowing, the existence of the unconscious determinants of his mannerisms, trivial expressions, acts and behavior, their purpose and significance.

xxxviiThis leads into the second fundamental conception, which is perhaps even less considered than the foregoing, and that is the relative value of the conscious mind and thought. It is the general attitude of people to judge themselves by their surface motives, to satisfy themselves by saying or thinking “this is what I want to do or say” or “I intended to do thus and so,” but somehow what one thought, one intended to say or expected to do is very often the contrary of what actually is said or done. Every one has had these experiences when the gap between the conscious thought and action was gross enough to be observed. It is also a well known experience to consciously desire something very much and when it is obtained to discover that this in no wise satisfied or lessened the desire, which was then transferred to some other object. Thus one became cognizant of the fact that the feeling and idea presented by consciousness as the desire was an error. What is the difficulty in these conditions? Evidently some other directing force than that of which we are aware is at work.

Dr. G. Stanley Hall uses a very striking symbol when he compares the mind to an iceberg floating in the ocean with one-eighth visible above the water and seven-eighths below—the one-eighth above being that part called conscious and the seven-eighths below that which we call the unconscious. The influence and controlling power of the unconscious desires over our thoughts and acts are in this relative proportion. Faint glimmers of other motives and interests than those we accept or which we believe, often flit into consciousness. These indications, if studied xxxviiior valued accurately, would lead to the realization that consciousness is but a single stage and but one form of expression of mind. Therefore its dictum is but one, often untrustworthy, approach to the great question as to what is man’s actual psychic accomplishment, and as to what in particular is the actual soul development of the individual.

A further contribution of equal importance has been the empiric development of a dynamic theory of life; the conception that life is in a state of flux—movement—leading either to construction or destruction. Through the development man has reached he has attained the power by means of his intelligence and understanding of definitely directing to a certain extent this life energy or libido into avenues which serve his interest and bring a real satisfaction for the present day.

When man through ignorance and certain inherent tendencies fails to recognize his needs or his power to fulfil them, or to adapt himself to the conditions of reality of the present time, there is then produced that reanimation of infantile paths by which an attempt is made to gain fulfilment or satisfaction through the production of symptoms or attitudes.

The acceptance of these statements demands the recognition of the existence of an infantile sexuality and the large part played by it in the later life of the individual. Because of the power and imperious influence exerted by the parents upon the child, and because of the unconscious attachment of his libido to the original object, the mother, and the perseverance of this first love model in the xxxixpsyche, he finds it very difficult, on reaching the stage of adult development and the time for seeking a love object outside of the family, to gain a satisfactory model.

It is exceedingly important for parents and teachers to recognize the requirements of nature, which, beginning with puberty, imperiously demand of the young individual a separation of himself from the parent stem and the development of an independent existence. In our complex modern civilization this demand of nature is difficult enough of achievement for the child who has the heartiest and most intelligent co-operation of his parents and environment—but for the one who has not only to contend with his own inner struggle for his freedom but has in addition the resistance of his parents who would hold him in his childhood at any cost, because they cannot endure the thought of his separation from them, the task becomes one of the greatest magnitude. It is during this period when the struggle between the childish inertia and nature’s urge becomes so keen, that there occur the striking manifestations of jealousy, criticism, irritability all usually directed against the parents, of defiance of parental authority, of runaways and various other psychic and nervous disorders known to all.

This struggle, which is the first great task of mankind and the one which requires the greatest effort, is that which is expressed by Jung as the self-sacrifice motive—the sacrifice of the childish feelings and demands, and of the irresponsibility of this period, and the assumption of the duties and tasks of an individual existence.

It is this great theme which Jung sees as the real xlmotive lying hidden in the myths and religions of man from the beginning, as well as in the literature and artistic creations of both ancient and modern time, and which he works out with the greatest wealth of detail and painstaking effort in the book herewith presented.

This necessitates a recognition and revaluation of the enormous importance and influence of the ego and the sexual instinct upon the thought and reaction of man, and also predicates a displacement of the psychological point of gravity from the will and intellect to the realm of the emotions and feelings. The desired end is a synthesis of these two paths or the use of the intellect constructively in the service of the emotions in order to gain for the best interest of the individual some sort of co-operative reaction between the two.

No one dealing with analytic psychology can fail to be struck by the tremendous and unnecessary burdens which man has placed upon himself, and how greatly he has increased the difficulties of adaptation by his rigid intellectual views and moral formulas, and by his inability to admit to himself that he is actually just a human being imperfect, and containing within himself all manner of tendencies, good and bad, all striving for some satisfactory goal. Further, that the refusal to see himself in this light instead of as an ideal person in no way alters the actual condition, and that in fact, through the cheap pretense of being able only to consider himself as a very virtuous person, or as shocked and hurt when observing the “sins” of others, he actually is prevented from developing xlihis own character and bringing his own capacities to their fullest expressions.

There is frequently expressed among people the idea of how fortunate it is that we cannot see each other’s thoughts, and how disturbing it would be if our real feelings could be read. But what is so shameful in these secrets of the soul? They are in reality our own egoistic desires all striving, longing, wishing for satisfaction, for happiness; those desires which instinctively crave their own gratification but which can only be really fulfilled by adapting them to the real world and to the social group.

Why is it that it is so painful for man to admit that the prime influence in all human endeavor is found in the ego itself, in its desires, wishes, needs and satisfactions, in short, in its need for self-expression and self-perpetuation, the evolutionary impetus in life?

The basis for the unpleasantness of this idea may perhaps be found in an inner resistance in nature itself which forces man to include others in his scheme, lest his own greedy desires should serve to destroy him. But even with this inner demand and all the ethical and moral teachings of centuries it is everywhere evident that man has only very imperfectly learned that it is to his own interest to consider his neighbor and that it is impossible for him to ignore the needs of the body social of which he is a part. Externally, the recognition of the strength of the ego impulse is objectionable because of the ideal conception that self-striving and so-called selfish seeking are unworthy, ignoble and incompatible with a desirable character and must be ignored at all cost.

xliiThe futility of this attitude is to be clearly seen in the failure after all these centuries to even approximate it, as evidenced in our human relations and institutions, and is quite as ineffectual in this realm as in that of sexuality where the effort to overcome this imperious domination has been attempted by lowering the instinct, and seeing in it something vile or unclean, something unspeakable and unholy. Instead of destroying the power of sexuality this struggle has only warped and distorted, injured and mutilated the expression; for not without destruction of the individual can these fundamental instincts be destroyed. Life itself has needs and imperiously demands expression through the forms created. All nature answers to this freely and simply except man. His failure to recognize himself as an instrument through which the life energy is coursing and the demands of which must be obeyed, is the cause of his misery. Despite his possession of intellect and self-consciousness, he cannot without disaster to himself refuse the tasks of life and the fulfilment of his own needs. Man’s great task is the adaptation of himself to reality and the recognition of himself as an instrument for the expression of life according to his individual possibilities.

It is in his privilege as a self-creator that his highest purpose is found.

The value of self-consciousness lies in the fact that man is enabled to reflect upon himself and learn to understand the true origin and significance of his actions and opinions, that he may adequately value the real level of his development and avoid being self-deceived and therefore xliiiinhibited from finding his biological adaptation. He need no longer be unconscious of the motives underlying his actions or hide himself behind a changed exterior, in other words, be merely a series of reactions to stimuli as the mechanists have it, but he may to a certain extent become a self-creating and self-determining being.

Indeed, there seems to be an impulse towards adaptation quite as Bergson sees it, and it would seem to be a task of the highest order to use intelligence to assist one’s self to work with this impulse.

Through the investigation of these different avenues leading into the hidden depths of the human being and through the revelation of the motives and influences at work there, although astonishing to the uninitiated, a very clear and definite conception of the actual human relationship—brotherhood—of all mankind is obtained. It is this recognition of these common factors basically inherent in humanity from the beginning and still active, which is at once both the most hopeful and the most feared and disliked part of psychoanalysis.

It is disliked by those individuals who have prided themselves upon their superiority and the distinction between their reactions and motives and those of ordinary mankind. In other words, they attempt to become personalities through elevating themselves and lowering others, and it is a distinct blow to discover that beneath these pretensions lie the very ordinary elements shared in common by all. On the other hand, to those who have been able to recognize their own weaknesses and have xlivsuffered in the privacy of their own souls, the knowledge that these things have not set them apart from others, but that they are the common property of all and that no one can point the finger of scorn at his fellow, is one of the greatest experiences of life and is productive of the greatest relief.

It is feared by many who realize that in these painfully acquired repressions and symptoms lie their safety and their protection from directly facing and dealing with tendencies and characteristics with which they feel unable to cope. The repression and the accompanying symptoms indicate a difficulty and a struggle, and in this way are a sort of compromise or substitute formation which permit, although only in a wasteful and futile manner, the activity of the repressed tendencies. Nevertheless, to analyze the individual back to his original tendencies and reveal to him the meaning of these substitute formations would be a useless procedure in which truly “the last state of that man would be worse than the first” if the work ceased there. The aim is not to destroy those barriers upon which civilized man has so painfully climbed and to reduce him to his primitive state, but, where these have failed or imperfectly succeeded, to help him to attain his greatest possibilities with less expenditure of energy, by less wasteful methods than nature provides. In this achievement lies the hopeful and valuable side of this method—the development of the synthesis. It is hopeful because now a way is opened to deal with these primitive tendencies constructively, and render their effects not only harmless but useful, by xlvutilizing them in higher aims, socially and individually valuable and satisfactory.

This is what has occurred normally in those individuals who seem capable and constructive personalities; in those creative minds that give so much to the race. They have converted certain psychological tendencies which could have produced useless symptoms or destructive actions into valuable productions. Indeed it is not uncommon for strong, capable persons to state themselves that they knew they could have been equally capable of a wasteful or destructive life. This utilization of the energy or libido freed by removing the repressions and the lifting of infantile tendencies and desires into higher purposes and directions suitable for the individual at his present status is called sublimation.

It must not be understood by this discussion that geniuses or wonderful personalities can be created through analysis, for this is not the aim of the procedure. Its purpose is to remove the inhibitions and restrictions which interfere with the full development of the personality, to help individuals attain to that level where they really belong, and to prepare people to better understand and meet life whether they are neurotic sufferers or so-called “normal people” with the difficulties and peculiarities which belong to all.

This reasoning and method of procedure is only new when the application is made to the human being. In all improvements of plants and animals these general principles have been recognized and their teachings constructively utilized.

xlviLuther Burbank, that plant wizard whose work is known to all the world, says, “A knowledge of the battle of the tendencies within a plant is the very basis of all plant improvement,” and “it is not that the work of plant improvement brings with it, incidentally, as people mistakenly think, a knowledge of these forces, it is the knowledge of these forces, rather, which makes plant improvement possible.”

Has this not been also the mistake of man regarding himself, and the cause, partly at least, of his failure to succeed in actually reaching a more advanced and stable development?

This recognition of man’s biological relationship to all life and the practical utilization of this recognition, necessitates a readjustment of thought and asks for an examination and reconsideration of the facts of human conduct which are observable by any thoughtful person. A quiet and progressive upheaval of old ideas has taken place and is still going on. Analytic psychology attempts to unify and value all of the various phenomena of man which have been observed and noted at different times by isolated investigators of isolated manifestations and thus bring some orderly sequence into the whole. It offers a method whereby the relations of the human being biologically to all other living forms can be established, the actual achievement of man himself adequately valued, and opens a vista of the possibilities of improvement in health, happiness and accomplishment for the human being.

My task in this work has been to investigate an individual phantasy system, and in the doing of it problems of such magnitude have been uncovered, that my endeavor to grasp them in their entirety has necessarily meant only a superficial orientation toward those paths, the opening and exploration of which may possibly crown the work of future investigators with success.

I am not in sympathy with the attitude which favors the repression of certain possible working hypotheses because they are perhaps erroneous, and so may possess no lasting value. Certainly I endeavored as far as possible to guard myself from error, which might indeed become especially dangerous upon these dizzy heights, for I am entirely aware of the risks of these investigations. However, I do not consider scientific work as a dogmatic contest, but rather as a work done for the increase and deepening of knowledge.

This contribution is addressed to those having similar ideas concerning science.

In conclusion, I must render thanks to those who have assisted my endeavors with valuable aid, especially my dear wife and my friends, to whose disinterested assistance I am deeply indebted.

“Therefore theory, which gives to facts their value and significance, is often very useful, even if it is partially false, for it throws light on phenomena which no one observed, it forces an examination, from many angles, of facts which no one had hitherto studied, and it gives the impulse for more extended and more productive researches.

“It is, therefore, a moral duty for the man of science to expose himself to the risk of committing error and to submit to criticism, in order that science may continue to progress. A writer has attacked the author for this very severely, saying, here is a scientific ideal very limited and very paltry. But those who are endowed with a mind sufficiently serious and impersonal as not to believe that all that they write is the expression of truth absolute and eternal, approve of this theory which places the aims of science well above the miserable vanity and paltry ‘amour propre’ of the scientist.”—Guglielmo Ferrero.

Any one who can read Freud’s “Interpretation of the Dream” without scientific rebellion at the newness and apparently unjustified daring of its analytical presentation, and without moral indignation at the astonishing nudity of the dream interpretation, and who can allow this unusual array of facts to influence his mind calmly and without prejudice, will surely be deeply impressed at that place where Freud calls to mind the fact that an individual psychologic conflict, namely, the Incest Phantasy, is the essential root of that powerful ancient dramatic material, the Oedipus legend. The impression made by this simple reference may be likened to that wholly peculiar feeling which arises in us if, for example, in the noise and tumult of a modern street we should come across an ancient relic—the Corinthian capital of a walled-in column, or a fragment of inscription. Just a moment ago we were given over to the noisy ephemeral life of the present, when something very far away and strange appears to us, which turns our attention to things of another order; a glimpse away from the incoherent multiplicity of the present to a higher coherence in history. Very likely it would suddenly occur to us that on this spot where we now run busily to and fro a similar life and activity prevailed two thousand years ago in 4somewhat other forms; similar passions moved mankind, and man was likewise convinced of the uniqueness of his existence. I would liken the impression which the first acquaintance with the monuments of antiquity so easily leaves behind to that impression which Freud’s reference to the Oedipus legend makes—for while we are still engaged with the confusing impressions of the variability of the Individual Soul, suddenly there is opened a revelation of the simple greatness of the Oedipus tragedy—that never extinguished light of the Grecian theatre.

This breadth of outlook carries in itself something of revelation. For us, the ancient psychology has long since been buried among the shadows of the past; in the schoolroom one could scarcely repress a sceptical smile when one indiscreetly reckoned the comfortable matronly age of Penelope and the age of Jocasta, and comically compared the result of the reckoning with the tragic-erotic struggles in the legend and drama. We did not know at that time (and who knows even to-day?) that the mother can be the all-consuming passion of the son, which perhaps undermines his whole life and tragically destroys it, so that not even the magnitude of the Oedipus Fate seems one jot overdrawn. Rare and pathologically understood cases like Ninon de Lenclos and her son^[4] lie too far removed from most of us to give a living impression. But when we follow the paths traced out by Freud, we arrive at a recognition of the present existence of such possibilities, which, although they are too weak to enforce incest, are still strong enough to cause disturbances of considerable magnitude in the soul. The admission 5of such possibilities to one’s self does not occur without a great burst of moral revulsion. Resistances arise which only too easily dazzle the intellect, and, through that, make knowledge of self impossible. Whenever we succeed, however, in stripping feelings from more scientific knowledge, then that abyss which separates our age from the antique is bridged, and, with astonishment, we see that Oedipus is still a living thing for us. The importance of such an impression should not be undervalued. We are taught by this insight that there is an identity of elementary human conflicts existing independent of time and place. That which affected the Greeks with horror still remains true, but it is true for us only when we give up a vain illusion that we are different—that is to say, more moral, than the ancients. We of the present day have nearly succeeded in forgetting that an indissoluble common bond binds us to the people of antiquity. With this truth a path is opened to the understanding of the ancient mind; an understanding which so far has not existed, and, on one side, leads to an inner sympathy, and, on the other side, to an intellectual comprehension. Through buried strata of the individual soul we come indirectly into possession of the living mind of the ancient culture, and, just precisely through that, do we win that stable point of view outside our own culture, from which, for the first time, an objective understanding of their mechanisms would be possible. At least that is the hope which we get from the rediscovery of the Oedipus problem.

The enquiry made possible by Freud’s work has already 6resulted fruitfully; we are indebted to this stimulation for some bold attacks upon the territory of the history of the human mind. There are the works of Riklin,^[5] Abraham,^[6] Rank,^[7] Maeder,^[8] Jones,^[9]—recently Silberer has joined their ranks with a beautiful investigation entitled “Phantasie und Mythus.”^[10] We are indebted to Pfister^[11] for a comprehensive work which cannot be overlooked here, and which is of much importance for Christian religious psychology. The leading purpose of these works is the unlocking of historical problems through the application of psychoanalytic knowledge; that is to say, knowledge drawn from the activity of the modern unconscious mind concerning specific historical material.

I must refer the reader entirely to the specified works, in order that he may gain information concerning the extent and the kind of insight which has already been obtained. The explanations are in many cases dubious in particulars; nevertheless, this detracts in no way from the total result. It would be significant enough if only the far-reaching analogy between the psychologic structure of the historical relics and the structure of the recent individual psychologic products alone were demonstrated. This proof is possible of attainment for every intelligent person through the work done up to this time. The analogy prevails especially in symbolism, as Riklin, Rank, Maeder, and Abraham have pointed out with illuminating examples; it is also shown in the individual mechanisms of unconscious work, that is to say in repression, condensation, etc., as Abraham explicitly shows.

7Up to the present time the psychoanalytic investigator has turned his interest chiefly to the analysis of the individual psychologic problems. It seems to me, however, that in the present state of affairs there is a more or less imperative demand for the psychoanalyst to broaden the analysis of the individual problems by a comparative study of historical material relating to them, just as Freud has already done in a masterly manner in his book on “Leonardo da Vinci.”^[12] For, just as the psychoanalytic conceptions promote understanding of the historic psychologic creations, so reversedly historical materials can shed new light upon individual psychologic problems. These and similar considerations have caused me to turn my attention somewhat more to the historical, in the hope that, out of this, new insight into the foundations of individual psychology might be won.

It is a well-known fact that one of the principles of analytic psychology is that the dream images are to be understood symbolically; that is to say, that they are not to be taken literally just as they are presented in sleep, but that behind them a hidden meaning has to be surmised. It is this ancient idea of a dream symbolism which has challenged not only criticism, but, in addition to that, the strongest opposition. That dreams may be full of import, and, therefore, something to be interpreted, is certainly neither a strange nor an extraordinary idea. This has been familiar to mankind for thousands of years, and, therefore, seems much like a banal truth. The dream interpretations of the Egyptians and Chaldeans, and the story of Joseph who interpreted Pharaoh’s dreams, are known to every one, and the dream book of Artemidorus is also familiar. From countless inscribed monuments of all times and peoples we learn of foreboding dreams, of significant, of prophetic and also of curative dreams which the Deity sent to the sick, sleeping in the temple. We know the dream of the mother of Augustus, who dreamt she was to be with child by the Deity transformed into a snake. We will not heap up references and examples to bear witness to the existence of a belief 9in the symbolism of dreams. When an idea is so old, and is so generally believed, it is probably true in some way, and, indeed, as is mostly the case, is not literally true, but is true psychologically. In this distinction lies the reason why the old fogies of science have from time to time thrown away an inherited piece of ancient truth; because it was not literal but psychologic truth. For such discrimination this type of person has at no time had any comprehension.

From our experience, it is hardly conceivable that a God existing outside of ourselves causes dreams, or that the dream, eo ipso, foresees the future prophetically. When we translate this into the psychologic, however, then the ancient theories sound much more reconcilable, namely, the dream arises from a part of the mind unknown to us, but none the less important, and is concerned with the desires for the approaching day. This psychologic formula derived from the ancient superstitious conception of dreams, is, so to speak, exactly identified with the Freudian psychology, which assumes a rising wish from the unconscious to be the source of the dream.

As the old belief teaches, the Deity or the Demon speaks in symbolic speech to the sleeper, and the dream interpreter has the riddle to solve. In modern speech we say this means that the dream is a series of images, which are apparently contradictory and nonsensical, but arise in reality from psychologic material which yields a clear meaning.

Were I to suppose among my readers a far-reaching 10ignorance of dream analysis, then I should be obliged to illustrate this statement with numerous examples. To-day, however, these things are quite well known, so that one must proceed carefully with every-day dream material, out of consideration for a public educated in these matters. It is a special inconvenience that no dream can be recounted without being obliged to add to it half a life’s history which affords the individual foundations of the dream, but there are some few typical dreams which can be told without too great a ballast. One of these is the dream of the sexual assault, which is especially prevalent among women. A girl sleeping after an evening happily spent in dancing, dreams that a robber breaks open her door noisily and stabs through her body with a lance. This theme, which explains itself, has countless variations, some simple, some complicated. Instead of the lance it is a sword, a dagger, a revolver, a gun, a cannon, a hydrant, a watering pot; or the assault is a burglary, a pursuit, a robbery, or it is some one hidden in the closet or under the bed. Or the danger may be illustrated by wild animals; for instance, a horse which throws the dreamer to the ground and kicks her in the body with his hind foot; lions, tigers, elephants with threatening trunks, and finally snakes in endless variety. Sometimes the snake creeps into the mouth, sometimes it bites the breast like Cleopatra’s legendary asp, sometimes it comes in the rôle of the paradisical snake, or in the variations of Franz Stuck, whose pictures of snakes bear the significant titles “Vice,” “Sin,” “Lust.” The mixture of lust and anxiety is expressed incomparably in 11the very atmosphere of these pictures, and far more brutally, indeed, than in Mörike’s charming poem.

All these things are simple, and need no explanation to be intelligible. Somewhat more complicated, but still 12unmistakable, is the dream of a woman; she sees the triumphal arch of Constantine. A cannon stands before it, to the right of it a bird, to the left a man. A shot flashes out of the tube; the projectile hits her; it goes into her pocket, into her purse. There it remains, and she holds her purse as if something very precious were in it. The image disappears, and she continues to see only the stock of the cannon, and over that Constantine’s motto, “In hoc signo vinces.”

These few references to the symbolic nature of dreams are perhaps sufficient. For whomsoever the proof may appear insufficient, and it is certainly insufficient for a beginner, further evidence may be found in the fundamental work of Freud, and in the works of Stekel and Rank which are fuller in certain particulars. We must assume here that the dream symbolism is an established fact, in order to bring to our study a mind suitably prepared for an appreciation of this work. We would not be successful if we, on the contrary, were to be astonished at the idea that an intellectual image can be projected into our conscious psychic activity; an image which apparently obeys such wholly other laws and purposes than those governing the conscious psychic product.

Why are dreams symbolic? Every “why” in psychology is divided into two separate questions: first, for what purpose are dreams symbolic? We will answer this question only to abandon it at once. Dreams are symbolic in order that they can not be understood; in order that the wish, which is the source of the dream, may remain unknown. The question why this is so and not otherwise, 13leads us out into the far-reaching experiences and trains of thought of the Freudian psychology.

Here the second question interests us, viz., How is it that dreams are symbolic? That is to say, from where does this capacity for symbolic representation come, of which we, in our conscious daily life, can discover apparently no traces?

Let us examine this more closely. Can we really discover nothing symbolic in our every-day thought? Let us follow our trains of thought; let us take an example. We think of the war of 1870 and 1871. We think about a series of bloody battles, the siege of Strassburg, Belfort, Paris, the Treaty of Peace, the foundation of the German Empire, and so on. How have we been thinking? We start with an idea, or super-idea, as it is also called, and without thinking of it, but each time merely guided by a feeling of direction, we think about individual reminiscences of the war. In this we can find nothing symbolic, and our whole conscious thinking proceeds according to this type.^[13]

If we observe our thinking very narrowly, and follow an intensive train of thought, as, for example, the solution of a difficult problem, then suddenly we notice that we are thinking in words, that in wholly intensive thinking we begin to speak to ourselves, or that we occasionally write down the problem, or make a drawing of it so as to be absolutely clear. It must certainly have happened to any one who has lived for some time in a foreign country, that after a certain period he has begun to think in the language of the country. A very intensive train 14of thinking works itself out more or less in word form; that is, if one wants to express it, to teach it, or to convince any one of it. Evidently it directs itself wholly to the outside world. To this extent, this directed or logical thinking is a reality thinking,^[14] having a real existence for us; that is to say, a thinking which adjusts itself to actual conditions,^[15] where we, expressed in other words, imitate the succession of objectively real things, so that the images in our mind follow after each other in the same strictly causal succession as the historical events outside of our mind.^[16]

We call this thinking, thinking with directed attention. It has, in addition, the peculiarity that one is tired by it, and that, on this account, it is set into action only for a time. Our whole vital accomplishment, which is so expensive, is adaptation to environment; a part of it is the directed thinking, which, biologically expressed, is nothing but a process of psychic assimilation, which, as in every vital accomplishment, leaves behind a corresponding exhaustion.

The material with which we think is language and speech concept, a thing which has been used from time immemorial as something external, a bridge for thought, and which has a single purpose—that of communication. As long as we think directedly, we think for others and speak to others.^[17]

Speech is originally a system of emotional and imitative sounds—sounds which express terror, fear, anger, love; and sounds which imitate the noises of the elements, the rushing and gurgling of water, the rolling of thunder, 15the tumults of the winds, the tones of the animal world, and so on; and, finally, those which represent a combination of the sounds of perception and of affective reaction.^[18] Likewise in the more or less modern languages, large quantities of onomatopoetic relics are retained; for example, sounds for the movement of water,—

Rauschen, risseln, rûschen, rinnen, rennen, to rush, ruscello, ruisseau, river, Rhein.

Wasser, wissen, wissern, pissen, piscis, fisch.

Thus language is originally and essentially nothing but a system of signs or symbols, which denote real occurrences, or their echo in the human soul.

Therefore one must decidedly agree with Anatole France,^[19] when he says,

“What is thought, and how do we think? We think with words; that alone is sensual and brings us back to nature. Think of it! The metaphysician has only the perfected cry of monkeys and dogs with which to construct the system of the world. That which he calls profound speculation and transcendent method is to put end to end in an arbitrary order the natural sounds which cry out hunger, fear, and love in the primitive forests, and to which were attached little by little the meanings which one believed to be abstract, when they were only crude.

“Do not fear that the succession of small cries, feeble and stifled, which compose a book of philosophy, will teach us so much regarding the universe, that we can live in it no longer.”

Thus is our directed thinking, and even if we were the loneliest and furthest removed from our fellows, this thinking is nothing but the first notes of a long-drawn-out call to our companions that water had been found, 16that we had killed the bear, that a storm was approaching, or that wolves were prowling around the camp. A striking paradox of Abélard’s which expresses in a very intuitive way the whole human limitation of our complicated thinking process, reads,—“Sermo generatur ab intellectu et generat intellectum.”^[20]

Any system of philosophy, no matter how abstract, represents in means and purpose nothing more than an extremely cleverly developed combination of original nature sounds.^[21] Hence arises the desire of a Schopenhauer or a Nietzsche for recognition and understanding, and the despair and bitterness of their loneliness. One might expect, perhaps, that a man full of genius could pasture in the greatness of his own thoughts, and renounce the cheap approbation of the crowd which he despises; yet he succumbs to the more powerful impulse of the herd instinct. His searching and his finding, his call, belong to the herd.

When I said just now that directed thinking is properly a thinking with words, and quoted that clever testimony of Anatole France as drastic proof of it, a misunderstanding might easily arise, namely, that directed thinking is really only “word.” That certainly would go too far. Language should, however, be comprehended in a wider sense than that of speech, which is in itself only the expression of the formulated thought which is capable of being communicated in the widest sense. Otherwise, the deaf mute would be limited to the utmost in his capacity for thinking, which is not the case in reality. Without 17any knowledge of the spoken word, he has his “language.” This language, considered from the standpoint of history, or in other words, directed thinking, is here a descendant of the primitive words, as, for instance, Wundt^[22] expresses it.

“A further important result of that co-operation of sound and sign interchange consists in the fact that very many words gradually lose altogether their original concrete thought meaning, and turn into signs for general ideas and for the expression of the apperceptive functions of relation and comparison and their products. In this manner abstract thought develops, which, because it would not be possible without the change of meaning lying at the root of it, is indeed a production of that psychic and psychophysical reciprocal action out of which the development of language takes place.”

Jodl^[23] denies the identity of language and thought, because, for one reason, one and the same psychic fact might be expressed in different languages in different ways. From that he draws the conclusion that a “super-language thinking” exists. Certainly there is such a thing, whether with Erdmann one considers it “hypologisch,” or with Jodl as “super-language.” Only this is not logical thinking. My conception of it agrees with the noteworthy contribution made by Baldwin, which I will quote here word for word.^[24]

“The transmission from pre-judgmental to judgmental meaning is just that from knowledge which has social confirmation to that which gets along without it. The meanings utilized for judgment are those already developed in their presuppositions and applications through the confirmation of social intercourse. Thus, the personal judgment, trained in the methods of social 18rendering, and disciplined by the interaction of its social world, projects its content into that world again. In other words, the platform for all movement into the assertion of individual judgment—the level from which new experience is utilized—is already and always socialized; and it is just this movement that we find reflected in the actual results as the sense of the ‘appropriateness’ or synomic character of the meaning rendered.

“Now the development of thought, as we are to see in more detail, is by a method essentially of trial and error, of experimentation, of the use of meanings as worth more than they are as yet recognized to be worth. The individual must use his own thoughts, his established knowledges, his grounded judgments, for the embodiment of his new inventive constructions. He erects his thought as we say ‘schematically’—in logic terms, ‘problematically,’ conditionally, disjunctively; projecting into the world an opinion still peculiar to himself, as if it were true. Thus all discovery proceeds. But this is, from the linguistic point of view, still to use the current language, still to work by meanings already embodied in social and conventional usage.

“Language grows, therefore, just as thought does, by never losing its synomic or dual reference; its meaning is both personal and social.

“It is the register of tradition, the record of racial conquest, the deposit of all the gains made by the genius of individuals.... The social copy-system, thus established, reflects the judgmental processes of the race, and in turn becomes the training school of the judgment of new generations.

“Most of the training of the self, whereby the vagaries of personal reaction to fact and image are reduced to the basis of sound judgment, comes through the use of speech. When the child speaks, he lays before the world his suggestion for a general or common meaning. The reception he gets confirms or refutes him. In either case he is instructed. His next venture is now from a platform of knowledge on which the newer item is more nearly convertible into the common coin of effective intercourse. The point to notice here is not so much the exact mechanism of the exchange—secondary conversion—by which this gain is made, 19as the training in judgment that the constant use of it affords. In each case, effective judgment is the common judgment.

“Here the object is to point out that it is secured by the development of a function whose rise is directly ad hoc, directly for the social experimentation by which growth in personal competence is advanced as well—the function of speech.

“In language, therefore, to sum up the foregoing, we have the tangible—the actual—the historical—instrument of the development and conservation of psychic meaning. It is the material evidence and proof of the concurrence of social and personal judgment. In it synomic meaning, judged as ‘appropriate,’ becomes ‘social’ meaning, held as socially generalized and acknowledged.”

These arguments of Baldwin abundantly emphasize the wide-reaching limitations of thinking caused by language.^[25] These limitations are of the greatest significance, both subjectively and objectively; at least their meaning is great enough to force one to ask one’s self if, after all, in regard to independence of thought, Franz Mauthner, thoroughly sceptical, is not really correct in his view that thinking is speech and nothing more. Baldwin expresses himself more cautiously and reservedly; nevertheless, his inner meaning is plainly in favor of the primacy of speech (naturally not in the sense of the spoken word); the directed thinking, or as we might perhaps call it, the thinking in internal speech, is the manifest instrument of culture, and we do not go astray when we say that the powerful work of education which the centuries have given to directed thinking has produced, just through the peculiar development of thinking from the individual subjective into the social objective, a practical application of the human mind to which we owe 20modern empiricism and technic, and which occurs for absolutely the first time in the history of the world. Inquisitive minds have often tormented themselves with the question why the undoubtedly extraordinary knowledge of mathematics and principles and material facts united with the unexampled art of the human hand in antiquity never arrived at the point of developing those known technical statements of fact, for instance, the principles of simple machines, beyond the realm of the amusing and curious to a real technic in the modern sense. There is necessarily only one answer to this; the ancients almost entirely, with the exception of a few extraordinary minds, lacked the capacity to allow their interest to follow the transformations of inanimate matter to the extent necessary for them to be able to reproduce the process of nature, creatively and through their own art, by means of which alone they could have succeeded in putting themselves in possession of the force of nature. That which they lacked was training in directed thinking, or, to express it psychoanalytically, the ancients did not succeed in tearing loose the libido which might be sublimated, from the other natural relations, and did not turn voluntarily to anthropomorphism. The secret of the development of culture lies in the mobility of the libido, and in its capacity for transference. It is, therefore, to be assumed that the directed thinking of our time is a more or less modern acquisition, which was lacking in earlier times.

But with that we come to a further question, viz., what happens if we do not think directedly? Then our thinking 21lacks the major idea, and the feeling of direction which emanates from that.^[26] We no longer compel our thoughts along a definite track, but let them float, sink and mount according to their own gravity. According to Kulpe^[27] thinking is a kind of inner will action, the absence of which necessarily leads to an automatic play of ideas. James understands the non-directed thinking, or “merely associative” thinking, as the ordinary one. He expresses himself about that in the following manner:

“Our thought consists for the great part of a series of images, one of which produces the other; a sort of passive dream-state of which the higher animals are also capable. This sort of thinking leads, nevertheless, to reasonable conclusions of a practical as well as of a theoretical nature.

“As a rule, the links of this sort of irresponsible thinking, which are accidentally bound together, are empirically concrete things, not abstractions.”

We can, in the following manner, complete these definitions of William James. This sort of thinking does not tire us; it quickly leads us away from reality into phantasies of the past and future. Here, thinking in the form of speech ceases, image crowds upon image, feeling upon feeling; more and more clearly one sees a tendency which creates and makes believe, not as it truly is, but as one indeed might wish it to be.^[28] The material of these thoughts which turns away from reality, can naturally be only the past with its thousand memory pictures. The customary speech calls this kind of thinking “dreaming.”

22Whoever attentively observes himself will find the general custom of speech very striking, for almost every day we can see for ourselves how, when falling asleep, phantasies are woven into our dreams, so that between the dreams of day and night there is not so great a difference. Thus we have two forms of thinking—directed thinking and dream or phantasy thinking. The first, working for communication with speech elements, is troublesome and exhausting; the latter, on the contrary, goes on without trouble, working spontaneously, so to speak, with reminiscences. The first creates innovations, adaptations, imitates reality and seeks to act upon it. The latter, on the contrary, turns away from reality, sets free subjective wishes, and is, in regard to adaptation, wholly unproductive.^[29]

Let us leave aside the query as to why we possess these two different ways of thinking, and turn back to the second proposition, namely, how comes it that we have two different ways of thinking? I have intimated above that history shows us that directed thinking was not always as developed as it is at present. In this age the most beautiful expression of directed thinking is science, and the technic fostered by it. Both things are indebted for their existence simply to an energetic education in directed thinking. At the time, however, when a few forerunners of the present culture, like the poet Petrarch, first began to appreciate Nature understandingly^[30] there was already in existence an equivalent for our science, to wit, scholasticism.^[31] This took its objects from the phantasies of the past, and it gave to the mind a dialectic 23training in directed thinking. The only success which beckoned the thinker was rhetorical victory in disputation, and not a visible transformation of reality.

The subjects of thinking were often astonishingly phantastical; for example, questions were discussed, such as how many angels could have a place on the point of a needle? Whether Christ could have done his work of redemption equally well if he had come into the world as a pea? The possibility of such problems, to which belong the metaphysical problems in general, viz., to be able to know the unknowable, shows us of what peculiar kind that mind must have been which created such things which to us are the height of absurdity. Nietzsche had guessed, however, at the biological background of this phenomenon when he spoke of the “beautiful tension” of the Germanic mind which the Middle Ages created. Taken historically, scholasticism, in the spirit of which persons of towering intellectual powers, such as Thomas of Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Abélard, William of Occam and others, have labored, is the mother of the modern scientific attitude, and a later time will see clearly how and in what scholasticism still furnishes living undercurrents to the science of to-day. Its whole nature lies in dialectic gymnastics which have raised the symbol of speech, the word, to an almost absolute meaning, so that it finally attained to that substantiality which expiring antiquity could lend to its logos only temporarily, through attributes of mystical valuation. The great work of scholasticism, however, appears to be the foundation of firmly knitted intellectual sublimation, the conditio 24sine qua non of the modern scientific and technical spirit.

Should we go further back into history, we shall find that which to-day we call science, dissolved into an indistinct cloud. The modern culture-creating mind is incessantly occupied in stripping off all subjectivity from experience, and in finding those formulas which bring Nature and her forces to the best and most fitting expression. It would be an absurd and entirely unjustified self-glorification if we were to assume that we are more energetic or more intelligent than the ancients—our materials for knowledge have increased, but not our intellectual capacity. For this reason, we become immediately as obstinate and insusceptible in regard to new ideas as people in the darkest times of antiquity. Our knowledge has increased but not our wisdom. The main point of our interest is displaced wholly into material reality; antiquity preferred a mode of thought which was more closely related to a phantastic type. Except for a sensitive perspicuity towards works of art, not attained since then, we seek in vain in antiquity for that precise and concrete manner of thinking characteristic of modern science. We see the antique spirit create not science but mythology. Unfortunately, we acquire in school only a very paltry conception of the richness and immense power of life of Grecian mythology.

Therefore, at first glance, it does not seem possible for us to assume that that energy and interest which to-day we put into science and technic, the man of antiquity gave in great part to his mythology. That, nevertheless, gives 25the explanation for the bewildering changes, the kaleidoscopic transformations and new syncretistic groupings, and the continued rejuvenation of the myths in the Grecian sphere of culture. Here, we move in a world of phantasies, which, little concerned with the outer course of things, flows from an inner source, and, constantly changing, creates now plastic, now shadowy shapes. This phantastical activity of the ancient mind created artistically par excellence. The object of the interest does not seem to have been to grasp hold of the “how” of the real world as objectively and exactly as possibly, but to æsthetically adapt subjective phantasies and expectations. There was very little place among ancient people for the coldness and disillusion which Giordano Bruno’s thoughts on eternity and Kepler’s discoveries brought to modern humanity. The naïve man of antiquity saw in the sun the great Father of the heaven and the earth, and in the moon the fruitful good Mother. Everything had its demons; they animated equally a human being and his brother, the animal. Everything was considered according to its anthropomorphic or theriomorphic attributes, as human being or animal. Even the disc of the sun was given wings or four feet, in order to illustrate its movement. Thus arose an idea of the universe which was not only very far from reality, but was one which corresponded wholly to subjective phantasies.

We know, from our own experience, this state of mind. It is an infantile stage. To a child the moon is a man or a face or a shepherd of the stars. The clouds in the sky 26seem like little sheep; the dolls drink, eat and sleep; the child places a letter at the window for the Christ-child; he calls to the stork to bring him a little brother or sister; the cow is the wife of the horse, and the dog the husband of the cat. We know, too, that lower races, like the negroes, look upon the locomotive as an animal, and call the drawers of the table the child of the table.

As we learn through Freud, the dream shows a similar type. Since the dream is unconcerned with the real condition of things, it brings the most heterogeneous matter together, and a world of impossibilities takes the place of realities. Freud finds progression characteristic of thinking when awake; that is to say, the advancement of the thought excitation from the system of the inner or outer perception through the “endopsychic” work of association, conscious and unconscious, to the motor end; that is to say, towards innervation. In the dream he finds the reverse, namely, regression of the thought excitation from the preconscious or unconscious to the system of perception, by the means of which the dream receives its ordinary impression of sensuous distinctness, which can rise to an almost hallucinating clearness. The dream thinking moves in a retrograde manner towards the raw material of memory. “The structure of the dream thoughts is dissolved during the progress of regression into its raw material.” The reanimation of the original perception is, however, only one side of regression. The other side is regression to the infantile memory material, which might also be understood as regression to the original perception, but which deserves especial mention 27on account of its independent importance. This regression might, indeed, be considered as “historical.” The dream, according to this conception, might also be described as the substitute of the infantile scene, changed through transference into the recent scene.

The infantile scene cannot carry through its revival; it must be satisfied with its return as a dream. From this conception of the historical side of regression, it follows consequently that the modes of conclusion of the dream, in so far as one may speak of them, must show at the same time an analogous and infantile character. This is truly the case, as experience has abundantly shown, so that to-day every one who is familiar with the subject of dream analysis confirms Freud’s proposition that dreams are a piece of the conquered life of the childish soul. Inasmuch as the childish psychic life is undeniably of an archaic type, this characteristic belongs to the dream in quite an unusual degree. Freud calls our attention to this especially.

“The dream, which fulfils its wishes by a short, regressive path, affords us only an example of the primary method of working of the psychic apparatus, which has been abandoned by us as unsuitable. That which once ruled in the waking state, when the psychical life was still young and impotent, appears to be banished to the dream life, in somewhat the same way as the bow and arrow, those discarded, primitive weapons of adult humanity, have been relegated to the nursery.”^[32]

All this experience suggests to us that we draw a parallel between the phantastical, mythological thinking of antiquity and the similar thinking of children, between 28the lower human races and dreams.^[33] This train of thought is not a strange one for us, but quite familiar through our knowledge of comparative anatomy and the history of development, which show us how the structure and function of the human body are the results of a series of embryonic changes which correspond to similar changes in the history of the race. Therefore, the supposition is justified that ontogenesis corresponds in psychology to phylogenesis. Consequently, it would be true, as well, that the state of infantile thinking in the child’s psychic life, as well as in dreams, is nothing but a re-echo of the prehistoric and the ancient.^[34]

In regard to this, Nietzsche takes a very broad and remarkable standpoint.^[35]

“In our sleep and in our dreams we pass through the whole thought of earlier humanity. I mean, in the same way that man reasons in his dreams, he reasoned when in the waking state many thousands of years. The first causa which occurred to his mind in reference to anything that needed explanation, satisfied him and passed for truth. In the dream this atavistic relic of humanity manifests its existence within us, for it is the foundation upon which the higher rational faculty developed, and which is still developing in every individual. The dream carries us back into earlier states of human culture, and affords us a means of understanding it better. The dream thought is so easy to us now, because we are so thoroughly trained to it through the interminable stages of evolution during which this phantastic and facile form of theorizing has prevailed. To a certain extent the dream is a restorative for the brain, which during the day is called upon to meet the severe demands for trained thought, made by the conditions of a higher civilization.

“From these facts, we can understand how lately more acute logical thinking, the taking seriously of cause and effect, has been 29developed; when our functions of reason and intelligence still reach back involuntarily to those primitive forms of conclusion, and we live about half our lives in this condition.”

We have already seen that Freud, independently of Nietzsche, has reached a similar standpoint from the basis of dream analysis. The step from this established proposition to the perception of the myths as familiar dream images is no longer a great one. Freud has formulated this conclusion himself.^[36]

“The investigation of this folk-psychologic formation, myths, etc., is by no means finished at present. To take an example of this, however, it is probable that the myths correspond to the distorted residue of wish phantasies of whole nations, the secularized dreams of young humanity.”

Rank^[37] understands the myths in a similar manner, as a mass dream of the people.^[38] Riklin^[39] has insisted rightly upon the dream mechanism of the fables, and Abraham^[40] has done the same for the myths. He says:

“The myth is a fragment of the infantile soul-life of the people.”

and

“Thus the myth is a sustained, still remaining fragment from the infantile soul-life of the people, and the dream is the myth of the individual.”

An unprejudiced reading of the above-mentioned authors will certainly allay all doubts concerning the intimate connection between dream psychology and myth psychology. The conclusion results almost from itself, that the age which created the myths thought childishly—that 30is to say, phantastically, as in our age is still done, to a very great extent (associatively or analogically) in dreams. The beginnings of myth formations (in the child), the taking of phantasies for realities, which is partly in accord with the historical, may easily be discovered among children.

One might raise the objection that the mythological inclinations of children are implanted by education. The objection is futile. Has humanity at all ever broken loose from the myths? Every man has eyes and all his senses to perceive that the world is dead, cold and unending, and he has never yet seen a God, nor brought to light the existence of such from empirical necessity. On the contrary, there was need of a phantastic, indestructible optimism, and one far removed from all sense of reality, in order, for example, to discover in the shameful death of Christ really the highest salvation and the redemption of the world. Thus one can indeed withhold from a child the substance of earlier myths but not take from him the need for mythology. One can say, that should it happen that all traditions in the world were cut off with a single blow, then with the succeeding generation, the whole mythology and history of religion would start over again. Only a few individuals succeed in throwing off mythology in a time of a certain intellectual supremacy—the mass never frees itself. Explanations are of no avail; they merely destroy a transitory form of manifestation, but not the creating impulse.

Let us again take up our earlier train of thought.

We spoke of the ontogenetic re-echo of the phylogenetic 31psychology among children, we saw that phantastic thinking is a characteristic of antiquity, of the child, and of the lower races; but now we know also that our modern and adult man is given over in large part to this same phantastic thinking, which enters as soon as the directed thinking ceases. A lessening of the interest, a slight fatigue, is sufficient to put an end to the directed thinking, the exact psychological adaptation to the real world, and to replace it with phantasies. We digress from the theme and give way to our own trains of thought; if the slackening of the attention increases, then we lose by degrees the consciousness of the present, and the phantasy enters into possession of the field.

Here the important question obtrudes itself: How are phantasies created? From the poets we learn much about it; from science we learn little. The psychoanalytic method, presented to science by Freud, shed light upon this for the first time. It showed us that there are typical cycles. The stutterer imagines he is a great orator. The truth of this, Demosthenes, thanks to his energy, has proven. The poor man imagines himself to be a millionaire, the child an adult. The conquered fight out victorious battles with the conquerer; the unfit torments or delights himself with ambitious plans. We imagine that which we lack. The interesting question of the “why” of all this we must here leave unanswered, while we return to the historic problem: From what source do the phantasies draw their materials?^[41] We chose, as an example, a typical phantasy of puberty. A child in that stage before whom the whole frightening 32uncertainty of the future fate opens, puts back the uncertainty into the past, through his phantasy, and says, “If only I were not the child of my ordinary parents, but the child of a rich and fashionable count, and had been merely passed over to my parents, then some day a golden coach would come, and the count would take his child back with him to his wonderful castle,” and so it goes on, as in Grimm’s Fairy Tales which the mother tells to her children.^[42] With a normal child, it stops with the fugitive, quickly-passing idea which is soon covered over and forgotten. However, at one time, and that was in the ancient world of culture, the phantasy was an openly acknowledged institution. The heroes,—I recall Romulus and Remus, Semiramis, Moses and many others,—have been separated from their real parents.^[43] Others are directly sons of gods, and the noble races derive their family trees from heroes and gods. As one sees by this example, the phantasy of modern humanity is nothing but a re-echo of an old-folk-belief, which was very widespread originally.^[44] The ambitious phantasy chooses, among others, a form which is classic, and which once had a true meaning. The same thing holds good in regard to the sexual phantasy. In the preamble we have spoken of dreams of sexual assault: the robber who breaks into the house and commits a dangerous act. That, too, is a mythological theme, and in the prehistoric era was certainly a reality too.^[45] Wholly apart from the fact that the capture of women was something general in the lawless prehistoric times, it was also a subject of mythology in cultivated epochs. I recall the capture of 33Proserpina, Deianira, Europa, the Sabine women, etc. We must not forget that, even to-day, marriage customs exist in various regions which recall the ancient custom of marriage by capture.

The symbolism of the instrument of coitus was an inexhaustible material for ancient phantasy. It furnished a widespread cult that was designated phallic, the object of reverence of which was the phallus. The companion of Dionysus was Phales, a personification of the phallus proceeding from the phallic Herme of Dionysus. The phallic symbols were countless. Among the Sabines, the custom existed for the bridegroom to part the bride’s hair with a lance. The bird, the fish and the snake were phallic symbols. In addition, there existed in enormous quantities theriomorphic representations of the sexual instinct, in connection with which the bull, the he-goat, the ram, the boar and the ass were frequently used. An undercurrent to this choice of symbol was furnished by the sodomitic inclination of humanity. When in the dream phantasy of modern man, the feared man is replaced by an animal, there is recurring in the ontogenetic re-echo the same thing which was openly represented by the ancients countless times. There were he-goats which pursued nymphs, satyrs with she-goats; in still older times in Egypt there even existed a shrine of a goat god, which the Greeks called Pan, where the Hierodules prostituted themselves with goats.^[46] It is well known that this worship has not died out, but continues to live as a special custom in South Italy and Greece.^[47]

To-day we feel for such a thing nothing but the deepest 34abhorrence, and never would admit it still slumbered in our souls. Nevertheless, just as truly as the idea of the sexual assault is there, so are these things there too; which we should contemplate still more closely,—not through moral eye-glasses, with horror, but with interest as a natural science, since these things are venerable relics of past culture periods. We have, even to-day, a clause in our penal code against sodomy. But that which was once so strong as to give rise to a worship among a highly developed people has probably not wholly disappeared from the human soul during the course of a few generations. We may not forget that since the symposium of Plato, in which homo-sexuality faces us on the same level with the so-called “normal sexuality,” only eighty generations have passed. And what are eighty generations? They shrink to an imperceptible period of time when compared with the space of time which separates us from the homo-Neandertalensis or Heidelbergensis. I might call to mind, in this connection, some choice thoughts of the great historian Guglielmo Ferrero:^[48]

“It is a very common belief that the further man is separated from the present by time, the more does he differ from us in his thoughts and feelings; that the psychology of humanity changes from century to century, like fashions of literature. Therefore, no sooner do we find in past history an institution, a custom, a law or a belief a little different from those with which we are familiar, than we immediately search for some complex meanings, which frequently resolve themselves into phrases of doubtful significance.

“Indeed, man does not change so quickly; his psychology at bottom remains the same, and even if his culture varies much from one epoch to another, it does not change the functioning of his mind. The fundamental laws of the mind remain the same, at 35least during the short historical period of which we have knowledge, and all phenomena, even the most strange, must be capable of explanation by those common laws of the mind which we can recognize in ourselves.”

The psychologist should accept this viewpoint without reservation as peculiarly applicable to himself. To-day, indeed, in our civilization the phallic processions, the Dionysian mysteries of classical Athens, the barefaced Phallic emblems, have disappeared from our coins, houses, temples and streets; so also have the theriomorphic representations of the Deity been reduced to small remnants, like the Dove of the Holy Ghost, the Lamb of God and the Cock of Peter adorning our church towers. In the same way, the capture and violation of women have shrunken away to crimes. Yet all of this does not affect the fact that we, in childhood, go through a period in which the impulses toward these archaic inclinations appear again and again, and that through all our life we possess, side by side with the newly recruited, directed and adapted thought, a phantastic thought which corresponds to the thought of the centuries of antiquity and barbarism. Just as our bodies still keep the reminders of old functions and conditions in many old-fashioned organs, so our minds, too, which apparently have outgrown those archaic tendencies, nevertheless bear the marks of the evolution passed through, and the very ancient re-echoes, at least dreamily, in phantasies.

The symbolism which Freud has discovered, is revealed as an expression of a thinking and of an impulse limited to the dream, to wrong conduct, and to derangements 36of the mind, which form of thinking and impulse at one time ruled as the mightiest influence in past culture epochs.

The question of whence comes the inclination and ability which enables the mind to express itself symbolically, brings us to the distinction between the two kinds of thinking—the directed and adapted on one hand, and the subjective, fed by our own egotistic wishes, on the other. The latter form of thinking, presupposing that it were not constantly corrected by the adapted thinking, must necessarily produce an overwhelmingly subjectively distorted idea of the world. We regard this state of mind as infantile. It lies in our individual past, and in the past of mankind.

With this we affirm the important fact that man in his phantastic thinking has kept a condensation of the psychic history of his development. An extraordinarily important task, which even to-day is hardly possible, is to give a systematic description of phantastic thinking. One may, at the most, sketch it. While directed thinking is a phenomenon conscious throughout,^[49] the same cannot be asserted of phantastic thinking. Doubtless, a great part of it still falls entirely in the realm of the conscious, but, at least, just as much goes along in half shadows, and generally an undetermined amount in the unconscious; and this can, therefore, be disclosed only indirectly.^[50] By means of phantastic thinking, directed thinking is connected with the oldest foundations of the human mind, which have been for a long time beneath the threshold of the consciousness. The products of this phantastic 37thinking arising directly from the consciousness are, first, waking dreams, or day-dreams, to which Freud, Flournoy, Pick and others have given special attention; then the dreams which offer to the consciousness, at first, a mysterious exterior, and win meaning only through the indirectly inferred unconscious contents. Lastly, there is a so-called wholly unconscious phantasy system in the split-off complex, which exhibits a pronounced tendency towards the production of a dissociated personality.^[51]

Our foregoing explanations show wherein the products arising from the unconscious are related to the mythical. From all these signs it may be concluded that the soul possesses in some degree historical strata, the oldest stratum of which would correspond to the unconscious. The result of that must be that an introversion occurring in later life, according to the Freudian teaching, seizes upon regressive infantile reminiscences taken from the individual past. That first points out the way; then, with stronger introversion and regression (strong repressions, introversion psychoses), there come to light pronounced traits of an archaic mental kind which, under certain circumstances, might go as far as the re-echo of a once manifest, archaic mental product.

This problem deserves to be more thoroughly discussed. As a concrete example, let us take the history of the pious Abbé Oegger which Anatole France has communicated to us.^[52] This priest was a hypercritical man, and much given to phantasies, especially in regard to one question, viz., the fate of Judas; whether he was 38really damned, as the teaching of the church asserts, to everlasting punishment, or whether God had pardoned him after all. Oegger sided with the intelligent point of view that God, in his all-wisdom, had chosen Judas as an instrument, in order to bring about the highest point of the work of redemption by Christ.^[53] This necessary instrument, without the help of which the human race would not have been a sharer in salvation, could not possibly be damned by the all-good God. In order to put an end to his doubts, Oegger went one night to the church, and made supplication for a sign that Judas was saved. Then he felt a heavenly touch upon his shoulder. Following this, Oegger told the Archbishop of his resolution to go out into the world to preach God’s unending mercy.

Here we have a richly developed phantasy system before us. It is concerned with the subtle and perpetually undecided question as to whether the legendary figure of Judas is damned or not. The Judas legend is, in itself, mythical material, viz., the malicious betrayal of a hero. I recall Siegfried and Hagen, Balder and Loki. Siegfried and Balder were murdered by a faithless traitor from among their closest associates. This myth is moving and tragic—it is not honorable battle which kills the noble, but evil treachery. It is, too, an occurrence which is historical over and over again. One thinks of Cæsar and Brutus. Since the myth of such a deed is very old, and still the subject of teaching and repetition, it is the expression of a psychological fact, that envy does not allow humanity to sleep, and that all of us carry, in a 39hidden recess of our heart, a deadly wish towards the hero. This rule can be applied generally to mythical tradition. It does not set forth any account of the old events, but rather acts in such a way that it always reveals a thought common to humanity, and once more rejuvenated. Thus, for example, the lives and deeds of the founders of old religions are the purest condensations of typical, contemporaneous myths, behind which the individual figure entirely disappears.^[54]

But why does our pious Abbé torment himself with the old Judas legend? He first went into the world to preach the gospel of mercy, and then, after some time, he separated from the Catholic church and became a Swedenborgian. Now we understand his Judas phantasy. He was the Judas who betrayed his Lord. Therefore, first of all, he had to make sure of the divine mercy, in order to be Judas in peace.

This case throws a light upon the mechanism of the phantasies in general. The known, conscious phantasy may be of mythical or other material; it is not to be taken seriously as such, for it has an indirect meaning. If we take it, however, as important per se, then the thing is not understandable, and makes one despair of the efficiency of the mind. But we saw, in the case of Abbé Oegger, that his doubts and his hopes did not turn upon the historical problem of Judas, but upon his own personality, which wished to win a way to freedom for itself through the solution of the Judas problem.

The conscious phantasies tell us of mythical or other material of undeveloped or no longer recognized wish 40tendencies in the soul. As is easily to be understood, an innate tendency, an acknowledgment of which one refuses to make, and which one treats as non-existent, can hardly contain a thing that may be in accord with our conscious character. It concerns the tendencies which are considered immoral, and as generally impossible, and the strongest resentment is felt towards bringing them into the consciousness. What would Oegger have said had he been told confidentially that he was preparing himself for the Judas rôle? And what in ourselves do we consider immoral and non-existent, or which we at least wish were non-existent? It is that which in antiquity lay widespread on the surface, viz., sexuality in all its various manifestations. Therefore, we need not wonder in the least when we find this at the base of most of our phantasies, even if the phantasies have a different appearance. Because Oegger found the damnation of Judas incompatible with God’s goodness, he thought about the conflict in that way; that is the conscious sequence. Along with this is the unconscious sequence; because Oegger himself wished to be a Judas, he first made sure of the goodness of God. To Oegger, Judas was the symbol of his own unconscious tendency, and he made use of this symbol in order to be able to meditate over his unconscious wish. The direct coming into consciousness of the Judas wish would have been too painful for him. Thus, there must be typical myths which are really the instruments of a folk-psychological complex treatment. Jacob Burckhardt seems to have suspected this when he once said that every Greek of the classical era carried in himself 41a fragment of the Oedipus, just as every German carries a fragment of Faust.^[55]

The problem which the simple story of the Abbé Oegger has brought clearly before us confronts us again when we prepare to examine phantasies which owe their existence this time to an exclusively unconscious work. We are indebted for the material which we will use in the following chapters to the useful publication of an American woman, Miss Frank Miller, who has given to the world some poetical unconsciously formed phantasies under the title, “Quelque faits d’imagination créatrice subconsciente.”—Vol. V., Archives de Psychologie, 1906.^[56]

We know, from much psychoanalytic experience, that whenever one recounts his phantasies or his dreams, he deals not only with the most important and intimate of his problems, but with the one the most painful at that moment.^[57]

Since in the case of Miss Miller we have to do with a complicated system, we must give our attention carefully to the particulars which I will discuss, following as best I can Miss Miller’s presentation.

In the first chapter, “Phénomènes de suggestion passagère ou d’autosuggestion instantanée,” Miss Miller gives a list of examples of her unusual suggestibility, which she herself considers as a symptom of her nervous temperament; for example, she is excessively fond of caviar, whereas some of her relatives loathe it. However, as soon as any one expresses his loathing, she herself feels momentarily the same loathing. I do not need to emphasize especially the fact that such examples are very important in individual psychology; that caviar is a food for which nervous women frequently have an especial predilection, is a fact well known to the psychoanalyst.

Miss Miller has an extraordinary faculty for taking 43other people’s feelings upon herself, and of identification; for example, she identifies herself to such a degree in “Cyrano” with the wounded Christian de Neuvillette, that she feels in her own breast a truly piercing pain at that place where Christian received the deadly blow.

From the viewpoint of analytic psychology, the theatre, aside from any esthetic value, may be considered as an institution for the treatment of the mass complex. The enjoyment of the comedy, or of the dramatic plot ending happily is produced by an unreserved identification of one’s own complexes with the play. The enjoyment of tragedy lies in the thrilling yet satisfactory feeling that something which might occur to one’s self is happening to another. The sympathy of our author with the dying Christian means that there is in her a complex awaiting a similar solution, which whispers softly to her “hodie tibi, cras mihi,” and that one may know exactly what is considered the effectual moment Miss Miller adds that she felt a pain in her breast, “Lorsque Sarah Bernhardt se précipite sur lui pour étancher le sang de sa blessure.” Therefore the effectual moment is when the love between Christian and Roxane comes to a sudden end.

If we glance over the whole of Rostand’s play, we come upon certain moments, the effect of which one cannot easily escape and which we will emphasize here because they have meaning for all that follows. Cyrano de Bergerac, with the long ugly nose, on account of which he undertakes countless duels, loves Roxane, who, for her part unaware of it, loves Christian, because of the beautiful verses which really originate from Cyrano’s 44pen, but which apparently come from Christian. Cyrano is the misunderstood one, whose passionate love and noble soul no one suspects; the hero who sacrifices himself for others, and, dying, just in the evening of life, reads to her once more Christian’s last letter, the verses which he himself had composed.

Whereupon Roxane recognizes in him the real loved one. It is already too late; death comes; and in agonized delirium, Cyrano raises himself, and draws his sword:

Cyrano, who under the hateful exterior of his body hid a soul so much more beautiful, is a yearner and one misunderstood, and his last triumph is that he departs, at least, with a clean shield—“Sans un pli et sans une tache.” The identification of the author with the dying Christian, who in himself is a figure but little impressive and sympathetic, expresses clearly that a sudden end is destined for her love just as for Christian’s love. The tragic intermezzo with Christian, however, is played as we have seen upon a background of much wider significance, viz., the misunderstood love of Cyrano for Roxane. Therefore, the identification with Christian has only the significance of a substitute memory (“deckerinnerung”), and is really intended for Cyrano. That this is just what we might expect will be seen in the further course of our analysis.

Besides this story of identification with Christian, there follows as a further example an extraordinarily plastic 46memory of the sea, evoked by the sight of a photograph of a steamboat on the high seas. (“Je sentis les pulsations des machines, le soulèvement des vagues, le balancement du navire.”)

We may mention here the supposition that there are connected with sea journeys particularly impressive and strong memories which penetrate deeply into the soul and give an especially strong character to the surface memories through unconscious harmony. To what extent the memories assumed here agree with the above mentioned problem we shall see in the following pages.

This example, following at this time, is singular: Once, while in bathing, Miss Miller wound a towel around her hair, in order to protect it from a wetting. At the same moment she had the following strong impression:

“Il me sembla que j’étais sur un piédestal, une véritable statue égyptienne, avec tous ses détails: membres raides, un pied en avant, la main tenant des insignes,” and so on.

Miss Miller identified herself, therefore, with an Egyptian statue, and naturally the foundation for this was a subjective pretension. That is to say, “I am like an Egyptian statue, just as stiff, wooden, sublime and impassive,” qualities for which the Egyptian statue is proverbial. One does not make such an assertion to one’s self without an inner compulsion, and the correct formula might just as well be, “as stiff, wooden, etc., as an Egyptian statue I might indeed be.” The sight of one’s own unclothed body in a bath has undeniable effects for the phantasy, which can be set at rest by the above formula.^[58]

47The example which follows this, emphasizes the author’s personal influence upon an artist:

“J’ai réussi à lui faire rendre des paysages, comme ceux du lac Léman, où il n’a jamais été, et il prétendait que je pouvais lui faire rendre des choses qu’il n’avait jamais vues, et lui donner la sensation d’une atmosphère ambiante qu’il n’avait jamais sentie; bref que je me servais de lui comme lui-même se servait de son crayon, c’est à dire comme d’un simple instrument.”

This observation stands in abrupt contrast to the phantasy of the Egyptian statue. Miss Miller had here the unspoken need of emphasizing her almost magic effect upon another person. This could not have happened, either, without an unconscious need, which is particularly felt by one who does not often succeed in making an emotional impression upon a fellow being.

With that, the list of examples which are to picture Miss Miller’s autosuggestibility and suggestive effect, is exhausted. In this respect, the examples are neither especially striking nor interesting. From an analytical viewpoint, on the contrary, they are much more important, since they afford us a glance into the soul of the writer. Ferenczi^[59] has taught us in an excellent work what is to be thought about suggestibility, that is to say, that these phenomena win new aspects in the light of the Freudian libido theory, in so much as their effects become clear through “Libido-besetzungen.” This was already indicated above in the discussion of the examples, and in the greatest detail regarding the identification with Christian. The identification becomes effective by its receiving an influx of energy from the strongly accentuated 48thought and emotional feeling underlying the Christian motif. Just the reverse is the suggestive effect of the individual in an especial capacity for concentrating interest (that is to say, libido) upon another person, by which the other is unconsciously compelled to reaction (the same or opposed). The majority of the examples concern cases where Miss Miller is put under the effects of suggestion; that is to say, when the libido has spontaneously gained possession of certain impressions, and this is impossible if the libido is dammed up to an unusual degree by the lack of application to reality. Miss Miller’s observations about suggestibility inform us, therefore, of the fact that the author is pleased to tell us in her following phantasies something of the history of her love.

The second chapter in Miss Miller’s work is entitled, “Gloire à Dieu. Poème onirique.”

When twenty years of age, Miss Miller took a long journey through Europe. We leave the description of it to her:

“After a long and rough journey from New York to Stockholm, from there to Petersburg and Odessa, I found it a true pleasure^[60] to leave the world of inhabited cities—and to enter the world of waves, sky and silence—I stayed hours long on deck to dream, stretched out in a reclining chair. The histories, legends and myths of the different countries which I saw in the distance, came back to me indistinctly blended together in a sort of luminous mist, in which things lost their reality, while the dreams and thoughts alone took on somewhat the appearance of reality. At first, I even avoided all company and kept to myself, lost wholly in my dreams, where all that I knew of great, beautiful and good came back into my consciousness with new strength and new life. I also employed a great part of my time writing to my distant friends, reading and sketching out short poems about the regions visited. Some of these poems were of a very serious character.”

It may seem superfluous, perhaps, to enter intimately into all these details. If we recall, however, the remark made above,—that when people let their unconscious speak, they always tell us the most important things of 50their intimate selves—then even the smallest detail appears to have meaning. Valuable personalities invariably tell us, through their unconscious, things that are generally valuable, so that patient interest is rewarded.

Miss Miller describes here a state of “introversion.” After the life of the cities with their many impressions had been absorbing her interest (with that already discussed strength of suggestion which powerfully enforced the impression) she breathed freely upon the ocean, and after so many external impressions, became engrossed wholly in the internal with intentional abstraction from the surroundings, so that things lost their reality and dreams became truth. We know from psychopathology that certain mental disturbances^[61] exist which are first manifested by the individuals shutting themselves off slowly, more and more, from reality and sinking into their phantasies, during which process, in proportion as the reality loses its hold, the inner world gains in reality and determining power.^[62] This process leads to a certain point (which varies with the individual) when the patients suddenly become more or less conscious of their separation from reality. The event which then enters is the pathological excitation: that is to say, the patients begin to turn towards the environment, with diseased views (to be sure) which, however, still represent the compensating, although unsuccessful, attempt at transference.^[63] The methods of reaction are, naturally, very different. I will not concern myself more closely about this here.

This type appears to be generally a psychological rule 51which holds good for all neuroses and, therefore, also for the normal in a much less degree. We might, therefore, expect that Miss Miller, after this energetic and persevering introversion, which had even encroached for a time upon the feeling of reality, would succumb anew to an impression of the real world and also to just as suggestive and energetic an influence as that of her dreams. Let us proceed with the narrative:

“But as the journey drew to an end, the ship’s officers outdid themselves in kindness (tout ce qu’il y a de plus empressé et de plus aimable) and I passed many amusing hours teaching them English. On the Sicilian coast, in the harbor of Catania, I wrote a sailor’s song which was very similar to a song well known on the sea, (Brine, wine and damsels fine). The Italians in general all sing very well, and one of the officers who sang on deck during night watch, had made a great impression upon me and had given me the idea of writing some words adapted to his melody. Soon after that, I was very nearly obliged to reverse the well-known saying, ‘Veder Napoli e poi morir,’—that is to say, suddenly I became very ill, although not dangerously so. I recovered to such an extent, however, that I could go on land to visit the sights of the city in a carriage. This day tired me very much, and since we had planned to see Pisa the following day, I went on board early in the evening and soon lay down to sleep without thinking of anything more serious than the beauty of the officers and the ugliness of the Italian beggars.”

One is somewhat disappointed at meeting here, instead of the expected impression of reality, rather a small intermezzo, a flirtation. Nevertheless, one of the officers, the singer, had made a great impression (il m’avait fait beaucoup d’impression). The remark at the close of the description, “sans songer à rien de plus sérieux qu’à la 52beauté des officiers,” and so on, diminishes the seriousness of the impression, it is true. The assumption, however, that the impression openly influenced the mood very much, is supported by the fact that a poem upon a subject of such an erotic character came forth immediately, “Brine, wine and damsels fine,” and in the singer’s honor. One is only too easily inclined to take such an impression lightly, and one admits so gladly the statements of the participators when they represent everything as simple and not at all serious. I dwell upon this impression at length, because it is important to know that an erotic impression after such an introversion, has a deep effect and is undervalued, possibly, by Miss Miller. The suddenly passing sickness is obscure and needs a psychologic interpretation which cannot be touched upon here because of lack of data. The phenomena now to be described can only be explained as arising from a disturbance which reaches to the very depths of her being.

“From Naples to Livorno, the ship travelled for a night, during which I slept more or less well,—my sleep, however, is seldom deep or dreamless. It seemed to me as if my mother’s voice wakened me, just at the end of the following dream. At first I had a vague conception of the words, ‘When the morning stars sang together,’ which were the praeludium of a certain confused representation of creation and of the mighty chorals resounding through the universe. In spite of the strange, contradictory and confused character which is peculiar to the dream, there was mingled in it the chorus of an oratorio which has been given by one of the foremost musical societies of New York, and with that were also memories of Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost.’ Then from out of this whirl, there slowly emerged certain words, which arranged themselves into three strophes and, indeed, they seemed 53to be in my own handwriting on ordinary blue-lined writing paper on a page of my old poetry book which I always carried around with me; in short, they appeared to me exactly as some minutes later they were in reality in my book.”

Miss Miller now wrote down the following poem, which she rearranged somewhat a few months later, to make it more nearly, in her opinion, like the dream original.

Before we enter upon Miss Miller’s attempt to bring to light through her suppositions^[64] the root of this subliminal creation, we will attempt a short analytic survey of the material already in our possession. The impression on the ship has already been properly emphasized, so that we need have no further difficulty in gaining possession of the dynamic process which brought about this poetical revelation. It was made clear in the preceding 54paragraphs that Miss Miller possibly had not inconsiderably undervalued the importance of the erotic impression. This assumption gains in probability through experience, which shows that, very generally, relatively weak erotic impressions are greatly undervalued. One can see this best in cases where those concerned, either from social or moral grounds, consider an erotic relation as something quite impossible; for example, parents and children, brothers and sisters, relations (homosexual) between older and younger men, and so on. If the impression is relatively slight, then it does not exist at all for the participators; if the impression is strong, then a tragic dependence arises, which may result in some great nonsense, or be carried to any extent. This lack of understanding can go unbelievably far; mothers, who see the first erections of the small son in their own bed, a sister who half-playfully embraces her brother, a twenty-year-old daughter who still seats herself on her father’s lap, and then has “strange” sensations in her “abdomen.” They are all morally indignant to the highest degree if one speaks of “sexuality.” Finally, our whole education is carried on with the tacit agreement to know as little as possible of the erotic, and to spread abroad the deepest ignorance in regard to it. It is no wonder, therefore, that the judgment, in puncto, of the importance of an erotic impression is generally unsafe and inadequate.

Miss Miller was under the influence of a deep erotic impression, as we have seen. Because of the sum-total of the feelings aroused by this, it does not seem that this impression was more than dimly realized, for the dream 55had to contain a powerful repetition. From analytic experience, one knows that the early dreams which patients bring for analysis are none the less of especial interest, because of the fact that they bring out criticisms and valuations of the physician’s personality, which previously, would have been asked for directly in vain. They enrich the conscious impression which the patient had of his physician, and often concerning very important points. They are naturally erotic observations which the unconscious was forced to make, just because of the quite universal undervaluation and uncertain judgment of the relatively weak erotic impression. In the drastic and hyperbolic manner of expression of the dream, the impression often appears in almost unintelligible form on account of the immeasurable dimension of the symbol. A further peculiarity which seems to rest upon the historic strata of the unconscious, is this—that an erotic impression, to which conscious acknowledgment is denied, usurps an earlier and discarded transference and expresses itself in that. Therefore, it frequently happens, for example, that among young girls at the time of their first love, remarkable difficulties develop in the capacity for erotic expression, which may be reduced analytically to disturbances through a regressive attempt at resuscitation of the father image, or the “Father-Imago.”^[65]

Indeed, one might presume something similar in Miss Miller’s case, for the idea of the masculine creative deity is a derivation, analytically and historically psychologic, of the “Father-Imago,”^[66] and aims, above all, to replace the discarded infantile father transference in such a way 56that for the individual the passing from the narrow circle of the family into the wider circle of human society may be simpler or made easier.

In the light of this reflection, we can see, in the poem and its “Praeludium,” the religious, poetically formed product of an introversion depending upon the surrogate of the “Father-Imago.” In spite of the incomplete apperception of the effectual impression, essential component parts of this are included in the idea of compensation, as marks, so to speak, of its origin. (Pfister has coined for this the striking expression, “Law of the Return of the Complex.”) The effectual impression was that of the officer singing in the night watch, “When the morning stars sang together.” The idea of this opened a new world to the girl. (Creation.)

This creator has created tone, then light, and then love. That the first to be created should have been tone, can be made clear only individually, for there is no cosmogony except the Gnosis of Hermes, a generally quite unknown system, which would have such tendencies. But now we might venture a conjecture, which is already apparent, and which soon will be proven thoroughly, viz., the following chain of associations: the singer—the singing morning stars—the God of tone—the Creator—the God of Light—(of the sun)—(of the fire)—and of Love.

The links of this chain are proven by the material, with the exception of sun and fire, which I put in parentheses, but which, however, will be proven through what follows in the further course of the analysis. All of these expressions, with one exception, belong to erotic speech. (“My 57God, star, light; my sun, fire of love, fiery love,” etc.) “Creator” appears indistinct at first, but becomes understandable through the reference to the undertone of Eros, to the vibrating chord of Nature, which attempts to renew itself in every pair of lovers, and awaits the wonder of creation.

Miss Miller had taken pains to disclose the unconscious creation of her mind to her understanding, and, indeed through a procedure which agrees in principle with psychoanalysis, and, therefore, leads to the same results as psychoanalysis. But, as usually happens with laymen and beginners, Miss Miller, because she had no knowledge of psychoanalysis, left off at the thoughts which necessarily bring the deep complex lying at the bottom of it to light in an indirect, that is to say, censored manner. More than this, a simple method, merely the carrying out of the thought to its conclusion, is sufficient to discover the meaning. Miss Miller finds it astonishing that her unconscious phantasy does not, following the Mosaic account of creation, put light in the first place, instead of tone.

Now follows an explanation, theoretically constructed and correct ad hoc, the hollowness of which is, however, characteristic of all similar attempts at explanation. She says:

“It is perhaps interesting to recall that Anaxagoras also had the Cosmos arise out of chaos through a sort of whirlwind, which does not happen usually without producing sound.^[67] But at this time I had studied no philosophy, and knew nothing either of Anaxagoras or of his theories about the ‘νοῦς,’ which I, unconsciously, was openly following. At that time, also, I was equally 58in complete ignorance of Leibnitz, and, therefore, knew nothing of his doctrine ‘dum Deus calculat, fit mundus.’”

Miss Miller’s references to Anaxagoras and to Leibnitz both refer to creation by means of thought; that is to say, that divine thought alone could bring forth a new material reality, a reference at first not intelligible, but which will soon, however, be more easily understood.

We now come to those fancies from which Miss Miller principally drew her unconscious creation.

“In the first place, there is the ‘Paradise Lost’ by Milton, which we had at home in the edition illustrated by Doré, and which had often delighted me from childhood. Then the ‘Book of Job,’ which had been read aloud to me since the time of my earliest recollection. Moreover, if one compares the first words of ‘Paradise Lost’ with my first verse, one notices that there is the same verse measure.

“My poem also recalls various passages in Job, and one or two places in Handel’s Oratorio ‘The Creation,’ which came out very indistinctly in the first part of the dream.”^[68]

The “Lost Paradise” which, as is well known, is so closely connected with the beginning of the world, is made more clearly evident by the verse—

“Of man’s first disobedience”

which is concerned evidently with the fall, the meaning of which need not be shown any further. I know the objection which every one unacquainted with psychoanalysis will raise, viz., that Miss Miller might just as well have chosen any other verse as an example, and that, accidentally, she had taken the first one that happened 59to appear which had this content, also accidentally. As is well known, the criticism which we hear equally from our medical colleagues, and from our patients, is generally based on such arguments. This misunderstanding arises from the fact that the law of causation in the psychical sphere is not taken seriously enough; that is to say, there are no accidents, no “just as wells.” It is so, and there is, therefore, a sufficient reason at hand why it is so. It is moreover true that Miss Miller’s poem is connected with the fall, wherein just that erotic component comes forth, the existence of which we have surmised above.

Miss Miller neglects to tell which passages in Job occurred to her mind. These, unfortunately, are therefore only general suppositions. Take first, the analogy to the Lost Paradise. Job lost all that he had, and this was due to an act of Satan, who wished to incite him against God. In the same way mankind, through the temptation of the serpent, lost Paradise, and was plunged into earth’s torments. The idea, or rather the mood which is expressed by the reference to the Lost Paradise, is Miss Miller’s feeling that she had lost something which was connected with satanic temptation. To her it happened, just as to Job, that she suffered innocently, for she did not fall a victim to temptation. Job’s sufferings are not understood by his friends;^[69] no one knows that Satan has taken a hand in the game, and that Job is truly innocent. Job never tires of avowing his innocence. Is there a hint in that? We know that certain neurotic and especially mentally diseased people continually defend 60their innocence against non-existent attacks; however, one discovers at a closer examination that the patient, while he apparently defends his innocence without reason, fulfils with that a “Deckhandlung,” the energy for which arises from just those impulses, whose sinful character is revealed by the contents of the pretended reproach and calumny.^[70]

Job suffered doubly, on one side through the loss of his fortune, on the other through the lack of understanding in his friends; the latter can be seen throughout the book. The suffering of the misunderstood recalls the figure of Cyrano de Bergerac—he too suffered doubly, on one side through hopeless love, on the other side through misunderstanding. He falls, as we have seen, in the last hopeless battle against “Le Mensonge, les Compromis, les Préjugés, les Lâchetés et la Sottise.—Oui, Vous m’arrachez tout le laurier et la rose!”

Job laments

The analogy of feeling lies in the suffering of the hopeless struggle against the more powerful. It is as if this conflict were accompanied from afar by the sounds of 61“creation,” which brings up a beautiful and mysterious image belonging to the unconscious, and which has not yet forced its way up to the light of the upper world. We surmise, rather than know, that this battle has really something to do with creation, with the struggles between negations and affirmations. The references to Rostand’s “Cyrano” through the identification with Christian, to Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” to the sorrows of Job, misunderstood by his friends, betray plainly that in the soul of the poet something was identified with these ideas. She also has suffered like Cyrano and Job, has lost paradise, and dreams of “creation,”—creation by means of thought—fruition through the whirlwind of Anaxagoras.^[71]

We once more submit ourselves to Miss Miller’s guidance:

“I remember that when fifteen years old, I was once very much stirred up over an article, read aloud to me by my mother, concerning the idea which spontaneously produced its object. I was so excited that I could not sleep all night because of thinking over and over again what that could mean.

“From the age of nine to sixteen, I went every Sunday to a Presbyterian Church, in charge of which, at that time, was a very cultured minister. In one of the earliest memories which I have retained of him, I see myself as a very small girl sitting in a very large pew, continually endeavoring to keep myself awake and pay attention, without in the least being able to understand what he meant when he spoke to us of Chaos, Cosmos and the Gift of Love (don d’amour).”

There are also rather early memories of the awakening of puberty (nine to sixteen) which have connected the idea of the cosmos springing from chaos with the 62“don d’amour.” The medium in which these associations occur is the memory of a certain very much honored ecclesiastic who spoke those dark words. From the same period of time comes the remembrance of that excitement about the idea of the “creative thought” which from itself “produced its object.” Here are two ways of creation intimated: the creative thought, and the mysterious reference to the “don d’amour.”

At the time when I had not yet understood the nature of psychoanalysis, I had a fortunate opportunity of winning through continual observation a deep insight into the soul of a fifteen-year-old girl. Then I discovered, with astonishment, what the contents of the unconscious phantasies are, and how far removed they are from those which a girl of that age shows outwardly. There are wide-reaching phantasies of truly mythical fruitfulness. The girl was, in the split-off phantasy, the race-mother of uncounted peoples.^[72] If we deduct the poetically spoken phantasy of the girl, elements are left which at that age are common to all girls, for the unconscious content is to an infinitely greater degree common to all mankind than the content of the individual consciousness. For it is the condensation of that which is historically the average and ordinary.

Miss Miller’s problem at this age was the common human problem: “How am I to be creative?” Nature knows but one answer to that: “Through the child (don d’amour!).” “But how is the child attained?” Here the terrifying problem emerges, which, as our analytic experience shows, is connected with the father,^[73] where 63it cannot be solved; because the original sin of incest weighs heavily for all time upon the human race. The strong and natural love which binds the child to the father, turns away in those years during which the humanity of the father would be all too plainly recognized, to the higher forms of the father, to the “Fathers” of the church, and to the Father God,^[74] visibly represented by them, and in that there lies still less possibility of solving the problem. However, mythology is not lacking in consolations. Has not the logos become flesh too? Has not the divine pneuma, even the logos, entered the Virgin’s womb and lived among us as the son of man? That whirlwind of Anaxagoras was precisely the divine νοῦς which from out of itself has become the world. Why do we cherish the image of the Virgin Mother even to this day? Because it is always comforting and says without speech or noisy sermon to the one seeking comfort, “I too have become a mother,”—through the “idea which spontaneously produces its object.”

I believe that there is foundation enough at hand for a sleepless night, if those phantasies peculiar to the age of puberty were to become possessed of this idea—the results would be immeasurable! All that is psychologic has an under and an over meaning, as is expressed in the profound remark of the old mystic: οὐρανὸς ἄνο, οὐρανὸς κάτο, αἰθέρα ἄνο, αἰθέρα κάτο, πᾶν τοῦτο ἄνο, πᾶν τοῦτο κάτο, τοῦτο λαβὲ καὶ εὐτυχει^[75]—

64We would show but slight justice, however, to the intellectual originality of our author, if we were satisfied to trace back the commotion of that sleepless night absolutely and entirely to the sexual problem in a narrow sense. That would be but one-half, and truly, to make use of the mystic’s expression, only the under half. The other half is the intellectual sublimation, which strives to make true in its own way the ambiguous expression of “the idea which produces its object spontaneously,”—ideal creation in place of the real.

In such an intellectual accomplishment of an evidently very capable personality, the prospect of a spiritual fruitfulness is something which is worthy of the highest aspiration, since for many it will become a necessity of life. Also this side of the phantasy explains, to a great extent, the excitement, for it is a thought with a presentiment of the future; one of those thoughts which arise, to use one of Maeterlinck’s expressions,^[76] from the “inconscient supérieur,” that “prospective potency” of subliminal combinations.^[77]

I have had the opportunity of observing certain cases of neuroses of years’ duration, in which, at the time of the beginning of the illness or shortly before, a dream occurred, often of visionary clarity. This impressed itself inextinguishably upon the memory, and in analysis revealed a hidden meaning to the patient which anticipated the subsequent events of life; that is to say, their psychologic meaning.^[78] I am inclined to grant this meaning to the commotion of that restless night, because the resulting events of life, in so far as Miss Miller consciously 65and unconsciously unveils them to us, are entirely of a nature to confirm the supposition that that moment is to be considered as the inception and presentiment of a sublimated aim in life.

Miss Miller concludes the list of her fancies with the following remarks:

“The dream seemed to me to come from a mixture of the representation of ‘Paradise Lost,’ ‘Job,’ and ‘Creation,’ with ideas such as ‘thought which spontaneously produces its object’: ‘the gift of love,’ ‘chaos, and cosmos.’”

In the same way as colored splinters of glass are combined in a kaleidoscope, in her mind fragments of philosophy, æsthetics and religion would seem to be combined—

“under the stimulating influence of the journey, and the countries hurriedly seen, combined with the great silence and the indescribable charm of the sea. ‘Ce ne fut que cela et rien de plus.’ ‘Only this, and nothing more!’”

With these words, Miss Miller shows us out, politely and energetically. Her parting words in her negation, confirmed over again in English, leave behind a curiosity; viz., what position is to be negated by these words? “Ce ne fut que cela et rien de plus”—that is to say, really, only “le charme impalpable de la mer”—and the young man who sang melodiously during the night watch is long since forgotten, and no one is to know, least of all the dreamer, that he was a morning star, who came before the creation of a new day.^[79] One should take care lest he satisfy himself and the reader with a sentence such as “ce ne fut que cela.” Otherwise, it might immediately 66happen that one would become disturbed again. This occurs to Miss Miller too, since she allowed an English quotation to follow,—“Only this, and nothing more,” without giving the source, it is true. The quotation comes from an unusually effective poem, “The Raven” by Poe. The line referred to occurs in the following:

The spectral raven knocks nightly at his door and reminds the poet of his irrevocably lost “Lenore.” The raven’s name is “Nevermore,” and as a refrain to every verse he croaks his horrible “Nevermore.” Old memories come back tormentingly, and the spectre repeats inexorably “Nevermore.” The poet seeks in vain to frighten away the dismal guest; he calls to the raven:

That quotation, which, apparently, skips lightly over the situation, “Only this, and nothing more,” comes from a text which depicts in an affecting manner the despair over the lost Lenore. That quotation also misleads our poet in the most striking manner. Therefore, she undervalues 67the erotic impression and the wide-reaching effect of the commotion caused by it. It is this undervaluation, which Freud has formulated more precisely as “repression,” which is the reason why the erotic problem does not attain directly conscious treatment, and from this there arise “these psychologic riddles.” The erotic impression works in the unconscious, and, in its stead, pushes symbols forth into consciousness. Thus, one plays hide-and-seek with one’s self. First, it is “the morning stars which sing together”; then “Paradise Lost”; then the erotic yearning clothes itself in an ecclesiastical dress and utters dark words about “World Creation” and finally rises into a religious hymn to find there, at last, a way out into freedom, a way against which the censor of the moral personality can oppose nothing more. The hymn contains in its own peculiar character the marks of its origin. It thus has fulfilled itself—the “Law of the Return of the Complex.” The night singer, in this circuitous manner of the old transference to the Father-Priest, has become the “Eternal,” the “Creator,” the God of Tone, of Light, of Love.

The indirect course of the libido seems to be a way of sorrow; at least “Paradise Lost” and the parallel reference to Job lead one to that conclusion. If we take, in addition to this, the introductory intimation of the identification with Christian, which we see concludes with Cyrano, then we are furnished with material which pictures the indirect course of the libido as truly a way of sorrow. It is the same as when mankind, after the sinful fall, had the burden of the earthly life to bear, or like 68the tortures of Job, who suffered under the power of Satan and of God, and who himself, without suspecting it, became a plaything of the superhuman forces which we no longer consider as metaphysical, but as metapsychological. Faust also offers us the same exhibition of God’s wager.

Mephistopheles:

Satan:

But put forth thine hand now, and touch all that he hath, and he will curse thee to thy face.—Job i: 11.

While in Job the two great tendencies are characterized simply as good and bad, the problem in Faust is a pronouncedly erotic one; viz., the battle between sublimation and eros, in which the Devil is strikingly characterized through the fitting rôle of the erotic tempter. The erotic is lacking in Job; at the same time Job is not conscious of the conflict within his own soul; he even continuously disputes the arguments of his friends who wish to convince him of evil in his own heart. To this extent, one might say that Faust is considerably more honorable since he openly confesses to the torments of his soul.

Miss Miller acts like Job; she says nothing, and lets the evil and the good come from the other world, from the metapsychologic. Therefore, the identification with Job is also significant in this respect. A wider, and, indeed, 69a very important analogy remains to be mentioned. The creative power, which love really is, rightly considered from the natural standpoint, remains as the real attribute of the Divinity, sublimated from the erotic impression; therefore, in the poem God is praised throughout as Creator.

Job offers the same illustration. Satan is the destroyer of Job’s fruitfulness. God is the fruitful one himself, therefore, at the end of the book, he gives forth, as an expression of his own creative power, this hymn, filled with lofty poetic beauty. In this hymn, strangely enough, two unsympathetic representatives of the animal kingdom, behemoth and the leviathan, both expressive of the crudest force conceivable in nature, are given chief consideration; the behemoth being really the phallic attribute of the God of Creation.

God says this in order to bring his power and omnipotence impressively before Job’s eyes. God is like the behemoth and the leviathan; the fruitful nature giving forth abundance,—the untamable wildness and boundlessness of nature,—and the overwhelming danger of the unchained power.^[80]

But what has destroyed Job’s earthly paradise? The unchained power of nature. As the poet lets it be seen here, God has simply turned his other side outwards for once; the side which man calls the devil, and which lets loose all the torments of nature on Job, naturally for the purpose of discipline and training. The God who created such monstrosities, before whom the poor weak man stiffens with anxiety, truly must hide qualities within himself which are food for thought. This God lives in the heart, in the unconscious, in the realm of metapsychology. There is the source of the anxiety before the unspeakably horrible, and of the strength to withstand the horrors. The person, that is to say his conscious “I,” is like a plaything, like a feather which is whirled around by different currents of air; sometimes the sacrifice and sometimes the sacrificer, and he cannot hinder either. The Book of Job shows us God at work both as creator and destroyer. Who is this God? A thought which humanity in every 71part of the world and in all ages has brought forth from itself and always again anew in similar forms; a power in the other world to which man gives praise, a power which creates as well as destroys, an idea necessary to life. Since, psychologically understood, the divinity is nothing else than a projected complex of representation which is accentuated in feeling according to the degree of religiousness of the individual, so God is to be considered as the representative of a certain sum of energy (libido). This energy, therefore, appears projected (metaphysically) because it works from the unconscious outwards, when it is dislodged from there, as psychoanalysis shows. As I have earlier made apparent in the “Bedeutung des Vaters,” the religious instinct feeds upon the incestuous libido of the infantile period. In the principal forms of religion which now exist, the father transference seems to be at least the moulding influence; in older religions, it seems to be the influence of the mother transference which creates the attributes of the divinity. The attributes of the divinity are omnipotence, a sternly persecuting paternalism ruling through fear (Old Testament) and a loving paternalism (New Testament). These are the attributes of the libido in that wide sense in which Freud has conceived this idea empirically. In certain pagan and also in certain Christian attributes of divinity the maternal stands out strongly, and in the former the animal also comes into the greatest prominence.^[81] Likewise, the infantile, so closely interwoven with religious phantasies, and from time to time breaking forth so violently, is nowhere lacking.^[82] All this points to the sources 72of the dynamic states of religious activity. These are those impulses which in childhood are withdrawn from incestuous application through the intervention of the incest barrier and which, especially at the time of puberty, as a result of affluxes of libido coming from the still incompletely employed sexuality, are aroused to their own peculiar activity. As is easily understood, that which is valuable in the God-creating idea is not the form but the power, the libido. The primitive power which Job’s Hymn of Creation vindicates, the unconditional and inexorable, the unjust and the superhuman, are truly and rightly attributes of libido, which “lead us unto life,” which “let the poor be guilty,” and against which struggle is in vain. Nothing remains for mankind but to work in harmony with this will. Nietzsche’s “Zarathustra” teaches us this impressively.

We see that in Miss Miller the religious hymn arising from the unconscious is the compensating amend for the erotic; it takes a great part of its materials from the infantile reminiscences which she reawakened into life by the introversion of the libido. Had this religious creation not succeeded (and also had another sublimated application been eliminated) then Miss Miller would have yielded to the erotic impression, either to its natural consequence or to a negative issue, which would have replaced the lost success in love by a correspondingly strong sorrow. It is well known that opinions are much divided concerning the worth of this issue of an erotic conflict, such as Miss Miller has presented to us. It is thought to be much more beautiful to solve unnoticed an 73erotic tension, in the elevated feelings of religious poetry, in which perhaps many other people can find joy and consolation. One is wrong to storm against this conception from the radical standpoint of fanaticism for truth.

I think that one should view with philosophic admiration the strange paths of the libido and should investigate the purposes of its circuitous ways.

It is not too much to say that we have herewith dug up the erotic root, and yet the problem remains unsolved. Were there not bound up with that a mysterious purpose, probably of the greatest biological meaning, then certainly twenty centuries would not have yearned for it with such intense longing. Doubtless, this sort of libidian current moves in the same direction as, taken in the widest sense, did that ecstatic ideal of the Middle Ages and of the ancient mystery cults, one of which became the later Christianity. There is to be seen biologically in this ideal an exercise of psychologic projection (of the paranoidian mechanism, as Freud would express it).^[83] The projection consists in the repressing of the conflict into the unconscious and the setting forth of the repressed contents into seeming objectivity, which is also the formula of paranoia. The repression serves, as is well known, for the freeing from a painful complex from which one must escape by all means because its compelling and oppressing power is feared. The repression can lead to an apparent complete suppression which corresponds to a strong self-control. Unfortunately, however, self-control has limits which are only too narrowly drawn. 74Closer observation of people shows, it is true, that calm is maintained at the critical moment, but certain results occur which fall into two categories.

First, the suppressed effect comes to the surface immediately afterwards; seldom directly, it is true, but ordinarily in the form of a displacement to another object (e. g. a person is, in official relations, polite, submissive, patient, and so on, and turns his whole anger loose upon his wife or his subordinates).

Second, the suppressed effect creates compensations elsewhere. For example, people who strive for excessive ethics, who try always to think, feel, and act altruistically and ideally, avenge themselves, because of the impossibility of carrying out their ideals, by subtle maliciousness, which naturally does not come into their own consciousness as such, but which leads to misunderstandings and unhappy situations. Apparently, then, all of these are only “especially unfortunate circumstances,” or they are the guilt and malice of other people, or they are tragic complications.

One is, indeed, freed of the conscious conflict, nevertheless it lies invisible at one’s feet, and is stumbled over at every step. The technic of the apparent suppressing and forgetting is inadequate because it is not possible of achievement in the last analysis—it is in reality a mere makeshift. The religious projection offers a much more effectual help. In this one keeps the conflict in sight (care, pain, anxiety, and so on) and gives it over to a personality standing outside of one’s self, the Divinity. The evangelical command teaches us this:

75“Cast all your anxiety upon him, because he careth for you.”—I Peter v: 7.

“In nothing be anxious; but in every thing by prayer and supplication ... let your requests be made known unto God.”—Phil. iv: 6.

One must give the burdening complex of the soul consciously over to the Deity; that is to say, associate it with a definite representation complex which is set up as objectively real, as a person who answers those questions, for us unanswerable. To this inner demand belongs the candid avowal of sin and the Christian humility presuming such an avowal. Both are for the purpose of making it possible for one to examine one’s self and to know one’s self.^[84] One may consider the mutual avowal of sins as the most powerful support to this work of education (“Confess, therefore, your sins one to another.”—James v: 16). These measures aim at a conscious recognition of the conflicts, thoroughly psychoanalytic, which is also a conditio sine qua non of the psychoanalytic condition of recovery. Just as psychoanalysis in the hands of the physician, a secular method, sets up the real object of transference as the one to take over the conflicts of the oppressed and to solve them, so the Christian religion sets up the Saviour, considered as real; “In whom we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins....” (Eph. i: 7 and Col. i: 14.)^[85] He is the deliverer and redeemer of our guilt, a God who stands above sin, “who did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth” (Pet. ii: 22). “Who his own self bare our sins in his body upon the tree” (Pet. ii: 24). “Therefore 76Christ has been sacrificed once to take away the sins of many” (Heb. ix: 28). The God, thus thought of, is distinguished as innocent in himself and as the self-sacrificer. (These qualities are true also for that amount of energy—libido—which belongs to the representation complex designated the Redeemer.) The conscious projection towards which the Christian education aims, offers, therefore, a double benefit: first, one is kept conscious of the conflict (sins) of two opposing tendencies mutually resistant, and through this one prevents a known trouble from becoming, by means of repressing and forgetting, an unknown and therefore so much more tormenting sorrow. Secondly, one lightens one’s burden by surrendering it to him to whom all solutions are known. One must not forget that the individual psychologic roots of the Deity, set up as real by the pious, are concealed from him, and that he, although unaware of this, still bears the burden alone and is still alone with his conflict. This delusion would lead infallibly to the speedy breaking up of the system, for Nature cannot indefinitely be deceived, but the powerful institution of Christianity meets this situation. The command in the book of James is the best expression of the psychologic significance of this: “Bear ye one another’s burdens.”^[86]

This is emphasized as especially important in order to preserve society upright through mutual love (Transference); the Pauline writings leave no doubt about this:

“Through love be servants one to another.”—Gal. v: 13.

“Let love of the brethren continue.”—Heb. xiii: 1.

“And let us consider one another to provoke unto love and 77good works. Not forgetting our own assembling together as is the custom of some, but exhorting one another.”—Heb. x: 24–25.

We might say that the real transference taught in the Christian community is the condition absolutely necessary for the efficacy of the miracle of redemption; the first letter of John comes out frankly with this:

“He that loveth his brother abideth in the light.”—I John ii: 10.

“If we love one another, God abideth in us.”—I John iv: 12.

The Deity continues to be efficacious in the Christian religion only upon the foundation of brotherly love. Consequently, here too the mystery of redemption is the unresisting real transference.^[87] One may properly ask one’s self, for what then is the Deity useful, if his efficacy consists only in the real transference? To this also the evangelical message has a striking answer:

“Men are all brothers in Christ.”

“So Christ also, having been once offered to bear the sins of many, shall appear a second time apart from sin to them that wait for him unto salvation.”—Heb. ix: 28.

The condition of transference among brothers is to be such as between man and Christ, a spiritual one. As the history of ancient cults and certain Christian sects shows, this explanation of the Christian religion is an especially important one biologically, for the psychologic intimacy creates certain shortened ways between men which lead only too easily to that from which Christianity seeks to release them, namely to the sexual relation with all those 78consequences and necessities under which the really already highly civilized man had to suffer at the beginning of our Christian era. For just as the ancient religious experience was regarded distinctly as a bodily union with the Deity,^[88] just so was worship permeated with sexuality of every kind. Sexuality lay only too close to the relations of people with each other. The moral degeneracy of the first Christian century produced a moral reaction arising out of the darkness of the lowest strata of society which was expressed in the second and third centuries at its purest in the two antagonistic religions, Christianity on the one side, and Mithracism on the other. These religions strove after precisely that higher form of social intercourse symbolic of a projected “become flesh” idea (logos), whereby all those strongest impulsive energies of the archaic man, formerly plunging him from one passion into another,^[89] and which seemed to the ancients like the compulsion of the evil constellations, as εἱμαρμένη,^[90] and which in the sense of later ages might be translated as the driving force of the libido,^[91] the δύναμις κινητική^[92] of Zeno, could be made use of for social preservation.^[93]

It may be assumed most certainly that the domestication of humanity has cost the greatest sacrifices. An age which produced the stoical ideal must certainly have known why and against what it was created. The age of Nero serves to set off effectually the famous extracts from the forty-first letter of Seneca to Lucilius:

79“One drags the other into error, and how can we attain to salvation when no one bids us halt, when all the world drives us in deeper?”

“Do you ever come across a man unafraid in danger, untouched by desires, happy in misfortune, peaceful in the midst of a storm, elevated above ordinary mortals, on the same plane as the gods, does not reverence seize you? Are you not compelled to say, ‘Such an exalted being is certainly something different from the miserable body which he inhabits?’ A divine strength rules there, such an excellent mind, full of moderation, raised above all trivialities, which smiles at that which we others fear or strive after: a heavenly power animates such a person, a thing of this kind does not exist without the coöperation of a deity. The largest part of such a being belongs to the region from which he came. Just as the sun’s rays touch the earth in reality and yet are at home only there from whence they come, so an eminent holy man associates with us. He is sent to us that we may learn to know the divine better, and although with us, still really belongs to his original home. He looks thither and reaches towards it; among us he walks as an exalted being.”

The people of this age had grown ripe for identification with the λόγος (word) “become flesh,” for the founding of a new fellowship, united by one idea,^[94] in the name of which people could love each other and call each other brothers.^[95] The old vague idea of a μεσίτης (Messiah), of a mediator in whose name new ways of love would be created, became a fact, and with that humanity made an immense step forward. This had not been brought about by a speculative, completely sophisticated philosophy, but by an elementary need in the mass of people vegetating in spiritual darkness. The profoundest necessities had evidently driven them towards that, since humanity did not thrive in a state of dissoluteness.^[96] The 80meaning of those cults—I speak of Christianity and Mithracism—is clear; it is a moral restraint of animal impulses.^[97] The dynamic appearance of both religions betrays something of that enormous feeling of redemption which animated the first disciples and which we to-day scarcely know how to appreciate, for these old truths are empty to us. Most certainly we should still understand it, had our customs even a breath of ancient brutality, for we can hardly realize in this day the whirlwinds of the unchained libido which roared through the ancient Rome of the Cæsars. The civilized man of the present day seems very far removed from that. He has become merely neurotic. So for us the necessities which brought forth Christianity have actually been lost, since we no longer understand their meaning. We do not know against what it had to protect us.^[98] For enlightened people, the so-called religiousness has already approached very close to a neurosis. In the past two thousand years Christianity has done its work and has erected barriers of repression, which protect us from the sight of our own “sinfulness.” The elementary emotions of the libido have come to be unknown to us, for they are carried on in the unconscious; therefore, the belief which combats them has become hollow and empty. Let whoever does not believe that a mask covers our religion, obtain an impression for himself from the appearance of our modern churches, from which style and art have long since fled.

With this we turn back to the question from which we digressed, namely, whether or not Miss Miller has created 81something valuable with her poem. If we bear in mind under what psychologic or moral conditions Christianity came into existence; that is to say, at a time when fierce brutality was an every-day spectacle, then we understand the religious seizure of the whole personality and the worth of that religion which defended the people of the Roman culture against the visible storms of wickedness. It was not difficult for those people to remain conscious of sin, for they saw it every day spread out before their eyes. The religious product was at that time the accomplishment of the total personality. Miss Miller not only undervalues her “sins,” but the connection between the “depressing and unrelenting need” and her religious product has even escaped her. Thus her poetical creation completely loses the living value of a religious product. It is not much more than a sentimental transformation of the erotic which is secretly carried out close to consciousness and principally possesses the same worth as the manifest content of the dream^[99] with its uncertain and delusive perishableness. Thus the poem is properly only a dream become audible.

To the degree that the modern consciousness is eagerly busied with things of a wholly other sort than religion, religion and its object, original sin, have stepped into the background; that is to say, into the unconscious in great part. Therefore, to-day man believes neither in the one nor in the other. Consequently the Freudian school is accused of an impure phantasy, and yet one might convince one’s self very easily with a rather fleeting glance at the history of ancient religions and morals as to what kind 82of demons are harbored in the human soul. With this disbelief in the crudeness of human nature is bound up the disbelief in the power of religion. The phenomenon, well known to every psychoanalyst, of the unconscious transformation of an erotic conflict into religious activity is something ethically wholly worthless and nothing but an hysterical production. Whoever, on the other hand, to his conscious sin just as consciously places religion in opposition, does something the greatness of which cannot be denied. This can be verified by a backward glance over history. Such a procedure is sound religion. The unconscious recasting of the erotic into something religious lays itself open to the reproach of a sentimental and ethically worthless pose.

By means of the secular practice of the naïve projection which is, as we have seen, nothing else than a veiled or indirect real-transference (through the spiritual, through the logos), Christian training has produced a widespread weakening of the animal nature so that a great part of the strength of the impulses could be set free for the work of social preservation and fruitfulness.^[100] This abundance of libido, to make use of this singular expression, pursues with a budding renaissance (for example Petrarch) a course which outgoing antiquity had already sketched out as religious; viz., the way of the transference to nature.^[101] The transformation of this libidinous interest is in great part due to the Mithraic worship, which was a nature religion in the best sense of the word;^[102] while the primitive Christians exhibited throughout an antagonistic attitude to the beauties of this 83world.^[103] I remember the passage of St. Augustine mentioned by J. Burckhardt:

“Men draw thither to admire the heights of the mountains and the powerful waves of the sea—and to turn away from themselves.”

The foremost authority on the Mithraic cult, Franz Cumont,^[104] says as follows:

“The gods were everywhere and mingled in all the events of daily life. The fire which cooked the means of nourishment for the believers and which warmed them; the water which quenched their thirst and cleansed them; also the air which they breathed, and the day which shone for them, were the objects of their homage. Perhaps no religion has given to its adherents in so large a degree as Mithracism opportunity for prayer and motive for devotion. When the initiated betook himself in the evening to the sacred grotto concealed in the solitude of the forest, at every step new sensations awakened in his heart some mystical emotion. The stars that shone in the sky, the wind that whispered in the foliage, the spring or brook which hastened murmuring to the valley, even the earth which he trod under his feet, were in his eyes divine; and all surrounding nature a worshipful fear of the infinite forces that swayed the universe.”

These fundamental thoughts of Mithracism, which, like so much else of the ancient spiritual life, arose again from their grave during the renaissance are to be found in the beautiful words of Seneca:^[105]

“When you enter a grove peopled with ancient trees, higher than the ordinary, and whose boughs are so closely interwoven that the sky cannot be seen, the stately shadows of the wood, the privacy of the place, and the awful gloom cannot but strike you, as with the presence of a deity, or when we see some cave at the foot of a mountain penetrating the rocks, not made by human 84hands, but hollowed out to great depths by nature; it fills the mind with a religious fear; we venerate the fountain-heads of great rivers; the sudden eruption of a vast body of water from the secret places of the earth, obtains an altar: we adore likewise the springs of warm baths, and either the opaque quality or immense depths, hath made some lakes sacred.”

All this disappeared in the transitory world of the Christian, only to break forth much later when the thought of mankind had achieved that independence of the idea which could resist the æsthetic impression, so that thought was no longer fettered by the emotional effects of the impression, but could rise to reflective observation. Thus man entered into a new and independent relation to nature whereby the foundation was laid for natural science and technique. With that, however, there entered in for the first time a displacement of the weight of interest; there arose again real-transference which has reached its greatest development in our time. Materialistic interest has everywhere become paramount. Therefore, the realms of the spirit, where earlier the greatest conflicts and developments took place, lie deserted and fallow; the world has not only lost its God as the sentimentalists of the nineteenth century bewail, but also to some extent has lost its soul as well. One, therefore, cannot wonder that the discoveries and doctrines of the Freudian school, with their wholly psychologic views, meet with an almost universal disapproval. Through the change of the centre of interest from the inner to the outer world, the knowledge of nature has increased enormously in comparison with that of earlier times. By this the anthropomorphic conception of the religious dogmas has been definitely thrown 85open to question; therefore, the present-day religions can only with the greatest difficulty close their eyes to this fact; for not only has the intense interest been diverted from the Christian religion, but criticism and the necessary correction have increased correspondingly. The Christian religion seems to have fulfilled its great biological purpose, in so far as we are able to judge. It has led human thought to independence, and has lost its significance, therefore, to a yet undetermined extent; in any case its dogmatic contents have become related to Mithracism. In consideration of the fact that this religion has rendered, nevertheless, inconceivable service to education, one cannot reject it “eo ipso” to-day. It seems to me that we might still make use in some way of its form of thought, and especially of its great wisdom of life, which for two thousand years has been proven to be particularly efficacious. The stumbling block is the unhappy combination of religion and morality. That must be overcome. There still remain traces of this strife in the soul, the lack of which in a human being is reluctantly felt. It is hard to say in what such things consist; for this, ideas as well as words are lacking. If, in spite of that, I attempt to say something about it, I do it parabolically, using Seneca’s words:^[106]

“Nothing can be more commendable and beneficial if you persevere in the pursuit of wisdom. It is what would be ridiculous to wish for when it is in your power to attain it. There is no need to lift up your hands to Heaven, or to pray the servant of the temple to admit you to the ear of the idol that your prayers may be heard the better. God is near thee; he is with thee. Yes, Lucilius, a holy spirit resides within us, the observer of 86good and evil, and our constant guardian. And as we treat him, he treats us; no good man is without a God. Could any one ever rise above the power of fortune without his assistance? It is he that inspires us with thoughts, upright, just and pure. We do not, indeed, pretend to say what God; but that a God dwells in the breast of every good man is certain.”

A little later Miss Miller travelled from Geneva to Paris. She says:

“My weariness on the railway was so great that I could hardly sleep an hour. It was terrifically hot in the ladies’ carriage.”

At four o’clock in the morning she noticed a moth that flew against the light in her compartment. She then tried to go to sleep again. Suddenly the following poem took possession of her mind.

Before we go into the material which Miss Miller offers us for the understanding of the poem, we will again cast a glance over the psychologic situation in which the poem originated. Some months or weeks appear to 88have elapsed since the last direct manifestation of the unconscious that Miss Miller reported to us; about this period we have had no information. We learn nothing about the moods and phantasies of this time. If one might draw a conclusion from this silence it would be presumably that in the time which elapsed between the two poems, really nothing of importance had happened, and that, therefore, this poem is again but a voiced fragment of the unconscious working of the complex stretching out over months and years. It is highly probable that it is concerned with the same complex as before.^[107] The earlier product, a hymn of creation full of hope, has, however, but little similarity to the present poem. The poem lying before us has a truly hopeless, melancholy character; moth and sun, two things which never meet. One must in fairness ask, is a moth really expected to rise to the sun? We know indeed the proverbial saying about the moth that flew into the light and singed its wings, but not the legend of the moth that strove towards the sun. Plainly, here, two things are connected in her thoughts that do not belong together; first, the moth which fluttered around the light so long that it burnt itself; and then, the idea of a small ephemeral being, something like the day fly, which, in lamentable contrast to the eternity of the stars, longs for an imperishable daylight. This idea reminds one of Faust:

Not long afterwards, Faust sees “the black dog roving there through cornfields and stubble,” the dog who is the same as the devil, the tempter, in whose hellish fires Faust has singed his wings. When he believed that he was expressing his great longing for the beauty of the sun and the earth, “he went astray thereover” and fell into the hands of “the Evil One.”

This is what Faust had said shortly before, in true recognition of the state of affairs. The honoring of the beauty of nature led the Christian of the Middle Ages to pagan thoughts which lay in an antagonistic relation to his conscious religion, just as once Mithracism was in threatening competition with Christianity, for Satan often disguises himself as an angel of light.^[108]

The longing of Faust became his ruin. The longing for the Beyond had brought as a consequence a loathing for life, and he stood on the brink of self-destruction.^[109] 90The longing for the beauty of this world led him anew to ruin, into doubt and pain, even to Marguerite’s tragic death. His mistake was that he followed after both worlds with no check to the driving force of his libido, like a man of violent passion. Faust portrays once more the folk-psychologic conflict of the beginning of the Christian era, but what is noteworthy, in a reversed order.

Against what fearful powers of seduction Christ had to defend himself by means of his hope of the absolute world beyond, may be seen in the example of Alypius in Augustine. If any of us had been living in that period of antiquity, he would have seen clearly that that culture must inevitably collapse because humanity revolted against it. It is well known that even before the spread of Christianity a remarkable expectation of redemption had taken possession of mankind. The following eclogue of Virgil might well be a result of this mood:

The turning to asceticism resulting from the general expansion of Christianity brought about a new misfortune to many: monasticism and the life of the anchorite.^[113]

Faust takes the reverse course; for him the ascetic ideal means death. He struggles for freedom and wins life, at the same time giving himself over to the Evil One; but through this he becomes the bringer of death to her whom he loves most, Marguerite. He tears himself away from pain and sacrifices his life in unceasing useful work, through which he saves many lives.^[114] His double mission as saviour and destroyer has already been hinted in a preliminary manner:

Wagner:

Faust:

92A parallel to this double rôle is that text in the Gospel of Matthew which has become historically significant:

“I came not to send peace, but a sword.”—Matt. x: 34.

Just this constitutes the deep significance of Goethe’s Faust, that he clothes in words a problem of modern man which has been turning in restless slumber since the Renaissance, just as was done by the drama of Oedipus for the Hellenic sphere of culture. What is to be the way out between the Scylla of renunciation of the world and the Charybdis of the acceptance of the world?

The hopeful tone, voiced in the “Hymn to the God of Creation,” cannot continue very long with our author. The pose simply promises, but does not fulfil. The old longing will come again, for it is a peculiarity of all complexes worked over merely in the unconscious^[115] that they lose nothing of their original amount of affect. Meanwhile, their outward manifestations can change almost endlessly. One might therefore consider the first poem as an unconscious longing to solve the conflict through positive religiousness, somewhat in the same manner as they of the earlier centuries decided their conscious conflicts by opposing to them the religious standpoint. This wish does not succeed. Now with the second poem there follows a second attempt which turns out in a decidedly more material way; its thought is unequivocal. Only once “having gained one raptured glance ...” and then—to die.

From the realms of the religious world, the attention, just as in Faust,^[116] turns towards the sun of this world, 93and already there is something mingled with it which has another sense, that is to say, the moth which fluttered so long around the light that it burnt its wings.

We now pass to that which Miss Miller offers for the better understanding of the poem. She says:

“This small poem made a profound impression upon me. I could not, of course, find immediately a sufficiently clear and direct explanation for it. However, a few days later when I once more read a certain philosophical work, which I had read in Berlin the previous winter, and which I had enjoyed very much, (I was reading it aloud to a friend), I came across the following words: ‘La même aspiration passionnée de la mite vers l’étoile, de l’homme vers Dieu.’ (The same passionate longing of the moth for the star, of man for God.) I had forgotten this sentence entirely, but it seemed very clear to me that precisely these words had reappeared in my hypnagogic poem. In addition to that it occurred to me that a play seen some years previously, ‘La Mite et La Flamme,’ was a further possible cause of the poem. It is easy to see how often the word ‘moth’ had been impressed upon me.”

The deep impression made by the poem upon the author shows that she put into it a large amount of love. In the expression “aspiration passionnée” we meet the passionate longing of the moth for the star, of man for God, and indeed, the moth is Miss Miller herself. Her last observation that the word “moth” was often impressed upon her shows how often she had noticed the word “moth” as applicable to herself. Her longing for God resembles the longing of the moth for the “star.” The reader will recall that this expression has already had a place in the earlier material, “when the morning stars sang together,” that is to say, the ship’s officer who sings 94on deck in the night watch. The passionate longing for God is the same as that longing for the singing morning stars. It was pointed out at great length in the foregoing chapter that this analogy is to be expected: “Sic parvis componere magna solebam.”

It is shameful or exalted just as one chooses, that the divine longing of humanity, which is really the first thing to make it human, should be brought into connection with an erotic phantasy. Such a comparison jars upon the finer feelings. Therefore, one is inclined in spite of the undeniable facts to dispute the connection. An Italian steersman with brown hair and black moustache, and the loftiest, dearest conception of humanity! These two things cannot be brought together; against this not only our religious feelings revolt, but our taste also rebels.

It would certainly be unjust to make a comparison of the two objects as concrete things since they are so heterogeneous. One loves a Beethoven sonata but one loves caviar also. It would not occur to any one to liken the sonata to caviar. It is a common error for one to judge the longing according to the quality of the object. The appetite of the gourmand which is only satisfied with goose liver and quail is no more distinguished than the appetite of the laboring man for corned beef and cabbage. The longing is the same; the object changes. Nature is beautiful only by virtue of the longing and love given her by man. The æsthetic attributes emanating from that has influence primarily on the libido, which alone constitutes the beauty of nature. The dream recognizes this well when it depicts a strong and beautiful feeling by 95means of a representation of a beautiful landscape. Whenever one moves in the territory of the erotic it becomes altogether clear how little the object and how much the love means. The “sexual object” is as a rule overrated far too much and that only on account of the extreme degree to which libido is devoted to the object.

Apparently Miss Miller had but little left over for the officer, which is humanly very intelligible. But in spite of that a deep and lasting effect emanates from this connection which places divinity on a par with the erotic object. The moods which apparently are produced by these objects do not, however, spring from them, but are manifestations of her strong love. When Miss Miller praises either God or the sun she means her love, that deepest and strongest impulse of the human and animal being.

The reader will recall that in the preceding chapter the following chain of synonyms was adduced: the singer—God of sound—singing morning star—creator—God of Light—sun—fire—God of Love.

At that time we had placed sun and fire in parentheses. Now they are entitled to their right place in the chain of synonyms. With the changing of the erotic impression from the affirmative to the negative the symbols of light occur as the paramount object. In the second poem where the longing is clearly exposed it is by no means the terrestrial sun. Since the longing has been turned away from the real object, its object has become, first of all, a subjective one, namely, God. Psychologically, however, God is the name of a representation-complex which is grouped 96around a strong feeling (the sum of libido). Properly, the feeling is what gives character and reality to the complex.^[117] The attributes and symbols of the divinity must belong in a consistent manner to the feeling (longing, love, libido, and so on). If one honors God, the sun or the fire, then one honors one’s own vital force, the libido. It is as Seneca says: “God is near you, he is with you, in you.” God is our own longing to which we pay divine honors.^[118] If it were not known how tremendously significant religion was, and is, this marvellous play with one’s self would appear absurd. There must be something more than this, however, because, notwithstanding its absurdity, it is, in a certain sense, conformable to the purpose in the highest degree. To bear a God within one’s self signifies a great deal; it is a guarantee of happiness, of power, indeed even of omnipotence, as far as these attributes belong to the Deity. To bear a God within one’s self signifies just as much as to be God one’s self. In Christianity, where, it is true, the grossly sensual representations and symbols are weeded out as carefully as possible, which seems to be a continuation of the poverty of symbols of the Jewish cult, there are to be found plain traces of this psychology. There are even plainer traces, to be sure, in the “becoming-one with God” in those mysteries closely related to the Christian, where the mystic himself is lifted up to divine adoration through initiatory rites. At the close of the consecration into the Isis mysteries the mystic was crowned with the palm crown,^[119] he was placed on a pedestal and worshipped as Helios.^[120] In the magic papyrus of the Mithraic liturgy 97published by Dieterich there is the ἱερός λόγος^[121] of the consecrated one:

Ἐγώ εἰμι σύμπλανος ὑμῖν ἀστὴρ καὶ ἐκ τοῦ βάθους ἀναλάμπων.^[122]

The mystic in religious ecstasies put himself on a plane with the stars, just as a saint of the Middle Ages put himself by means of the stigmata on a level with Christ. St. Francis of Assisi expressed this in a truly pagan manner,^[123] even as far as a close relationship with the brother sun and the sister moon. These representations of “becoming-one with God” are very ancient. The old belief removed the becoming-one with God until the time after death; the mysteries, however, suggest this as taking place already in this world. A very old text brings most beautifully before one this unity with God; it is the song of triumph of the ascending soul.^[124]

“I was yesterday and know to-morrow; the battle-ground of Gods was made when I spoke. I know the name of that great God who tarries therein.

“I am that great Phoenix who is in Heliopolis, who there keeps account of all there is, of all that exists.

“I am the God Min, at his coming forth, who placed the feathers upon my head.^[125]

“I am in my country, I come into my city. Daily I am together with my father Atum.^[126]

98“My impurity is driven away, and the sin which was in me is overcome. I washed myself in those two great pools of water which are in Heracleopolis, in which is purified the sacrifice of mankind for that great God who abideth there.

“I go on my way to where I wash my head in the sea of the righteous. I arrive at this land of the glorified, and enter through the splendid portal.

“Thou, who standest before me, stretch out to me thy hands, it is I, I am become one of thee. Daily am I together with my Father Atum.”

The identification with God necessarily has as a result the enhancing of the meaning and power of the individual.^[127] That seems, first of all, to have been really its purpose: a strengthening of the individual against his all too great weakness and insecurity in real life. This great megalomania thus has a genuinely pitiable background. The strengthening of the consciousness of power is, however, only an external result of the “becoming-one with God.” Of much more significance are the deeper-lying disturbances in the realm of feeling. Whoever introverts libido—that is to say, whoever takes it away from a real object without putting in its place a real compensation—is overtaken by the inevitable results of introversion. The libido, which is turned inward into the subject, awakens again from among the sleeping remembrances one which contains the path upon which earlier the libido once had come to the real object. At the very first and in foremost position it was father and mother who were the objects of the childish love. They are unequalled and imperishable. Not many difficulties are needed in an adult’s life to cause those memories to 99reawaken and to become effectual. In religion the regressive reanimation of the father-and-mother imago is organized into a system. The benefits of religion are the benefits of parental hands; its protection and its peace are the results of parental care upon the child; its mystic feelings are the unconscious memories of the tender emotions of the first childhood, just as the hymn expresses it:

“I am in my country, I come into my city. Daily am I together with my father Atum.”^[128]

The visible father of the world is, however, the sun, the heavenly fire; therefore, Father, God, Sun, Fire are mythologically synonymous. The well-known fact that in the sun’s strength the great generative power of nature is honored shows plainly, very plainly, to any one to whom as yet it may not be clear that in the Deity man honors his own libido, and naturally in the form of the image or symbol of the present object of transference. This symbol faces us in an especially marked manner in the third Logos of the Dieterich papyrus. After the second prayer^[129] stars come from the disc of the sun to the mystic, “five-pointed, in quantities, filling the whole air. If the sun’s disc has expanded, you will see an immeasurable circle, and fiery gates which are shut off.” The mystic utters the following prayer:

Ἐπακουσόν μου, ἀκουσόν μου—ὁ συνδήσας πνεύματι τὰ πύρινα κλεῖθρα τοῦ οὐρανοῦ, δισώματος πυρίπολε, φωτὸς κτίστα—πυρίπνοε, πυρίθυμε, πνευματόφως, πυριχαρῆ, καλλίφως, φωτοκράτωρ, πυρισώματε, φωτοδότα, πυρισπόρε, πυρικλόνε, φωτόβιε, πυριδῖνα, φωτοκινῆτα, 100κεραυνοκλόνε, φωτὸς κλέος, αὐξησίφως, ἐνπυρισχησίφως, ἀστροδάμα.^[130]

The invocation is, as one sees, almost inexhaustible in light and fire attributes, and can be likened in its extravagance only to the synonymous attributes of love of the mystic of the Middle Ages. Among the innumerable texts which might be used as an illustration of this, I select a passage from the writings of Mechthild von Magdeburg (1212–1277):

“O Lord, love me excessively and love me often and long; the oftener you love me, so much the purer do I become; the more excessively you love me, the more beautiful I become; the longer you love me, the more holy will I become here upon earth.”

God answered: “That I love you often, that I have from my nature, for I myself am love. That I love you excessively, that I have from my desire, for I too desire that men love me excessively. That I love you long, that I have from my everlastingness, for I am without end.”^[131]

The religious regression makes use indeed of the parent image without, however, consciously making it an object of transference, for the incest horror^[132] forbids that. It remains rather as a synonym, for example, of the father or of God, or of the more or less personified symbol of the sun and fire.^[133] Sun and fire—that is to say, 101the fructifying strength and heat—are attributes of the libido. In Mysticism the inwardly perceived, divine vision is often merely sun or light, and is very little, or not at all, personified. In the Mithraic liturgy there is found, for example, a significant quotation:

Ἡ δὲ πορεία τῶν ὁρωμένων θεῶν διὰ τοῦ δίσκου, πατρός μου, θεοῦ φανήσεται.^[134]

Hildegarde von Bingen (1100–1178) expresses herself in the following manner:^[135]

“But the light I see is not local, but far off, and brighter than the cloud which supports the sun. I can in no way know the form of this light since I cannot entirely see the sun’s disc. But within this light I see at times, and infrequently, another light which is called by me the living light, but when and in what manner I see this I do not know how to say, and when I see it all weariness and need is lifted from me, then too, I feel like a simple girl and not like an old woman.”

Symeon, the New Theologian (970–1040), says the following:

“My tongue lacks words, and what happens in me my spirit sees clearly but does not explain. It sees the invisible, that emptiness of all forms, simple throughout, not complex, and in extent infinite. For it sees no beginning, and it sees no end. It is entirely unconscious of the meanings, and does not know what to call that which it sees. Something complete appears, it seems to me, not indeed through the being itself, but through a participation. For you enkindle fire from fire, and you receive the whole fire; but this remains undiminished and undivided, as before. Similarly, that which is divided separates itself from the first; and like something corporeal spreads itself into several lights. This, 102however, is something spiritual, immeasurable, indivisible, and inexhaustible. For it is not separated when it becomes many, but remains undivided and is in me, and enters within my poor heart like a sun or circular disc of the sun, similar to the light, for it is a light.”^[136]

That that thing, perceived as inner light, as the sun of the other world, is longing, is clearly shown by Symeon’s words:^[137]

“And following It my spirit demanded to embrace the splendor beheld, but it found It not as creature and did not succeed in coming out from among created beings, so that it might embrace that uncreated and uncomprehended splendor. Nevertheless it wandered everywhere, and strove to behold It. It penetrated the air, it wandered over the Heavens, it crossed over the abysses, it searched, as it seemed to it, the ends of the world.^[138] But in all of that it found nothing, for all was created. And I lamented and was sorrowful, and my breast burned, and I lived as one distraught in mind. But It came, as It would, and descending like a luminous mystic cloud, It seemed to envelop my whole head so that dismayed I cried out. But flying away again It left me alone. And when I, troubled, sought for It, I realized suddenly that It was in me, myself, and in the midst of my heart It appeared as the light of a spherical sun.”

In Nietzsche’s “Glory and Eternity” we meet with an essentially similar symbol:

103It is not astonishing if Nietzsche’s great inner loneliness calls again into existence certain forms of thought which the mystic ecstasy of the old cults has elevated to ritual representation. In the visions of the Mithraic liturgy we have to deal with many similar representations which we can now understand without difficulty as the ecstatic symbol of the libido:

Μετὰ δὲ τὸ ειπεῖν σε τὸν δεύτερον λόγον, ὅπου σιγὴ δὶς καὶ τὰ ἀκόλουθα, σύρισον δὶς καὶ πόππυσον δὶς καὶ εὐθέως ὄψει ἀπὸ τοῦ δίσκου ἀστέρας προσερχομένους πενταδακτυλιαίους πλείστους καὶ πιπλῶντας ὅλον τὸν αέρα. Σὺ δὲ πάλιν λέγε: σιγή, σιγή. Καὶ τοῦ δίσκου ἀνοιγέντος ὄψει ἄπειρον κύκλωμα καὶ θύρας πυρίνας ἀποκεκλεισμένας.^[140]

Silence is commanded, then the vision of light is revealed. The similarity of the mystic’s condition and Nietzsche’s poetical vision is surprising. Nietzsche says “constellation.” It is well known that constellations are chiefly therio- or anthropo-morphic symbols.

The papyrus says, ἀστέρας πενταδακτυλιαίους^[141] (similar to the “rosy-fingered” Eos), which is nothing else than an anthropomorphic image. Accordingly, one may expect from that, that by long gazing a living being would be formed out of the “flame image,” a “star constellation” of therio- or anthropo-morphic nature, for the symbolism of the libido does not end with sun, light 104and fire, but makes use of wholly other means of expression. I yield precedence to Nietzsche:

Here libido becomes fire, flame and snake. The Egyptian symbol of the “living disc of the sun,” the disc with the two entwining snakes, contains the combination of both the libido analogies. The disc of the sun with its fructifying warmth is analogous to the fructifying warmth of love. The comparison of the libido with sun and fire is in reality analogous.

There is also a “causative” element in it, for sun and fire as beneficent powers are objects of human love; for example, the sun-hero Mithra is called the “well-beloved.” 105In Nietzsche’s poem the comparison is also a causative one, but this time in a reversed sense. The comparison with the snake is unequivocally phallic, corresponding completely with the tendency in antiquity, which was to see in the symbol of the phallus the quintessence of life and fruitfulness. The phallus is the source of life and libido, the great creator and worker of miracles, and as such it received reverence everywhere. We have, therefore, three designating symbols of the libido: First, the comparison by analogy, as sun and fire. Second, the comparisons based on causative relations, as A: Object comparison. The libido is designated by its object, for example, the beneficent sun. B: The subject comparison, in which the libido is designated by its place of origin or by analogies of this, for example, by phallus or (analogous) snake.

To these two fundamental forms of comparison still a third is added, in which the “tertium comparationis” is the activity; for example, the libido is dangerous when fecundating like the bull—through the power of its passion—like the lion, like the raging boar when in heat, like the ever-rutting ass, and so on.

This activity comparison can belong equally well to the category of the analogous or to the category of the causative comparisons. The possibilities of comparison mean just as many possibilities for symbolic expression, and from this basis all the infinitely varied symbols, so far as they are libido images, may properly be reduced to a very simple root, that is, just to libido and its fixed primitive qualities. This psychologic reduction and simplification 106is in accordance with the historic efforts of civilization to unify and simplify, to syncretize, the endless number of the gods. We come across this desire as far back as the old Egyptians, where the unlimited polytheism as exemplified in the numerous demons of places finally necessitated simplification. All the various local gods, Amon of Thebes, Horus of Edfu, Horus of the East, Chnum of Elephantine, Atum of Heliopolis, and others,^[143] became identified with the sun God Rê. In the hymns to the sun the composite being Amon-Rê-Harmachis-Atum was invoked as “the only god which truly lives.”^[144]

Amenhotep IV (XVIII dynasty) went the furthest in this direction. He replaced all former gods by the “living great disc of the sun,” the official title reading:

“The sun ruling both horizons, triumphant in the horizon in his name; the glittering splendor which is in the sun’s disc.”

“And, indeed,” Erman adds,^[145] “the sun, as a God, should not be honored, but the sun itself as a planet which imparts through its rays^[146] the infinite life which is in it to all living creatures.”

Amenhotep IV by his reform completed a work which is psychologically important. He united all the bull,^[147] ram,^[148] crocodile^[149] and pile-dwelling^[150] gods into the disc of the sun, and made it clear that their various attributes were compatible with the sun’s attributes.^[151] A similar fate overtook the Hellenic and Roman polytheism through the syncretistic efforts of later centuries. The beautiful prayer of Lucius^[152] to the queen of the Heavens furnishes an important proof of this:

107“Queen of Heaven, whether thou art the genial Ceres, the prime parent of fruits;—or whether thou art celestial Venus;—or whether thou art the sister of Phœbus;—or whether thou art Proserpina, terrific with midnight howlings—with that feminine brightness of thine illuminating the walls of every city.”^[153]

This attempt to gather again into a few units the religious thoughts which were divided into countless variations and personified in individual gods according to their polytheistic distribution and separation makes clear the fact that already at an earlier time analogies had formally arisen. Herodotus is rich in just such references, not to mention the systems of the Hellenic-Roman world. Opposed to the endeavor to form a unity there stands a still stronger endeavor to create again and again a multiplicity, so that even in the so-called severe monotheistic religions, as Christianity, for example, the polytheistic tendency is irrepressible. The Deity is divided into three parts at least, to which is added the feminine Deity of Mary and the numerous company of the lesser gods, the angels and saints, respectively. These two tendencies are in constant warfare. There is only one God with countless attributes, or else there are many gods who are then simply known differently, according to locality, and personify sometimes this, sometimes that attribute of the fundamental thought, an example of which we have seen above in the Egyptian gods.

With this we turn once more to Nietzsche’s poem, “The Beacon.” We found the flame there used as an image of the libido, theriomorphically represented as a snake (also as an image of the soul:^[154] “This flame is 108mine own soul”). We saw that the snake is to be taken as a phallic image of the libido (upreared in impatience), and that this image, also an attribute of the conception of the sun (the Egyptian sun idol), is an image of the libido in the combination of sun and phallus. It is not a wholly strange conception, therefore, that the sun’s disc is represented with a penis, as well as with hands and feet. We find proof for this idea in a peculiar part of the Mithraic liturgy: ὁμοίως δὲ καὶ ὁ καλούμενος αὐλός, ἡ ἀρχὴ τοῦ λειτουργοῦντος ἀνέμου. Ὄψει γὰρ ἀπὸ τοῦ δίσκου ὡς αὐλὸν κρεμάμενον.^[155]

This extremely important vision of a tube hanging down from the sun would produce in a religious text, such as that of the Mithraic liturgy, a strange and at the same time meaningless effect if it did not have the phallic meaning. The tube is the place of origin of the wind. The phallic meaning seems very faint in this idea, but one must remember that the wind, as well as the sun, is a fructifier and creator. This has already been pointed out in a footnote.^[156] There is a picture by a Germanic painter of the Middle Ages of the “conceptio immaculata” which deserves mention here. The conception is represented by a tube or pipe coming down from heaven and passing beneath the skirt of Mary. Into this flies the Holy Ghost in the form of a dove for the impregnation of the Mother of God.^[157]

Honegger discovered the following hallucination in an insane man (paranoid dement): The patient sees in the 109sun an “upright tail” similar to an erected penis. When he moves his head back and forth, then, too, the sun’s penis sways back and forth in a like manner, and out of that the wind arises. This strange hallucination remained unintelligible to us for a long time until I became acquainted with the Mithraic liturgy and its visions. This hallucination threw an illuminating light, as it appears to me, upon a very obscure place in the text which immediately follows the passage previously cited:

εἰς δὲ τὰ μέρη τὰ πρὸς λίβα ἀπέραντον οἷον ἀπηλιώτην. Ἐὰν ᾖ κεκληρώμενος εἰς δὲ τὰ μέρη τοῦ ἀπηλιώτου ὁ ἕτερος, ὁμοίως εἰς τὰ μέρη τὰ ἐκείνου ὄψει τὴν ἀποφορὰν τοῦ ὁρμάτος.

Mead translates this very clearly:^[158]

“And towards the regions westward, as though it were an infinite Eastwind. But if the other wind, towards the regions of the East, should be in service, in the like fashion shalt thou see towards the regions of that side the converse of the sight.”

In the original ὅραμα is the vision, the thing seen. ἀποφορά means properly the carrying away. The sense of the text, according to this, might be: the thing seen may be carried or turned sometimes here, sometimes there, according to the direction of the wind. The ὅραμα is the tube, “the place of origin of the wind,” which turns sometimes to the east, sometimes to the west, and, one might add, generates the corresponding wind. The vision of the insane man coincides astonishingly with this description of the movement of the tube.^[159]

110The various attributes of the sun, separated into a series, appear one after the other in the Mithraic liturgy. According to the vision of Helios, seven maidens appear with the heads of snakes, and seven gods with the heads of black bulls.

It is easy to understand the maiden as a symbol of the libido used in the sense of causative comparison. The snake in Paradise is usually considered as feminine, as the seductive principle in woman, and is represented as feminine by the old artists, although properly the snake has a phallic meaning. Through a similar change of meaning the snake in antiquity becomes the symbol of the earth, which on its side is always considered feminine. The bull is the well-known symbol for the fruitfulness of the sun. The bull gods in the Mithraic liturgy were called κνωθακοφύλακες, “guardians of the axis of the earth,” by whom the axle of the orb of the heavens was turned. The divine man, Mithra, also had the same attributes; he is sometimes called the “Sol invictus” itself, sometimes the mighty companion and ruler of Helios; he holds in his right hand the “bear constellation, which moves and turns the heavens.” The bull-headed gods, equally ἱεροὶ καὶ ἄλκιμοι νεανίαι with Mithra himself, to whom the attribute νεώτερος, “young one,” “the newcomer,” is given, are merely attributive components of the same divinity. The chief god of the Mithraic liturgy is himself subdivided into Mithra and Helios; the attributes of each of these are closely related to the other. Of Helios it is said: ὄψει θεὸν νεώτερον εὐειδῆ πυρινότριχα 111ἐν χιτῶνι λευκῷ καὶ χλαμύδι κοκκίνῃ, ἔχοντα πύρινον στέφανον.^[160]

Of Mithra it is said: ὄψει θεὸν ὑπερμεγέθη, φωτινὴν ἔχοντα τὴν ὄψιν, νεώτερον, χρυσοκόμαν, ἐν χιτῶνι λευκῳ καὶ χρυσῳ στεφάνῳ καὶ ἀναξυρίσι, κατέχοντα τῇ δεξιᾷ χειρὶ μόσχου ὦμόν χρύσεον, ὅς ἐστιν ἄρκτος ἡ κινοῦσα καὶ ἀντιστρέφουσα τὸν οὐρανόν, κατὰ ὥραν ἀναπολεύουσα καὶ καταπολεύουσα. ἔπειτα ὄψει αὐτοῦ ἐκ τῶν ὀμμάτων ἀστραπὰς καὶ ἐκ τοῦ σώματος ἀστέρας ἁλλομένους.^[161]

If we place fire and gold as essentially similar, then a great accord is found in the attributes of the two gods. To these mystical pagan ideas there deserve to be added the probably almost contemporaneous vision of Revelation:

“And being turned, I saw seven golden candlesticks. And in the midst of the candlesticks^[162] one like unto the son of man, clothed with a garment down to the foot, and girt about at the breasts with a golden girdle. And his head and his hair were white as white wool, white as snow, and his eyes were as a flame of fire. And his feet like unto burnished brass, as if it had been refined in a furnace; and his voice as the sound of many waters. And he had in his right hand seven stars,^[163] and out of his mouth proceeded a sharp two-edged sword,^[164] and his countenance was as the sun shineth in his strength.”—Rev. i: 12 ff.

“And I looked, and beheld a white cloud, and upon the cloud 112I saw one sitting like unto the son of man, having on his head a golden crown, and in his hand a sharp sickle.”^[165]—Rev. xiv: 14.

“And his eyes were as a flame of fire, and upon his head were many diadems. And he was arrayed in a garment^[166] sprinkled with blood.... And the armies which were in heaven followed him upon white horses, clothed in fine linen,^[167] white and pure. And out of his mouth proceeded a sharp sword.”—Rev. xix: 12–15.

One need not assume that there is a direct dependency between the Apocalypse and the Mithraic liturgy. The visionary images of both texts are developed from a source, not limited to one place, but found in the soul of many divers people, because the symbols which arise from it are too typical for it to belong to one individual only. I put these images here to show how the primitive symbolism of light gradually developed, with the increasing depth of the vision, into the idea of the sun-hero, the “well-beloved.”^[168] The development of the symbol of light is thoroughly typical. In addition to this, perhaps I might call to mind the fact that I have previously pointed out this course with numerous examples,^[169] and, therefore, I can spare myself the trouble of returning to this subject.^[170] These visionary occurrences are the psychological roots of the sun-coronations in the mysteries. Its rite is religious hallucination congealed into liturgical form, which, on account of its great regularity, could become a generally accepted outer form. After all this, it is easily understood how the ancient Christian Church, on one side, stood in an especial bond to Christ as “sol novus,” and, on the other side, had a certain difficulty in freeing itself from the earthly symbols of Christ. Indeed 113Philo of Alexandria saw in the sun the image of the divine logos or of the Deity especially (“De Somniis,” 1:85). In an Ambrosian hymn Christ is invoked by “O sol salutis,” and so on. At the time of Marcus Aurelius, Meliton, in his work,^[171] περὶ λούτρου, called Christ the Ἥλιος ἀνατολης ... μόνος ἥλιος οὗτος ἀνέτειλεν ἀπ’ οὐρανοῦ.^[172]

Still more important is a passage from Pseudo-Cyprian:^[173]

“O quam præclara providentia ut illo die quo factus est sol, in ipso die nasceretur Christus, v. Kal. Apr. feria IV, et ideo de ipso ad plebem dicebat Malachias propheta: ‘Orietur vobis sol iustitiæ et curatio est in pennis ejus,’ hic est sol iustitiæ cuius in pennis curatio præostendebatur.”^[174][175]

In a work nominally attributed to John Chrysostomus, “De Solstitiis et Aequinoctiis,”^[176] occurs this passage:

“Sed et dominus nascitur mense Decembri hiemis tempore, VIII. Kal. Januarias, quando oleæ maturæ præmuntur ut unctio, id est Chrisma, nascatur—sed et Invicti natalem appellant. Quis utique tam invictus nisi dominus noster qui mortem subactam devicit? Vel quod dicant Solis esse natalem, ipse est sol iustitiæ, de quo Malachias propheta dixit: ‘Dominus lucis ac noctis conditor et discretor qui a propheta Sol iustitiæ cognominatus est.’”^[177]

114According to the testimony of Eusebius of Alexandria, the Christians also shared in the worship of the rising sun, which lasted into the fifth century:

οὐαῖ τοῖς προσκυνοῦσι τὸν ἥλιον καὶ τὴν σελήνην καὶ τοὺς ἀστέρας. Πολλοὺς γὰρ οἶδα τοὺς προσκυνοῦντας καὶ εὐχομένους εἰς τὸν ἥλιον. Ἤδη γὰρ ἀνατείλαντος τοῦ ἡλίου, προσεύχονται καὶ λέγουσιν “Ἐλέησον ἡμᾶς” καὶ οὐ μόνον Ἡλιογνώσται καὶ αἱρετικοὶ τοῦτο ποιοῦσιν ἀλλὰ καὶ χριστιανοὶ καὶ ἀφέντες τὴν πίστιν τοῖς αἱρετικοῖς συναμίγνυνται.^[178]

Augustine preached emphatically to the Christians:

“Non est Dominus Sol factus sed per quem Sol factus est—ne quis carnaliter sapiens Solem istum (Christum) intelligendum putaret.”

Art has preserved much of the remnants of sun-worship,^[179] thus the nimbus around the head of Christ and the halo of the saints in general. The Christian legends also attribute many fire and light symbols to the saints.^[180] The twelve apostles, for example, are likened to the twelve signs of the zodiac, and are represented, therefore, with a star over the head.^[181]

It is not to be wondered at that the heathen, as Tertullian avows, considered the sun as the Christian God. 115Among the Manichaeans God was really the sun. One of the most remarkable works extant, where the Pagan, Asiatic, Hellenic and Christian intermingle, is the Ἐξήγησις περὶ των ἐν Περσίδι πραχθέντων, edited by Wirth.^[182] This is a book of fables, but, nevertheless, a mine for near-Christian phantasies, which gives a profound insight into Christian symbolism. In this is found the following magical dedication: Διὶ Ἡλίῳ θεῳ μεγάλῳ βασιλεῖ Ἰησοῦ—.^[183] In certain parts of Armenia the rising sun is still worshipped by Christians, that “it may let its foot rest upon the faces of the worshippers.”^[184] The foot occurs as an anthropomorphic attribute, and we have already met the theriomorphic attribute in the feathers and the sun phallus. Other comparisons of the sun’s ray, as knife, sword, arrow, and so on, have also, as we have learned from the psychology of the dream, a phallic meaning at bottom. This meaning is attached to the foot as I here point out,^[185] and also to the feathers, or hair, of the sun, which signify the power or strength of the sun. I refer to the story of Samson, and to that of the Apocalypse of Baruch, concerning the phœnix bird, which, flying before the sun, loses its feathers, and, exhausted, is strengthened again in an ocean bath at evening.

Under the symbol of “moth and sun” we have dug down into the historic depths of the soul, and in doing this we have uncovered an old buried idol, the youthful, beautiful, fire-encircled and halo-crowned sun-hero, who, forever unattainable to the mortal, wanders upon the 116earth, causing night to follow day; winter, summer; death, life; and who returns again in rejuvenated splendor and gives light to new generations. The longing of the dreamer concealed behind the moth stands for him.

The ancient pre-Asiatic civilizations were acquainted with a sun-worship having the idea of a God dying and rising again (Osiris, Tammuz, Attis-Adonis),^[186] Christ, Mithra and his bull,^[187] Phœnix and so on. The beneficent power as well as the destroying power was worshipped in fire. The forces of nature always have two sides, as we have already seen in the God of Job. This reciprocal bond brings us back once more to Miss Miller’s poem. Her reminiscences support our previous supposition, that the symbol of moth and sun is a condensation of two ideas, about one of which we have just spoken; the other is the moth and the flame. As the title of a play, about the contents of which the author tells us absolutely nothing, “Moth and Flame” may easily have the well-known erotic meaning of flying around the flame of passion until one’s wings are burned. The passionate longing, that is to say, the libido, has its two sides; it is power which beautifies everything, and which under other circumstances destroys everything. It often appears as if one could not accurately understand in what the destroying quality of the creative power consists. A woman who gives herself up to passion, particularly under the present-day condition of culture, experiences the destructive side only too soon. One has only to imagine one’s self a little away from the every-day moral conditions in order to understand what feelings of extreme insecurity overwhelm 117the individual who gives himself unconditionally over to Fate.

To be fruitful means, indeed, to destroy one’s self, because with the rise of the succeeding generation the previous one has passed beyond its highest point; thus our descendants are our most dangerous enemies, whom we cannot overcome, for they will outlive us, and, therefore, without fail, will take the power from our enfeebled hands. The anxiety in the face of the erotic fate is wholly understandable, for there is something immeasurable therein. Fate usually hides unknown dangers, and the perpetual hesitation of the neurotic to venture upon life is easily explained by his desire to be allowed to stand still, so as not to take part in the dangerous battle of life.^[188] Whoever renounces the chance to experience must stifle in himself the wish for it, and, therefore, commits a sort of self-murder. From this the death phantasies which readily accompany the renunciation of the erotic wish are made clear. In the poem Miss Miller has voiced these phantasies.

She adds further to the material with the following:

“I had been reading a selection from one of Byron’s poems which pleased me very much and made a deep and lasting impression. Moreover, the rhythm of my last two verses, ‘For I the source, etc.,’ and the two lines of Byron’s are very similar.

This reminiscence with which the series of ideas is closed confirms the death phantasies which follow from 118renunciation of the erotic wish. The quotation comes—which Miss Miller did not mention—from an uncompleted poem of Byron’s called “Heaven and Earth.”^[189] The whole verse follows:

The words are included in a kind of praise or prayer, spoken by a “mortal” who is in hopeless flight before the mounting deluge. Miss Miller puts herself in the same situation in her quotation; that is to say, she readily lets it be seen that her feeling is similar to the despondency of the unhappy ones who find themselves hard pressed by the threatening mounting waters of the deluge. With this the writer allows us a deep look into the dark abyss of her longing for the sun-hero. We see that her longing is in vain; she is a mortal, only for a short time borne upwards into the light by means of the highest longing, and then sinking to death, or, much more, urged upwards by the fear of death, like the people before the deluge, and in spite of the desperate conflict, irretrievably given over to destruction. This is a mood which recalls 119vividly the closing scene in “Cyrano de Bergerac”:^[190]

We already know sufficiently well what longing and what impulse it is that attempts to clear a way for itself to the light, but that it may be realized quite clearly and irrevocably, it is shown plainly in the quotation “No, let me die,” which confirms and completes all earlier remarks. The divine, the “much-beloved,” who is honored in the image of the sun, is also the goal of the longing of our poet.

Byron’s “Heaven and Earth” is a mystery founded on the following passage from Genesis, chapter vi:2: “And it came to pass ... that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair, and they took them wives of all that they chose.” Byron offers as a further motif for his poem the following passage from Coleridge: “And woman wailing for her Demon lover.” Byron’s poem is concerned with two great events, one psychologic and one telluric; the passion which throws down all barriers; and all the terrors of the unchained powers of nature: a parallel which has already been introduced into our earlier discussion. The angels Samiasa 120and Azaziel burn with sinful love for the beautiful daughters of Cain, Anah and Aholibama, and force a way through the barrier which is placed between mortal and immortal. They revolt as Lucifer once did against God, and the archangel Raphael raises his voice warningly:

The power of God is threatened by the seduction of passion; a second fall of angels menaces heaven. Let us translate this mythologic projection back into the psychologic, from whence it originated. Then it would read: the power of the good and reasonable ruling the world wisely is threatened by the chaotic primitive power of passion; therefore passion must be exterminated; that is to say, projected into mythology. The race of Cain and the whole sinful world must be destroyed from the roots by the deluge. It is the inevitable result of that sinful passion which has broken through all barriers. Its counterpart is the sea and the waters of the deep and the floods of rain,^[191] the generating, fructifying and “maternal waters,” as the Indian mythology refers to them. Now they leave their natural bounds and surge over the mountain tops, engulfing all living things; for passion destroys itself. The libido is God and Devil. With the destruction of the sinfulness of the libido an essential 121portion of the libido would be destroyed. Through the loss of the Devil, God himself suffered a considerable loss, somewhat like an amputation upon the body of the Divinity. The mysterious hint in Raphael’s lament concerning the two rebels, Samiasa and Azaziel, suggests this.

Love raises man, not only above himself, but also above the bounds of his mortality and earthliness, up to divinity itself, and in the very act of raising him it destroys him. Mythologically, this self-presumption finds its striking expression in the building of the heaven-high tower of Babel, which brings confusion to mankind.^[192] In Byron’s poem it is the sinful ambition of the race of Cain, for love of which it makes even the stars subservient and leads away the sons of God themselves. If, indeed, longing for the highest things—if I may speak so—is legitimate, then it lies in the circumstances that it leaves its human boundaries, that of sinfulness, and, therefore, destruction. The longing of the moth for the star is not absolutely pure and transparent, but glows in sultry mist, for man continues to be man. Through the excess of his longing he draws down the divine into the corruption of his passion;^[193] therefore, he seems to raise himself to the Divine; but with that his humanity is destroyed. Thus the love of Anah and Aholibama for their angels becomes the ruin of gods and men. The invocation 122with which Cain’s daughters implore their angels is psychologically an exact parallel to Miss Miller’s poem.

124The apparition of both angels which follows the invocation is, as always, a shining vision of light.

At the sight of this many-colored vision of light, where both women are entirely filled with desire and expectation, Anah makes use of a simile full of presentiment, which suddenly allows us to look down once more into the dismal dark depths, out of which for a moment the terrible animal nature of the mild god of light emerges.

125Thus like the leviathan! We recall this overpowering weight in the scale of God’s justice in regard to the man Job. There, where the deep sources of the ocean are, the leviathan lives; from there the all-destroying flood ascends, the all-engulfing flood of animal passion. That stifling, compressing feeling^[203] of the onward-surging impulse is projected mythologically as a flood which, rising up and over all, destroys all that exists, in order to allow a new and better creation to come forth from this destruction.

126The prophetic visions of Japhet have almost prophetic meaning for our poetess; with the death of the moth in the light, evil is once more laid aside; the complex has once again, even if in a censored form, expressed itself. With that, however, the problem is not solved; all sorrow and every longing begins again from the beginning, but there is “Promise in the Air”—the premonition of the Redeemer, of the “Well-beloved,” of the Sun-hero, who again mounts to the height of the sun and again descends to the coldness of the winter, who is the light of hope from race to race, the image of the libido.

Before I enter upon the contents of this second part, it seems necessary to cast a backward glance over the singular train of thought which the analysis of the poem “The Moth to the Sun” has produced. Although this poem is very different from the foregoing Hymn of Creation, closer investigation of the “longing for the sun” has carried us into the realm of the fundamental ideas of religion and astral mythology, which ideas are closely related to those considered in the first poem. The creative God of the first poem, whose dual nature, moral and physical, was shown especially clearly to us by Job, has in the second poem a new qualification of astral-mythological, or, to express it better, of astrological character. The God becomes the sun, and in this finds an adequate natural expression quite apart from the moral division of the God idea into the heavenly father and the devil. The sun is, as Renan remarked, really the only rational representation of God, whether we take the point of view of the barbarians of other ages or that of the modern physical sciences. In both cases the sun is the parent God, mythologically predominantly the Father God, from whom all living things draw life; He is the fructifier and 128creator of all that lives, the source of energy of our world. The discord into which the soul of man has fallen through the action of moral laws^[204] can be resolved into complete harmony through the sun as the natural object which obeys no human moral law. The sun is not only beneficial, but also destructive; therefore the zodiacal representation of the August heat is the herd-devouring lion whom the Jewish hero Samson^[205] killed in order to free the parched earth from this plague. Yet it is the harmonious and inherent nature of the sun to scorch, and its scorching power seems natural to men. It shines equally on the just and on the unjust, and allows useful living objects to flourish as well as harmful ones. Therefore, the sun is adapted as is nothing else to represent the visible God of this world. That is to say, that driving strength of our own soul, which we call libido, and whose nature it is to allow the useful and injurious, the good and the bad to proceed. That this comparison is no mere play of words is taught us by the mystics. When by looking inwards (introversion) and going down into the depths of their own being they find “in their heart” the image of the Sun, they find their own love or libido, which with reason, I might say with physical reason, is called the Sun; for our source of energy and life is the Sun. Thus our life substance, as an energic process, is entirely Sun. Of what special sort this “Sun energy” seen inwardly by the mystic is, is shown by an example taken from the Hindoo mythology.^[206] From the explanation of Part III of the “Shvetâshvataropanishad” we take the following quotation, which relates to the Rudra:^[207]

129(2) “Yea, the one Rudra who all these worlds with ruling power doth rule, stands not for any second. Behind those that are born he stands; at ending time ingathers all the worlds he hath evolved, protector (he).

(3) “He hath eyes on all sides, on all sides surely hath faces, arms surely on all sides, on all sides feet. With arms, with wings he tricks them out, creating heaven and earth, the only God.

(4) “Who of the gods is both the source and growth, the Lord of all, the Rudra. Mighty seer; who brought the shining germ of old into existence—may he with reason pure conjoin us.”^[208]

These attributes allow us clearly to discern the all-creator and in him the Sun, which has wings and with a thousand eyes scans the world.^[209]

The following passages confirm the text and join to it the idea most important for us, that God is also contained in the individual creature:

(7) “Beyond this (world) the Brahman beyond, the mighty one, in every creature hid according to its form, the one encircling Lord of all, Him having known, immortal they become.

(8) “I know this mighty man, Sun-like, beyond the darkness, Him (and him) only knowing, one crosseth over death; no other path (at all) is there to go.

(11) “... spread over the universe is He the Lord therefore as all-pervader, He’s benign.”

The powerful God, the equal of the Sun, is in that one, and whoever knows him is immortal.^[210] Going on further with the text, we come upon a new attribute, which informs us in what form and manner Rudra lived in men.

(12) “The mighty monarch, He, the man, the one who doth the essence start towards that peace of perfect stainlessness, lordly, exhaustless light.

130(13) “The Man, the size of a thumb, the inner self, sits ever in the heart of all that’s born, by mind, mind ruling in the heart, is He revealed. That they who know, immortal they become.

(14) “The Man of the thousands of heads (and) thousands of eyes (and) thousands of feet, covering the earth on all sides, He stands beyond, ten finger-breadths.

(15) “The Man is verily this all, (both) what has been and what will be, Lord (too) of deathlessness which far all else surpasses.”

Important parallel quotations are to be found in the “Kathopanishad,” section 2, part 4.

(12) “The Man of the size of a thumb, resides in the midst within the self, of the past and the future, the Lord.

(13) “The Man of the size of a thumb like flame free from smoke, of past and of future the Lord, the same is to-day, to-morrow the same will He be.”

Who this Tom-Thumb is can easily be divined—the phallic symbol of the libido. The phallus is this hero dwarf, who performs great deeds; he, this ugly god in homely form, who is the great doer of wonders, since he is the visible expression of the creative strength incarnate in man. This extraordinary contrast is also very striking in “Faust” (the mother scene):

Here the devil again puts into Faust’s hand the marvellous tool, a phallic symbol of the libido, as once before in the beginning the devil, in the form of the black dog, accompanied Faust, when he introduced himself with the words:

United to this strength, Faust succeeded in accomplishing his real life task, at first through evil adventure and then for the benefit of humanity, for without the evil there is no creative power. Here in the mysterious mother scene, where the poet unveils the last mystery of the creative power to the initiated, Faust has need of the phallic magic wand (in the magic strength of which he has at first no confidence), in order to perform the greatest of wonders, namely, the creation of Paris and Helen. With that Faust attains the divine power of working miracles, and, indeed, only by means of this small, insignificant instrument. This paradoxical impression seems to be very ancient, for even the Upanishads could say the following of the dwarf god:

132(19) “Without hands, without feet, He moveth, He graspeth: Eyeless He seeth, (and) earless He heareth: He knoweth what is to be known, yet is there no knower of Him. Him call the first, mighty the Man.

(20) “Smaller than small, (yet) greater than great in the heart of this creature the self doth repose ... etc.”

The phallus is the being, which moves without limbs, which sees without eyes, which knows the future; and as symbolic representative of the universal creative power existent everywhere immortality is vindicated in it. It is always thought of as entirely independent, an idea current not only in antiquity, but also apparent in the pornographic drawings of our children and artists. It is a seer, an artist and a worker of wonders; therefore it should not surprise us when certain phallic characteristics are found again in the mythological seer, artist and sorcerer. Hephaestus, Wieland the smith, and Mani, the founder of Manicheism, whose followers were also famous, have crippled feet. The ancient seer Melampus possessed a suggestive name (Blackfoot),^[212] and it seems also to be typical for seers to be blind. Dwarfed stature, ugliness and deformity have become especially typical for those mysterious chthonian gods, the sons of Hephaestus, the Cabiri,^[213] to whom great power to perform miracles was ascribed. The name signifies “powerful,” and the Samothracian cult is most intimately united with that of the ithyphallic Hermes, who, according to the account of Herodotus, was brought to Attica by the Pelasgians. They are also called μεγάλοι θεοί, the great gods. Their near relations are the “Idaean dactyli” (finger or Idaean 133thumb),^[214] to whom the mother of the gods had taught the blacksmith’s art. (“The key will scent the true place from all others! follow it down!—’twill lead thee to the Mothers!”) They were the first leaders, the teachers of Orpheus, and invented the Ephesian magic formulas and the musical rhythms.^[215] The characteristic disparity which is shown above in the Upanishad text, and in “Faust,” is also found here, since the gigantic Hercules passed as an Idaean dactyl.

The colossal Phrygians, the skilled servants of Rhea,^[216] were also Dactyli. The Babylonian teacher of wisdom, Oannes,^[217] was represented in a phallic fish form.^[218] The two sun heroes, the Dioscuri, stand in relation to the Cabiri;^[219] they also wear the remarkable pointed head-covering (Pileus) which is peculiar to these mysterious gods,^[220] and which is perpetuated from that time on as a secret mark of identification. Attis (the elder brother of Christ) wears the pointed cap, just as does Mithra. It has also become traditional for our present-day chthonian infantile gods,^[221] the brownies (Penates), and all the typical kind of dwarfs. Freud^[222] has already called our attention to the phallic meaning of the hat in modern phantasies. A further significance is that probably the pointed cap represents the foreskin. In order not to go too far afield from my theme, I must be satisfied here merely to present the suggestion. But at a later opportunity I shall return to this point with detailed proof.

The dwarf form leads to the figure of the divine boy, the puer eternus, the young Dionysus, Jupiter Anxurus, Tages,^[223] and so on. In the vase painting of Thebes, 134already mentioned, a bearded Dionysus is represented as ΚΑΒΕΙΡΟΣ, together with a figure of a boy as Παῖς, followed by a caricatured boy’s figure designated as ΠΡΑΤΟΛΑΟΣ and then again a caricatured man, which is represented as ΜΙΤΟΣ.^[224] Μίτος really means thread, but in orphic speech it stands for semen. It was conjectured that this collection corresponded to a group of statuary in the sanctuary of a cult. This supposition is supported by the history of the cult as far as it is known; it is an original Phœnician cult of father and son;^[225] of an old and young Cabir who were more or less assimilated with the Grecian gods. The double figures of the adult and the child Dionysus lend themselves particularly to this assimilation. One might also call this the cult of the large and small man. Now, under various aspects, Dionysus is a phallic god in whose worship the phallus held an important place; for example, in the cult of the Argivian Bull—Dionysus. Moreover, the phallic herme of the god has given occasion for a personification of the phallus of Dionysus, in the form of the god Phales, who is nothing else but a Priapus. He is called ἑταῖρος or σύγκωμος Βάκχου^[226].^[227] Corresponding to this state of affairs, one cannot very well fail to recognize in the previously mentioned Cabiric representation, and in the added boy’s figure, the picture of man and his penis.^[228] The previously mentioned paradox in the Upanishad text of large and small, of giant and dwarf, is expressed more mildly here by man and boy, or father and son.^[229] The motive of deformity which is used constantly by the 135Cabiric cult is present also in the vase picture, while the parallel figures to Dionysus and Παῖς are the caricatured Μίτος and Πρατόλαος. Just as formerly the difference in size gave occasion for division, so does the deformity here.^[230]

Without first bringing further proof to bear, I may remark that from this knowledge especially strong sidelights are thrown upon the original psychologic meaning of the religious heroes. Dionysus stands in an intimate relation with the psychology of the early Asiatic God who died and rose again from the dead and whose manifold manifestations have been brought together in the figure of Christ into a firm personality enduring for centuries. We gain from our premise the knowledge that these heroes, as well as their typical fates, are personifications of the human libido and its typical fates. They are imagery, like the figures of our nightly dreams—the actors and interpreters of our secret thoughts. And since we, in the present day, have the power to decipher the symbolism of dreams and thereby surmise the mysterious psychologic history of development of the individual, so a way is here opened to the understanding of the secret springs of impulse beneath the psychologic development of races. Our previous trains of thought, which demonstrate the phallic side of the symbolism of the libido, also show how thoroughly justified is the term “libido.”^[231] Originally taken from the sexual sphere, this word has become the most frequent technical expression of psychoanalysis, for the simple reason that its significance is wide enough to cover all the unknown and 136countless manifestations of the Will in the sense of Schopenhauer. It is sufficiently comprehensive and rich in meaning to characterize the real nature of the psychical entity which it includes. The exact classical significance of the word libido qualifies it as an entirely appropriate term. Libido is taken in a very wide sense in Cicero:^[232]

“(Volunt ex duobus opinatis) bonis (nasci) Libidinem et Lætitiam; ut sit lætitia præsentium bonorum: libido futurorum.—Lætitia autem et Libido in bonorum opinione versantur, cum Libido ad id, quod videtur bonum, illecta et inflammata rapiatur.—Natura enim omnes ea, quæ bona videntur, sequuntur, fugiuntque contraria. Quamobrem simul objecta species cuiuspiam est, quod bonum videatur, ad id adipiscendum impellit ipsa natura. Id cum constanter prudenterque fit, ejusmodi appetitionem stoici βούλησιν appellant, nos appellamus voluntatem; eam illi putant in solo esse sapiente, quam sic definiunt; voluntas est quæ quid cum ratione desiderat: quæ autem ratione adversa incitata est vehementius, ea libido est, vel cupiditas effrenata, quæ in omnibus stultis invenitur.”^[233]

The meaning of libido here is “to wish,” and in the stoical distinction of will, dissolute desire. Cicero^[234] used “libido” in a corresponding sense:

In the same sense Sallust says:

In another place in a milder and more general sense, which completely approaches the analytical use:

“Magisque in decoris armis et militaribus equis, quam in scortis et conviviis libidinem habebant.”^[235]

Also:

The use of libido is so general that the phrase “libido est scire” merely had the significance of “I will, it pleases me.” In the phrase “aliquam libido urinæ lacessit” libido had the meaning of urgency. The significance of sexual desire is also present in the classics.

This general classical application of the conception agrees with the corresponding etymological context of the word, libido or lubido (with libet, more ancient lubet), it pleases me, and libens or lubens = gladly, willingly. Sanskrit, lúbhyati = to experience violent longing, lôbhayati = excites longing, lubdha-h = eager, lôbha-h = longing, eagerness. Gothic = liufs, and Old High German liob = love. Moreover, in Gothic, lubains was represented as hope; and Old High German, lobôn = to praise, lob = commendation, praise, glory; Old Bulgarian, ljubiti = to love, ljuby = love; Lithuanian, liáupsinti 138= to praise.^[236] It can be said that the conception of libido as developed in the new work of Freud and of his school has functionally the same significance in the biological territory as has the conception of energy since the time of Robert Mayer in the physical realm.^[237] It may not be superfluous to say something more at this point concerning the conception of libido after we have followed the formation of its symbol to its highest expression in the human form of the religious hero.

The chief source of the history of the analytic conception of libido is Freud’s “Three Contributions to the Sexual Theory.” There the term libido is conceived by him in the original narrow sense of sexual impulse, sexual need. Experience forces us to the assumption of a capacity for displacement of the libido, because functions or localizations of non-sexual force are undoubtedly capable of taking up a certain amount of libidinous sexual impetus, a libidinous afflux.^[238] Functions or objects could, therefore, obtain sexual value, which under normal circumstances really have nothing to do with sexuality.^[239] From this fact results the Freudian comparison of the libido with a stream, which is divisible, which can be dammed up, which overflows into branches, and so on.^[240] Freud’s original conception does not interpret “everything sexual,” although this has been asserted by critics, but recognizes the existence of certain forces, the nature of which are not well known; to which Freud, however, compelled by the notorious facts which are evident to any layman, grants the capacity to receive “affluxes of libido.” The hypothetical idea at the basis is the symbol of the “Triebbündel”^[241] (bundle of impulses), wherein the sexual impulse figures as a partial impulse of the whole 140system, and its encroachment into the other realms of impulse is a fact of experience. The theory of Freud, branching off from this interpretation, according to which the motor forces of a neurotic system correspond precisely to their libidinous additions to other (non-sexual) functional impulses, has been sufficiently proven as correct, it seems to me, by the work of Freud and his school.^[242] Since the appearance of the “Three Contributions,” in 1905, a change has taken place^[243] in the libido conception; its field of application has been widened. An extremely clear example of this amplification is this present work. However, I must state that Freud, as well as myself, saw the need of widening the conception of libido. It was paranoia, so closely related to dementia præcox, which seemed to compel Freud to enlarge the earlier limits of the conception. The passage in question, which I will quote here, word for word, reads:^[244]

“A third consideration which presents itself, in regard to the views developed here, starts the query as to whether we should accept as sufficiently effectual the universal receding of the libido from the outer world, in order to interpret from that, the end of the world: or whether in this case, the firmly rooted possession of the ‘I’ must not suffice to uphold the rapport with the outer world. Then one must either let that which we call possession of the libido (interest from erotic sources) coincide with interest in general, or else take into consideration the possibility that great disturbance in the disposition of the libido can also induce a corresponding disturbance in the possession of the ‘I.’ Now, these are the problems, which we are still absolutely helpless and unfitted to answer. Things would be different could we proceed from a safe fund of knowledge of instinct. But the truth is, we have nothing of that kind at our disposal. We understand instinct as the resultant of the reaction of the somatic and the psychic. 141We see in it the psychical representation of organic forces and take the popular distinction between the ‘I’ impulse and the sexual impulse, which appears to us to be in accord with the biological double rôle of the individual being who aspires to his own preservation as well as to the preservation of the species. But anything beyond this is a structure, which we set up, and also willingly let fall again in order to orient ourselves in the confusion of the dark processes of the soul; we expect particularly, from the psychoanalytic investigations into diseased soul processes, to have certain decisions forced upon us in regard to questions of the theory of instinct. This expectation has not yet been fulfilled on account of the still immature and limited investigations in these fields. At present the possibility of the reaction of libido disturbance upon the possession of the ‘I’ can be shown as little as the reverse; the secondary or induced disturbances of the libido processes through abnormal changes in the ‘I.’ It is probable that processes of this sort form the distinctive character of the psychoses. The conclusions arising from this, in relation to paranoia, are at present uncertain. One cannot assert that the paranoiac has completely withdrawn his interest from the outer world, nor withdrawn into the heights of repression, as one sometimes sees in certain other forms of hallucinatory psychoses. He takes notice of the outer world, he takes account of its changes, he is stirred to explanations by their influence, and therefore I consider it highly probable that the changed relation to the world is to be explained, wholly or in great part, by the deficiency of the libido interest.”

In this passage Freud plainly touches upon the question whether the well-known longing for reality of the paranoic dement (and the dementia præcox patients),^[245] to whom I have especially called attention in my book, “The Psychology of Dementia Præcox,”^[246] is to be traced back to the withdrawal of the “libidinous affluxes” alone, or whether this coincides with the so-called objective interest in general. It is hardly to be assumed 142that the normal “fonction du réel” (Janet)^[247] is maintained only through affluxes of libido or erotic interest. The fact is that in very many cases reality disappears entirely, so that not a trace of psychological adaptation or orientation can be recognized. Reality is repressed under these circumstances and replaced by the contents of the complex. One must of necessity say that not only the erotic interest but the interest in general has disappeared, that is to say, the whole adaptation to reality has ceased. To this category belong the stuporose and catatonic automatons.

I have previously made use of the expression “psychic energy” in my “Psychology of Dementia Præcox” because I was unable to establish the theory of this psychosis upon the conception of the displacement of the affluxes of libido. My experience, at that time chiefly psychiatric, did not enable me to understand this theory. However, the correctness of this theory in regard to neuroses, strictly speaking the transference neuroses, was proven to me later after increased experience in the field of hysteria and compulsion neuroses. In the territory of these neuroses it is mainly a question whether any portion of the libido which is spared through the specific repression becomes introverted and regressive into earlier paths of transference; for example, the path of the parental transference.^[248] With that, however, the former non-sexual psychologic adaptation to the environment remains preserved so far as it does not concern the erotic and its secondary positions (symptoms). The reality which is lacking to the patients is just that portion 143of the libido to be found in the neurosis. In dementia præcox, on the contrary, not merely that portion of libido which is saved in the well-known specific sexual repression is lacking for reality, but much more than one could write down to the account of sexuality in a strict sense. The function of reality is lacking to such a degree that even the motive power must be encroached upon in the loss. The sexual character of this must be disputed absolutely,^[249] for reality is not understood to be a sexual function. Moreover, if that were so, the introversion of the libido in the strict sense must have as a result a loss of reality in the neuroses, and, indeed, a loss which could be compared with that of dementia præcox. These facts have rendered it impossible for me to transfer Freud’s theory of libido to dementia præcox, and, therefore, I am of the opinion that Abraham’s investigation^[250] is hardly tenable theoretically, from the standpoint of the Freudian theory of libido. If Abraham believes that through the withdrawal of the libido from the outer world the paranoid system or the schizophrenic symptomatology results, then this assumption is not justified from the standpoint of the knowledge of that time, because a mere libido introversion and regression leads, speedily, as Freud has clearly shown, into the neuroses, and, strictly speaking, into the transference neuroses, and not into dementia præcox. Therefore, the transference of the libido theory to dementia præcox is impossible, because this illness produces a loss of reality which cannot be explained by the deficiency of the libido defined in this narrow sense.

It affords me especial satisfaction that our teacher also, 144when he laid his hand on the delicate material of the paranoic psychology, was forced to doubt the applicability of the conception of libido held by him at that time. The sexual definition of this did not permit me to understand those disturbances of function, which affect the vague territory of the hunger instinct just as much as that of the sexual instinct. For a long time the theory of libido seemed to me inapplicable to dementia præcox. With increasing experience in analytical work, however, I became aware of a gradual change in my conception of libido. In place of the descriptive definition of the “Three Contributions” there gradually grew up a generic definition of the libido, which rendered it possible for me to replace the expression “psychic energy” by the term “libido.” I was forced to ask myself whether indeed the function of reality to-day does not consist only in its smaller part of libido sexualis and in the greater part of other impulses? It is still a very important question whether phylogenetically the function of reality is not, at least in great part, of sexual origin. To answer this question directly in regard to the function of reality is not possible, but we shall attempt to come to an understanding indirectly.

A fleeting glance at the history of evolution is sufficient to teach us that countless complicated functions to which to-day must be denied any sexual character were originally pure derivations from the general impulse of propagation. During the ascent through the animal kingdom an important displacement in the fundamentals of the procreative instinct has taken place. The mass of 145the reproductive products with the uncertainty of fertilization has more and more been replaced by a controlled impregnation and an effective protection of the offspring. In this way part of the energy required in the production of eggs and sperma has been transposed into the creation of mechanisms for allurement and for protection of the young. Thus we discover the first instincts of art in animals used in the service of the impulse of creation, and limited to the breeding season. The original sexual character of these biological institutions became lost in their organic fixation and functional independence. Even if there can be no doubt about the sexual origin of music, still it would be a poor, unæsthetic generalization if one were to include music in the category of sexuality. A similar nomenclature would then lead us to classify the cathedral of Cologne as mineralogy because it is built of stones. It can be a surprise only to those to whom the history of evolution is unknown to find how few things there really are in human life which cannot be reduced in the last analysis to the instinct of procreation. It includes very nearly everything, I think, which is beloved and dear to us. We spoke just now of libido as the creative impulse and at the same time we allied ourselves with the conception which opposes libido to hunger in the same way that the instinct of the preservation of the species is opposed to the instinct of self-preservation. In nature, this artificial distinction does not exist. Here we see only a continuous life impulse, a will to live which will attain the creation of the whole species through the preservation of the individual. Thus far this conception coincides with 146the idea of the Will in Schopenhauer, for we can conceive Will objectively, only as a manifestation of an internal desire. This throwing of psychological perceptions into material reality is characterized philosophically as “introjection.” (Ferenczi’s conception of “introjection” denoted the reverse, that is, the taking of the outer world into the inner world.)^[251] Naturally, the conception of the world was distorted by introjection. Freud’s conception of the principle of desire is a voluntary formulation of the idea of introjection, while his once more voluntarily conceived “principle of reality” corresponds functionally to that which I designate as “corrective of reality,” and R. Avenarius^[252] designates as “empiriokritische Prinzipialkoordination.” The conception of power owes its existence to this very introjection; this has already been said expressively by Galileo in his remark that its origin is to be sought in the subjective perception of the muscular power of the individual. Because we have already arrived at the daring assumption that the libido, which was employed originally in the exclusive service of egg and seed production, now appears firmly organized in the function of nest-building, and can no longer be employed otherwise; similarly this conception forces us to relate it to every desire, including hunger. For now we can no longer make any essential distinction between the will to build a nest and the will to eat. This view brings us to a conception of libido, which extends over the boundaries of the physical sciences into a philosophical aspect—to a conception of the will in general. I must give this bit of psychological “Voluntarismus” into the hands of the 147philosophers for them to manage. For the rest I refer to the words of Schopenhauer^[253] relating to this. In connection with the psychology of this conception (by which I understand neither metapsychology nor metaphysics) I am reminded here of the cosmogenic meaning of Eros in Plato and Hesiod,^[254] and also of the orphic figure of Phanes, the “shining one,” the first created, the “father of Eros.” Phanes has also orphically the significance of Priapus; he is a god of love, bisexual and similar to the Theban Dionysus Lysios.^[255] The orphic meaning of Phanes is similar to that of the Indian Kâma, the god of love, which is also the cosmogenic principle. To Plotinus, of the Neo-Platonic school, the world-soul is the energy of the intellect.^[256] Plotinus compares “The One,” the creative primal principle, with light in general; the intellect with the Sun (♂), the world-soul with the moon (♀). In another comparison Plotinus compares “The One” with the Father, the intellect with the Son.^[257] The “One” designated as Uranus is transcendent. The son as Kronos has dominion over the visible world. The world-soul (designated as Zeus) appears as subordinate to him. The “One,” or the Usia of the whole existence is designated by Plotinus as hypostatic, also as the three forms of emanation, also μία οὐσία ἐν τρισὶν ὑποστάσεσιν.^[258] As Drews observed, this is also the formula of the Christian Trinity (God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost) as it was decided upon at the councils of Nicea and Constantinople.^[259] It may also be noticed that certain early Christian sectarians attributed a maternal significance 148to the Holy Ghost (world-soul, moon). (See what follows concerning Chi of Timæus.) According to Plotinus, the world-soul has a tendency toward a divided existence and towards divisibility, the conditio sine qua non of all change, creation and procreation (also a maternal quality). It is an “unending all of life” and wholly energy; it is a living organism of ideas, which attain in it effectiveness and reality.^[260] The intellect is its procreator, its father, which, having conceived it, brings it to development in thought.^[261]

“What lies enclosed in the intellect, comes to development in the world-soul as logos, fills it with meaning and makes it as if intoxicated with nectar.”^[262]

Nectar is analogous to soma, the drink of fertility and of life, also to sperma. The soul is fructified by the intellect; as oversoul it is called heavenly Aphrodite, as the undersoul the earthly Aphrodite. “It knows the birth pangs,”^[263] and so on. The bird of Aphrodite, the dove, is not without good cause the symbol of the Holy Ghost.

This fragment of the history of philosophy, which may easily be enlarged, shows the significance of the endopsychic perception of the libido and of its symbolism in human thought.

In the diversity of natural phenomena we see the desire, the libido, in the most diverse applications and forms. We see the libido in the stage of childhood almost wholly occupied in the instinct of nutrition, which takes care of the upbuilding of the body. With the development of the body there are successively opened new spheres of application 149for the libido. The last sphere of application, and surpassing all the others in its functional significance, is sexuality, which seems at first almost bound up with the function of nutrition. (Compare with this the influence on procreation of the conditions of nutrition in lower animals and plants.) In the territory of sexuality, the libido wins that formation, the enormous importance of which has justified us in the use of the term libido in general. Here the libido appears very properly as an impulse of procreation, and almost in the form of an undifferentiated sexual primal libido, as an energy of growth, which clearly forces the individual towards division, budding, etc. (The clearest distinction between the two forms of libido is to be found among those animals in whom the stage of nutrition is separated from the sexual stage by a chrysalis stage.)

From that sexual primal libido which produced millions of eggs and seeds from one small creature derivatives have been developed with the great limitation of the fecundity; derivatives in which the functions are maintained by a special differentiated libido. This differentiated libido is henceforth desexualized because it is dissociated from its original function of egg and sperma production; nor is there any possibility of restoring it to its original function. Thus, in general, the process of development consists in an increasing transformation of the primal libido which only produced products of generation to the secondary functions of allurement and protection of the young. This now presupposes a very different and very complicated relation to reality, a true 150function of reality, which, functionally inseparable, is bound up with the needs of procreation. Thus the altered mode of procreation carries with it as a correlate a correspondingly heightened adaptation to reality.^[264]

In this way we attain an insight into certain primitive conditions of the function of reality. It would be radically wrong to say that its compelling power is a sexual one. It was a sexual one to a large extent. The process of transformation of the primal libido into secondary impulses always took place in the form of affluxes of sexual libido, that is to say, sexuality became deflected from its original destination and a portion of it turned, little by little, increasing in amount, into the phylogenetic impulse of the mechanisms of allurement and of protection of the young. This diversion of the sexual libido from the sexual territory into associated functions is still taking place.^[265] Where this operation succeeds without injury to the adaptation of the individual it is called sublimation. Where the attempt does not succeed it is called repression.

The descriptive standpoint of psychology accepts the multiplicity of instincts, among which is the sexual instinct, as a special phenomenon; moreover, it recognizes certain affluxes of libido to non-sexual instincts.

Quite otherwise is the genetic standpoint. It regards the multiplicity of instincts as issuing from a relative unity, the primal libido;^[266] it recognizes that definite amounts of the primal libido are split off, as it were, associated with the newly formed functions and finally merged in them. As a result of this it is impossible, from the genetic standpoint, to hold to the strictly limited conception 151of libido of the descriptive standpoint; it leads inevitably to a broadening of the conception. With this we come to the theory of libido that I have surreptitiously introduced into the first part of this work for the purpose of making this genetic conception familiar to the reader. The explanation of this harmless deceit I have saved until the second part.

For the first time, through this genetic idea of libido, which in every way surpasses the descriptive sexual, the transference was made possible of the Freudian libido theory into the psychology of mental disease. The passage quoted above shows how the present Freudian conception of libido collides with the problem of the psychoses.^[267] Therefore, when I speak of libido, I associate with it the genetic conception which contains not only the immediate sexual but also an amount of desexualized primal libido. When I say a sick person takes his libido away from the outer world, in order to take possession of the inner world with it, I do not mean that he takes away merely the affluxes from the function of reality, but he takes energy away, according to my view, from those desexualized instincts which regularly and properly support the function of reality.

With this alteration in the libido conception, certain parts of our terminology need revision as well. As we know, Abraham has undertaken the experiment of transferring the Freudian libido theory to dementia præcox and has conceived the characteristic lack of rapport and the cessation of the function of reality as autoerotism. This conception needs revision. Hysterical introversion 152of the libido leads to autoerotism, since the patient’s erotic afflux of libido designed for the function of adaptation is introverted, whereby his ego is occupied by the corresponding amount of erotic libido. The schizophrenic, however, shuns reality far more than merely the erotic afflux would account for; therefore, his inner condition is very different from that of the hysteric. He is more than autoerotic, he builds up an intra-psychic equivalent for reality, for which purpose he has necessarily to employ other dynamics than that afforded by the erotic afflux. Therefore, I must grant to Bleuler the right to reject the conception of autoerotism, taken from the study of hysterical neuroses, and there legitimate, and to replace it by the conception of autismus.^[268] I am forced to say that this term is better fitted to facts than autoerotism. With this I acknowledge my earlier idea of the identity of autismus (Bleuler) and autoerotism (Freud) as unjustified, and, therefore, retract it.^[269] This thorough revision of the conception of libido has compelled me to this.

From these considerations it follows necessarily that the descriptive psychologic conception of libido must be given up in order for the libido theory to be applied to dementia præcox. That it is there applicable is best shown in Freud’s brilliant investigation of Schreber’s phantasies. The question now is whether this genetic conception of libido proposed by me is suitable for the neuroses. I believe that this question may be answered affirmatively. “Natura non fecit saltum”—it is not merely to be expected but it is also probable that at least temporary functional disturbances of various degrees appear 153in the neuroses, which transcend the boundaries of the immediate sexual; in any case, this occurs in psychotic episodes. I consider the broadening of the conception of libido which has developed through the most recent analytic work as a real advance which will prove of especial advantage in the important field of the introversion psychoses. Proofs of the correctness of my assumption are already at hand. It has become apparent through a series of researches of the Zurich School, which are now published in part,^[270] that the phantastic substitution products which take the place of the disturbed function of reality bear unmistakable traces of archaic thought. This confirmation is parallel to the postulate asserted above, according to which reality is deprived, not merely of an immediate (individual) amount of libido, but also of an already differentiated or desexualized quantity of libido, which, among normal people, has belonged to the function of reality ever since prehistoric times. A dropping away of the last acquisition of the function of reality (or adaptation) must of necessity be replaced by an earlier mode of adaptation. We find this principle already in the doctrines of the neuroses, that is, that a repression resulting from the failure of the recent transference is replaced by an old way of transference, namely, through a regressive revival of the parent imago. In the transference neurosis (hysterical), where merely a part of the immediate sexual libido is taken away from reality by the specific sexual repression, the substituted product is a phantasy of individual origin and significance, with only a trace of those archaic traits found in the phantasies of those 154mental disorders in which a portion of the general human function of reality organized since antiquity has broken off. This portion can be replaced only by a generally valid archaic surrogate. We owe a simple and clear example of this proposition to the investigation of Honegger.^[271] A paranoic of good intelligence who has a clear idea of the spherical form of the earth and its rotation around the sun replaces the modern astronomical views by a system worked out in great detail, which one must call archaic, in which the earth is a flat disc over which the sun travels.^[272] (I am reminded of the sun-phallus mentioned in the first part of this book, for which we are also indebted to Honegger.) Spielrein has likewise furnished some very interesting examples of archaic definitions which begin in certain illnesses to overlay the real meanings of the modern word. For example, Spielrein’s patient had correctly discovered the mythological significance of alcohol, the intoxicating drink, to be “an effusion of seed.”^[273] She also had a symbolism of boiling which I must place parallel to the especially important alchemistic vision of Zosimos,^[274] who found people in boiling water within the cavity of the altar.^[275] This patient used earth in place of mother, and also water to express mother.^[276] I refrain from further examples because future work of the Zurich School will furnish abundant evidence of this sort.

My foregoing proposition of the replacement of the disturbed function of reality by an archaic surrogate is supported by an excellent paradox of Spielrein’s. She says: “I often had the illusion that these patients might 155be simply victims of a folk superstition.” As a matter of fact, patients substitute phantasies for reality, phantasies similar to the actually incorrect mental products of the past, which, however, were once the view of reality. As the Zosimos vision shows, the old superstitions were symbols^[277] which permitted transitions to the most remote territory. This must have been very expedient for certain archaic periods, for by this means convenient bridges were offered to lead a partial amount of libido over into the mental realm. Evidently Spielrein thinks of a similar biological meaning of the symbols when she says:^[278]

“Thus a symbol seems to me to owe its origin in general to the tendency of a complex for dissolution in the common totality of thought.... The complex is robbed by that of the personal element.... This tendency towards dissolution (transformation) of every individual complex is the motive for poetry, painting, for every sort of art.”

When here we replace the formal conception “complex” by the conception of the quantity of libido (the total effect of the complex), which, from the standpoint of the libido theory, is a justified measure, then does Spielrein’s view easily agree with mine. When primitive man understands in general what an act of generation is, then, according to the principle of the path of least resistance, he never can arrive at the idea of replacing the generative organs by a sword-blade or a shuttle; but this is the case with certain Indians, who explain the origin of mankind by the union of the two transference symbols. He then must be compelled to devise an analogous thing in order to bring a manifest sexual interest upon an asexual expression. 156The propelling motive of this transition of the immediate sexual libido to the non-sexual representation can, in my opinion, be found only in a resistance which opposes primitive sexuality.

It appears as if, by this means of phantastic analogy formation, more libido would gradually become desexualized, because increasingly more phantasy correlates were put in the place of the primitive achievement of the sexual libido. With this an enormous broadening of the world idea was gradually developed because new objects were always assimilated as sexual symbols. It is a question whether the human consciousness has not been brought to its present state entirely or in great part in this manner. It is evident, in any case, that an important significance in the development of the human mind is due to the impulse towards the discovery of analogy. We must agree thoroughly with Steinthal when he says that an absolutely overweening importance must be granted to the little phrase “Gleich wie” (even as) in the history of the development of thought. It is easy to believe that the carryover of the libido to a phantastic correlate has led primitive man to a number of the most important discoveries.

In the following pages I will endeavor to picture a concrete example of the transition of the libido. I once treated a patient who suffered from a depressive catatonic condition. The case was one of only a slight introversion psychosis; therefore, the existence of many hysterical features was not surprising. In the beginning of the analytic treatment, while telling of a very painful occurrence she fell into a hysterical-dreamy state, in which she showed all signs of sexual excitement. For obvious reasons she lost the knowledge of my presence during this condition. The excitement led to a masturbative act (frictio femorum). This act was accompanied by a peculiar gesture. She made a very violent rotary motion with the forefinger of the left hand on the left temple, as if she were boring a hole there. Afterwards there was complete amnesia for what had happened, and there was nothing to be learned about the queer gesture with her hand. Although this act can easily be likened to a boring into the mouth, nose or ear, now transferred to the temple, it belongs in the territory of infantile ludus sexualis^[279]—to the preliminary exercise preparatory to sexual activity. Without really understanding it, this gesture, 158nevertheless, seemed very important to me. Many weeks later I had an opportunity to speak to the patient’s mother, and from her I learned that her daughter had been a very exceptional child. When only two years old she would sit with her back to an open cupboard door for hours and rhythmically beat her head against the door^[280]—to the distraction of the household. A little later, instead of playing as other children, she began to bore a hole with her finger in the plaster of the wall of the house. She did this with little turning and scraping movements, and kept herself busy at this occupation for hours. She was a complete puzzle to her parents. From her fourth year she practised onanism. It is evident that in this early infantile activity the preliminary stage of the later trouble may be found. The especially remarkable features in this case are, first, that the child did not carry out the action on its own body, and, secondly, the assiduity with which it carried on the action.^[281] One is tempted to bring these two facts into a causal relationship and to say, because the child does not accomplish this action on her own body, perhaps that is the reason of the assiduity, for by boring into the wall she never arrives at the same satisfaction as if she executed the activity onanistically on her own body.

The very evident onanistic boring of the patient can be traced back to a very early stage of childhood, which is prior to the period of local onanism. That time is still psychologically very obscure, because individual reproductions and memories are lacking to a great extent, the same as among animals. The race characteristics (manner of life) predominate during the entire life of the animal, 159whereas among men the individual character asserts itself over the race type. Granting the correctness of this remark, we are struck with the apparently wholly incomprehensible individual activity of this child at this early age. We learn from her later life history that her development, which is, as is always the case, intimately interwoven with parallel external events, has led to that mental disturbance which is especially well known on account of its individuality and the originality of its productions, i. e. dementia præcox. The peculiarity of this disturbance, as we have pointed out above, depends upon the predominance of the phantastic form of thought—of the infantile in general. From this type of thinking proceed all those numerous contacts with mythological products, and that which we consider as original and wholly individual creations are very often creations which are comparable with nothing but those of antiquity. I believe that this comparison can be applied to all formations of this remarkable illness, and perhaps also to this special symptom of boring. We have already seen that the onanistic boring of the patient dated from a very early stage of childhood, that is to say, it was reproduced from that period of the past. The sick woman fell back for the first time into the early onanism only after she had been married many years, and following the death of her child, with whom she had identified herself through an overindulgent love. When the child died the still healthy mother was overcome by early infantile symptoms in the form of scarcely concealed fits of masturbation, which were associated with this very act of boring. As already observed, the primary 160boring appeared at a time which preceded the infantile onanism localized in the genitals. This fact is of significance in so far as this boring differs thereby from a similar later practice which appeared after the genital onanism. The later bad habits represent, as a rule, a substitution for repressed genital masturbation, or for an attempt in this direction. As such these habits (finger-sucking, biting the nails, picking at things, boring into the ears and nose, etc.) may persist far into adult life as regular symptoms of a repressed amount of libido.

As has already been shown above, the libido in youthful individuals at first manifests itself in the nutritional zone, when food is taken in the act of suckling with rhythmic movements and with every sign of satisfaction. With the growth of the individual and the development of his organs the libido creates for itself new avenues to supply its need of activity and satisfaction. The primary model of rhythmic activity, producing pleasure and satisfaction, must now be transferred to the zone of other functions, with sexuality as its final goal. A considerable part of the “hunger libido” is transferred into the “sexual libido.” This transition does not take place suddenly at the time of puberty, as is generally supposed, but very gradually in the course of the greater part of childhood. The libido can free itself only with difficulty and very slowly from that which is peculiar to the function of nutrition, in order to enter into the peculiarity of the sexual function. Two periods are to be distinguished in this state of transition, so far as I can judge—the epoch of suckling and the epoch of the displaced rhythmic activity. 161Suckling still belongs to the function of nutrition, but passes beyond it, however, in that it is no longer the function of nutrition, but rhythmic activity, with pleasure and satisfaction as a goal, without the taking of nourishment. Here the hand enters as an auxiliary organ. In the period of the displaced rhythmic activity the hand appears still more clearly as an auxiliary organ; the gaining of pleasure leaves the mouth zone and turns to other regions. The possibilities are now many. As a rule, other openings of the body become the objects of the libido interest; then the skin, and special portions of that. The activity expressed in these parts, which can appear as rubbing, boring, picking, and so on, follows a certain rhythm and serves to produce pleasure. After longer or shorter tarryings of the libido at these stations, it passes onward until it reaches the sexual zone, and there, for the first time, can be occasion for the beginning of onanistic attempts. In its migration the libido takes more than a little of the function of nutrition with it into the sexual zone, which readily accounts for the numerous and innate correlations between the functions of nutrition and sexuality. If, after the occupation of the sexual zone, an obstacle arises against the present form of application of the libido, then there occurs, according to the well-known laws, a regression to the nearest station lying behind, to the two above-mentioned periods. It is now of special importance that the epoch of the displaced rhythmic activity coincides in a general way with the time of the development of the mind and of speech. I might designate the period from birth until the occupation of the sexual zone as the presexual 162stage of development. This generally occurs between the third and fifth year, and is comparable to the chrysalis stage in butterflies. It is distinguished by the irregular commingling of the elements of nutrition and of sexual functions. Certain regressions follow directly back to the presexual stage, and, judging from my experience, this seems to be the rule in the regression of dementia præcox. I will give two brief examples. One case concerns a young girl who developed a catatonic state during her engagement. When she saw me for the first time, she came up suddenly, embraced me, and said, “Papa, give me something to eat.” The other case concerns a young maidservant who complained that people pursued her with electricity and that this caused a queer feeling in her genitals, “as if it ate and drank down there.”

These regressive phenomena show that even from the distance of the modern mind those early stages of the libido can be regressively reached. One may assume, therefore, that in the earliest states of human development this road was much more easily travelled than it is to-day. It becomes then a matter of great interest to learn whether traces of this have been preserved in history.

We owe our knowledge of the ethnologic phantasy of boring to the valuable work of Abraham,^[282] who also refers us to the writings of Adalbert Kuhn.^[283] Through this investigation we learn that Prometheus, the fire-bringer, may be a brother of the Hindoo Pramantha, that is to say, of the masculine fire-rubbing piece of wood. The Hindoo fire-bringer is called Mâtariçvan, and the activity 163of the fire preparation is always designated in the hieratic text by the verb “manthâmi,”^[284] which means shaking, rubbing, bringing forth by rubbing. Kuhn has put this verb in connection with the Greek μανθάνω, which means “to learn,” and has explained this conceptual relationship.^[285] The “tertium comparationis” might lie in the rhythm, the movement to and fro in the mind. According to Kuhn, the root “manth” or “math” must be traced from μανθάνω (μάθημα, μάθησις) to προ-μηθέομαι to Προμηθεύς,^[286] who is the Greek fire-robber. Through an unauthorized Sanskrit word “pramâthyus,” which comes by way of “pramantha,” and which possesses the double meaning of “Rubber” and “Robber,” the transition to Prometheus was effected. With that, however, the prefix “pra” caused special difficulty, so that the whole derivation was doubted by a series of authors, and was held, in part, as erroneous. On the other hand, it was pointed out that as the Thuric Zeus bore the especially interesting cognomen Προ-μανθεύς, thus Προ-μηθεύς might not be an original Indo-Germanic stem word that was related to the Sanskrit “pramantha,” but might represent only a cognomen. This interpretation is supported by a gloss of Hesychius, Ἰθάς: ὁ τῶν Τιτάνων κήρυξ Προμηθεύς.^[287] Another gloss of Hesychius explains ἰθαίνομαι (ιαίνω) as θερμαίνομαι, through which Ἰθάς attains the meaning of “the flaming one,” analogous to Αἴθων or Φλεγύας.^[288] The relation of Prometheus to 164pramantha could scarcely be so direct as Kuhn conjectures. The question of an indirect relation is not decided with that. Above all, Προμηθεύς is of great significance as a surname for Ἰθάς, since the “flaming one” is the “fore-thinker.” (Pramati = precaution is also an attribute of Agni, although pramati is of another derivation.) Prometheus, however, belongs to the line of Phlegians which was placed by Kuhn in uncontested relationship to the Indian priest family of Bhṛgu.^[289] The Bhṛgu are like Mâtariçvan (the “one swelling in the mother”), also fire-bringers. Kuhn quotes a passage, according to which Bhṛgu also arises from the flame like Agni. (“In the flame Bhṛgu originated. Bhṛgu roasted, but did not burn.”) This view leads to a root related to Bhṛgu, that is to say, to the Sanskrit bhrây = to light, Latin fulgeo and Greek φλέγω (Sanskrit bhargas = splendor, Latin fulgur). Bhṛgu appears, therefore, as “the shining one.” Φλεγύας means a certain species of eagle, on account of its burnished gold color. The connection with φλέγειν, which signifies “to burn,” is clear. The Phlegians are also the fire eagles.^[290] Prometheus also belongs to the Phlegians. The path from Pramantha to Prometheus passes not through the word, but through the idea, and, therefore, we should adopt this same meaning for Prometheus as that which Pramantha attains from the Hindoo fire symbolism.^[291]

The Pramantha, as the tool of Manthana (the fire sacrifice), is considered purely sexual in the Hindoo; the Pramantha as phallus, or man; the bored wood underneath as vulva, or woman.^[292] The resulting fire is the 165child, the divine son Agni. The two pieces of wood are called in the cult Purûravas and Urvaçî, and were thought of personified as man and woman. The fire was born from the genitals of the woman.^[293] An especially interesting representation of fire production, as a religious ceremony (manthana), is given by Weber:^[294]

“A certain sacrificial fire was lit by the rubbing together of two sticks; one piece of wood is taken up with the words: ‘Thou art the birthplace of the fire,’ and two blades of grass are placed upon it; ‘Ye are the two testicles,’ to the ‘adhârarani’ (the underlying wood): ‘Thou art Urvaçî’; then the utarârani (that which is placed on top) is anointed with butter. ‘Thou art Power.’ This is then placed on the adhârarani. ‘Thou art Purûravas’ and both are rubbed three times. ‘I rub thee with the Gâyatrîmetrum: I rub thee with the Trishtubhmeṭrum: I rub thee with the Jagatîmetrum.’”

The sexual symbolism of this fire production is unmistakable. We see here also the rhythm, the metre in its original place as sexual rhythm, rising above the mating call into music. A song of the Rigveda^[295] conveys the same interpretation and symbolism:

Side by side with the unequivocal coitus symbolism we see that the Pramantha is also Agni, the created son. The Phallus is the son, or the son is the Phallus. Therefore, Agni in the Vedic mythology has the threefold character. With this we are once more connected with the above-mentioned Cabiric Father-Son-Cult. In the modern German language we have preserved echoes of the primitive symbols. A boy is designated as “bengel” (short, thick piece of wood). In Hessian as “stift” or “bolzen” (arrow,^[298] wooden peg or stump). The Artemisia Abrotanum, which is called in German “Stabwurz” (stick root), is called in English “Boy’s Love.” (The vulgar designation of the penis as “boy” was remarked even by Grimm and others.) The ceremonial production of fire was retained in Europe as late as the nineteenth century as a superstitious custom. Kuhn mentions such a case even in the year 1828, which occurred in Germany. The solemn, magic ceremony was called the “Nodfyr”—“The fire of need”^[299]—and the charm was chiefly used against cattle epidemics. Kuhn cites from the chronicle of Lanercost of the year 1268 an especially noteworthy case of the “Nodfyr,”^[300] the ceremonies of which plainly reveal the fundamental phallic meaning:

“Pro fidei divinæ integritate servanda recolat lector, quod cum hoc anno in Laodonia pestis grassaretur in pecudes armenti, quam vocant usetati Lungessouht, quidam bestiales, habitu claustrales non animo, docebant idiotas patriæ ignem confrictione de lignis educere et simulacrum Priapi statuere, et per hæc bestiis succurrere. 167Quod cum unus laicus Cisterciensis apud Fentone fecisset ante atrium aulæ, ac intinctis testiculis canis in aquam benedictam super animalis sparsisset, etc.”^[301]

These examples, which allow us to recognize a clear sexual symbolism in the generation of fire, prove, therefore, since they originate from different times and different peoples, the existence of a universal tendency to credit to fire production not only a magical but also a sexual significance. This ceremonial or magic repetition of this very ancient, long-outlived observance shows how insistently the human mind clings to the old forms, and how deeply rooted is this very ancient reminiscence of fire boring. One might almost be inclined to see in the sexual symbolism of fire production a relatively late addition to the priestly lore. This may, indeed, be true for the ceremonial elaboration of the fire mysteries, but whether originally the generation of fire was in general a sexual action, that is to say, a “coitus-play,” is still a question. That similar things occur among very primitive people we learn from the Australian tribe of the Watschandies,^[302] who in the spring perform the following magic ceremonies of fertilization: They dig a hole in the ground, so formed and surrounded with bushes as to 168counterfeit a woman’s genitals. They dance the night long around this hole; in connection with this they hold spears in front of themselves in a manner to recall the penis in erection. They dance around the hole and thrust their spears into the ditch, while they cry to it, “Pulli nira, pulli nira, wataka!” (Non fossa, non fossa, sed cunnus!) Such obscene dances appear among other primitive races as well.^[303]

In this spring incantation are contained the elements of the coitus play.^[304] This play is nothing but a coitus game, that is to say, originally this play was simply a coitus in the form of sacramental mating, which for a long time was a mysterious element among certain cults, and reappeared in sects.^[305] In the ceremonies of Zinzendorf’s followers echoes of the coitus sacrament may be recognized; also in other sects.

One can easily think that just as the above-mentioned Australian bushmen perform the coitus play in this manner the same performance could be enacted in another manner, and, indeed, in the form of fire production. Instead of through two selected human beings, the coitus was represented by two substitutes, by Purûravas and Urvaçi, by Phallus and Vulva, by borer and opening. Just as the primitive thought behind other customs is really the sacramental coition so here the primal tendency is really the act itself. For the act of fertilization is the climax—the true festival of life, and well worthy to become the nucleus of a religious mystery. If we are justified in concluding that the symbolism of the hole in the earth used by the Watschandies for the fertilization of 169the earth takes the place of the coitus, then the generation of fire could be considered in the same way as a substitute for coitus; and, indeed, it might be further concluded as a consequence of this reasoning that the invention of fire-making is also due to the need of supplying a symbol for the sexual act.^[306]

Let us return, for a moment, to the infantile symptom of boring. Let us imagine a strong adult man carrying on the boring with two pieces of wood with the same perseverance and the energy corresponding to that of this child. He may very easily create fire by this play. But of greatest significance in this work is the rhythm.^[307] This hypothesis seems to me psychologically possible, although it should not be said with this that only in this way could the discovery of fire occur. It can result just as well by the striking together of flints. It is scarcely possible that fire was created in only one way. All I want to establish here is merely the psychologic process, the symbolic indications of which point to the possibility that in such a way was fire invented or prepared.

The existence of the primitive coitus play or rite seems to me sufficiently proven. The only thing that is obscure is the energy and emphasis of the ritual play. It is well known that those primitive rites were often of very bloody seriousness, and were performed with an extraordinary display of energy, which appears as a great contrast to the well-known indolence of primitive humanity. Therefore, the ritual activity entirely loses the character of play, and wins that of purposeful effort. If certain Negro races can dance the whole night long to three tones in 170the most monotonous manner, then, according to our idea, there is in this an absolute lack of the character of play pastime; it approaches nearer to exercise. There seems to exist a sort of compulsion to transfer the libido into such ritual activity. If the basis of the ritual activity is the sexual act, we may assume that it is really the underlying thought and object of the exercise. Under these circumstances, the question arises why the primitive man endeavors to represent the sexual act symbolically and with effort, or, if this wording appears to be too hypothetical, why does he exert energy to such a degree only to accomplish practically useless things, which apparently do not especially amuse him?^[308] It may be assumed that the sexual act is more desirable to primitive man than such absurd and, moreover, fatiguing exercises. It is hardly possible but that a certain compulsion conducts the energy away from the original object and real purpose, inducing the production of surrogates. The existence of a phallic or orgiastic cult does not indicate eo ipso a particularly lascivious life any more than the ascetic symbolism of Christianity means an especially moral life. One honors that which one does not possess or that which one is not. This compulsion, to speak in the nomenclature formulated above, removes a certain amount of libido from the real sexual activity, and creates a symbolic and practically valid substitute for what is lost. This psychology is confirmed by the above-mentioned Watschandie ceremony; during the entire ceremony none of the men may look at a woman. This detail again informs us from whence the libido is to be diverted. But this gives 171rise to the pressing question, Whence comes this compulsion? We have already suggested above that the primitive sexuality encounters a resistance which leads to a side-tracking of the libido on to substitution actions (analogy, symbolism, etc.). It is unthinkable that it is a question of any outer opposition whatsoever, or of a real obstacle, since it occurs to no savage to catch his elusive quarry with ritual charms; but it is a question of an internal resistance; will opposes will; libido opposes libido, since a psychologic resistance as an energic phenomenon corresponds to a certain amount of libido. The psychologic compulsion for the transformation of the libido is based on an original division of the will. I will return to this primal splitting of the libido in another place. Here let us concern ourselves only with the problem of the transition of the libido. The transition takes place, as has been repeatedly suggested by means of shifting to an analogy. The libido is taken away from its proper place and transferred to another substratum.

The resistance against sexuality aims, therefore, at preventing the sexual act; it also seeks to crowd the libido away from the sexual function. We see, for example, in hysteria, how the specific repression blocks the real path of transference; therefore, the libido is obliged to take another path, and that an earlier one, namely, the incestuous road which ultimately leads to the parents. Let us speak, however, of the incest prohibition, which hindered the very first sexual transference. Then the situation changes in so far that no earlier way of transference is left, except that of the presexual stage of development, 172where the libido was still partly in the function of nutrition. By a regression to the presexual material the libido becomes quasi-desexualized. But as the incest prohibition signifies only a temporary and conditional restriction of the sexuality, thus only that part of the libido which is best designated as the incestuous component is now pushed back to the presexual stage. The repression, therefore, concerns only that part of the sexual libido which wishes to fix itself permanently upon the parents. The sexual libido is only withdrawn from the incestuous component, repressed upon the presexual stage, and there, if the operation is successful, desexualized, by which this amount of libido is prepared for an asexual application. However, it is to be assumed that this operation is accomplished only with difficulty, because the incestuous libido, so to speak, must be artificially separated from the sexual libido, with which, for ages, through the whole animal kingdom, it was indistinguishably united. The regression of the incestuous component must, therefore, take place, not only with great difficulty, but also carry with it into the presexual stage a considerable sexual character. The consequence of this is that the resulting phenomena, although stamped with the character of the sexual act, are, nevertheless, not really sexual acts de facto; they are derived from the presexual stage, and are maintained by the repressed sexual libido, therefore possess a double significance. Thus the fire boring is a coitus (and, to be sure, an incestuous one), but a desexualized one, which has lost its immediate sexual worth, and is, therefore, indirectly useful to the propagation of the 173species. The presexual stage is characterized by countless possibilities of application, because the libido has not yet formed definite localizations. It therefore appears intelligible that an amount of libido which reaches this stage through regression is confronted with manifold possibilities of application. Above all, it is met with the possibility of a purely onanistic activity. But as the matter in question in the regressive component of libido is sexual libido, the ultimate object of which is propagation, therefore it goes to the external object (Parents); it will also introvert with this destination as its essential character. The result, therefore, is that the purely onanistic activity turns out to be insufficient, and another object must be sought for, which takes the place of the incest object. The nurturing mother earth represents the ideal example of such an object. The psychology of the presexual stage contributes the nutrition component; the sexual libido the coitus idea. From this the ancient symbols of agriculture arise. In the work of agriculture hunger and incest intermingle. The ancient cults of mother earth and all the superstitions founded thereon saw in the cultivation of the earth the fertilization of the mother. The aim of the action is desexualized, however, for it is the fruit of the field and the nourishment contained therein. The regression resulting from the incest prohibition leads, in this case, to the new valuation of the mother; this time, however, not as a sexual object, but as a nourisher.

The discovery of fire seems to be due to a very similar regression to the presexual stage, more particularly to the 174nearest stage of the displaced rhythmic manifestation. The libido, introverted from the incest prohibition (with the more detailed designation of the motor components of coitus), when it reaches the presexual stage, meets the related infantile boring, to which it now gives, in accordance with its realistic destination, an actual material. (Therefore the material is fittingly called “materia,” as the object is the mother as above.) As I sought to show above, the action of the infantile boring requires only the strength and perseverance of an adult man and suitable “material” in order to generate fire. If this is so, it may be expected that analogous to our foregoing case of onanistic boring the generation of fire originally occurred as such an act of quasi-onanistic activity, objectively expressed. The demonstration of this can never be actually furnished, but it is thinkable that somewhere traces of this original onanistic preliminary exercise of fire production have been preserved. I have succeeded in finding a passage in a very old monument of Hindoo literature which contains this transition of the sexual libido through the onanistic phase in the preparation of fire. This passage is found in Brihadâranyaka-Upanishad:^[309]

“In truth, he (Âtman)^[310] was as large as a woman and a man, when they embrace each other. This, his own self, he divided into two parts, out of which husband and wife were formed.^[311] With her, he copulated; from this humanity sprang. She, however, pondered: ‘How may he unite with me after he has created me from himself? Now I shall hide!’ Then she became a cow; he, however, became a bull and mated with her. From that sprang the horned cattle. Then she became a mare; he, however, 175became a stallion; she became a she-ass; he, an ass, and mated with her. From these sprang the whole-hoofed animals. She became a goat; he became a buck; she became an ewe; he became a ram, and mated with her. Thus were created goats and sheep. Thus it happened that all that mates, even down to the ants, he created—then he perceived: ‘Truly I myself am Creation, for I have created the whole world!’ Thereupon he rubbed his hands (held before the mouth) so that he brought forth fire from his mouth, as from the mother womb, and from his hands.”

We meet here a peculiar myth of creation which requires a psychologic interpretation. In the beginning the libido was undifferentiated and bisexual;^[312] this was followed by differentiation into a male and a female component. From then on man knows what he is. Now follows a gap in the coherence of the thought where belongs that very resistance which we have postulated above for the explanation of the urge for sublimation. Next follows the onanistic act of rubbing or boring (here finger-sucking) transferred from the sexual zone, from which proceeds the production of fire.^[313] The libido here leaves its characteristic manifestation as sexual function and regresses to the presexual stage, where, in conformity with the above explanation, it occupies one of the preliminary stages of sexuality, thereby producing, in the view expressed in the Upanishad, the first human art, and from there, as suggested by Kuhn’s idea of the root “manth,” perhaps the higher intellectual activity in general. This course of development is not strange to the psychiatrist, for it is a well-known psychopathological fact that onanism and excessive activity of phantasy are very closely related. (The sexualizing-autonomizing of the 176mind through autoerotism^[314] is so familiar a fact that examples of that are superfluous.) The course of the libido, as we may conclude from these studies, originally proceeded in a similar manner as in the child, only in a reversed sequence. The sexual act was pushed out of its proper zone and was transferred into the analogous mouth zone^[315]—the mouth receiving the significance of the female genitals; the hand and the fingers, respectively, receiving the phallic meaning.^[316] In this manner the regressively reoccupied activity of the presexual stage is invested with the sexual significance, which, indeed, it already possessed, in part, before, but in a wholly different sense. Certain functions of the presexual stage are found to be permanently suitable, and, therefore, are retained later on as sexual functions. Thus, for example, the mouth zone is retained as of erotic importance, meaning that its valuation is permanently fixed. Concerning the mouth, we know that it also has a sexual meaning among animals, inasmuch as, for example, stallions bite mares in the sexual act; also, cats, cocks, etc. A second significance of the mouth is as an instrument of speech, it serves essentially in the production of the mating call, which mostly represents the developed tones of the animal kingdom. As to the hand, we know that it has the important significance of the contrectation organ (for example, among frogs). The frequent erotic use of the hand among monkeys is well known. If there exists a resistance against the real sexuality, then the accumulated libido is most likely to cause a hyperfunction of those collaterals which are most adapted to compensate for the resistance, that is to say, 177the nearest functions which serve for the introduction of the act;^[317] on one side the function of the hand, on the other that of the mouth. The sexual act, however, against which the opposition is directed is replaced by a similar act of the presexual stage, the classic case being either finger-sucking or boring. Just as among apes the foot can on occasions take the place of the hand, so the child is often uncertain in the choice of the object to suck, and puts the big toe in the mouth instead of the finger. This last movement belongs to a Hindoo rite, only the big toe was not put in the mouth, but held against the eye.^[318] Through the sexual significance of the hand and mouth these organs, which in the presexual stage served to obtain pleasure, are invested with a procreating power which is identical with the above-mentioned destination, which aims at the external object, because it concerns the sexual or creating libido. When, through the actual preparation of fire, the sexual character of the libido employed in that is fulfilled, then the mouth zone remains without adequate expression; only the hand has now reached its real, purely human goal in its first art.

The mouth has, as we saw, a further important function, which has just as much sexual relation to the object as the hand, that is to say, the production of the mating call. In opening up the autoerotic ring (hand-mouth),^[319] where the phallic hand became the fire-producing tool, the libido which was directed to the mouth zone was obliged to seek another path of functioning, which naturally was found in the already existing love call. The excess of libido entering here must have had the usual 178results, namely, the stimulation of the newly possessed function; hence an elaboration of the mating call.

We know that from the primitive sounds human speech has developed. Corresponding to the psychological situation, it might be assumed that language owes its real origin to this moment, when the impulse, repressed into the presexual stage, turns to the external in order to find an equivalent object there. The real thought as a conscious activity is, as we saw in the first part of this book, a thinking with positive determination towards the external world, that is to say, a “speech thinking.” This sort of thinking seems to have originated at that moment. It is very remarkable that this view, which was won by the path of reasoning, is again supported by old tradition and other mythological fragments.

In Aitareyopanishad^[320] the following quotation is to be found in the doctrine of the development of man: “Being brooded-o’er, his mouth hatched out, like as an egg; from out his mouth (came) speech, from speech, the fire.” In Part II, where it is depicted how the newly created objects entered man, it reads: “Fire, speech becoming, entered in the mouth.” These quotations allow us to plainly recognize the intimate connection between fire and speech.^[321] In Brihadâranyaka-Upanishad is to be found this passage:

“‘Yayñavalkya,’ thus he spake, ‘when after the death of this man his speech entereth the fire, his breath into the wind, his eye into the sun, etc.’”

A further quotation from the Brihadâranyaka-Upanishad reads:

179“But when the sun is set, O Yayñavalkya, and the moon has set, and the fire is extinguished, what then serves man as light? Then speech serves him as light; then, by the light of speech he sits, and moves, he carries on his work, and he returns home. But when the sun is set, O Yayñavalkya, and the moon is set, and the fire extinguished, and the voice is dumb, what then serves man as light? Then he serves himself (Atman) as light; then, by the light of himself, he sits and moves, carries on his work and returns home.”

In this passage we notice that fire again stands in the closest relation to speech. Speech itself is called a “light,” which, in its turn, is reduced to the “light” of the Atman, the creating psychic force, the libido. Thus the Hindoo metapsychology conceives speech and fire as emanations of the inner light from which we know that it is libido. Speech and fire are its forms of manifestation, the first human arts, which have resulted from its transformation. This common psychologic origin seems also to be indicated by certain results of philology. The Indo-Germanic root bhâ designates the idea of “to lighten, to shine.” This root is found in Greek, φάω, φαίνω, φάος^[322]; in old Icelandic bán = white, in New High German bohnen = to make shining. The same root bhâ also designates “to speak”; it is found in Sanskrit bhan = to speak, Armenian ban = word, in New High German bann = to banish, Greek φᾱ-μί, ἔφαν, φấτις.^[323] Latin fâ-ri, fânum.

The root bhelso, with the meanings “to ring, to bark,” is found in Sanskrit bhas = to bark and bhâs = to talk, 180to speak; Lithuanian balsas = voice, tone. Really bhel-sô = to be bright or luminous. Compare Greek φάλος = bright, Lithuanian bálti = to become white, Middle High German blasz = pale.

The root lâ, with the meaning of “to make sound, to bark,” is found in Sanskrit las, lásati = to resound; and las, lásati = to radiate, to shine.

The related root lesô, with the meaning “desire,” is also found in Sanskrit las, lásati = to play; lash, láshati = to desire. Greek λάσταυρος = lustful, Gothic lustus, New High German Lust, Latin lascivus.

A further related root, lásô = to shine, to radiate, is found in las, lásati = to radiate, to shine.

This group unites, as is evident, the meanings of “to desire, to play, to radiate, and to sound.” A similar archaic confluence of meanings in the primal libido symbolism (as we are perhaps justified in calling it) is found in that class of Egyptian words which are derived from the closely related roots ben and bel and the reduplication benben and belbel. The original significance of these roots is “to burst forth, to emerge, to extrude, to well out,” with the associated idea of bubbling, boiling and roundness. Belbel, accompanied by the sign of the obelisk, of originally phallic nature, means source of light. The obelisk itself had besides the names of techenu and men also the name benben, more rarely berber and belbel.^[324] The libido symbolism makes clear this connection, it seems to me.

The Indo-Germanic root vel, with the meaning “to wave, to undulate” (fire), is found in Sanskrit ulunka 181= burning, Greek ἀλέα, Attic ἁλέα = warmth of the sun, Gothic vulan = to undulate, Old High German and Middle High German walm = heat, glow.

The related Indo-Germanic root vélkô, with the meaning of “to lighten, to glow,” is found in Sanskrit ulkă = firebrand, Greek Ϝελχᾶνος = Vulcan. This same root vel means also “to sound”; in Sanskrit vâní = tone, song, music. Tschech volati = to call.

The root svénô = to sound, to ring, is found in Sanskrit svan, svánati = to rustle, to sound; Zend qanañt, Latin sonâre, Old Iranian senm, Cambrian sain, Latin sonus, Anglo-Saxon svinsian = to resound. The related root svénos = noise, sound, is found in Vedic svánas = noise, Latin sonor, sonorus. A further related root is svonós = tone, noise; in Old Iranian son = word.

The root své (n), locative svéni, dative sunéi, means sun; in Zend qeñg = sun. (Compare above svénô, Zend qanañt); Gothic sun-na, sunnô.^[325] Here Goethe has preceded us:

We also must not forget the beautiful verse of Hölderlin:

Just as in archaic speech fire and the speech sounds (the mating call, music) appear as forms of emanation of the libido, thus light and sound entering the psyche become one: libido.

Manilius expresses it in his beautiful verses:

The idea of the Sanskrit têjas suggests the fundamental significance of the libido for the conception of the world in general. I am indebted to Dr. Abegg, in Zurich, a 183thorough Sanskrit scholar, for the compilation of the eight meanings of this word.

Têjas signifies:

1. Sharpness, cutting edge.

2. Fire, splendor, light, glow, heat.

3. Healthy appearance, beauty.

4. The fiery and color-producing power of the human organism (thought to be in the bile).

5. Power, energy, vital force.

6. Passionate nature.

7. Mental, also magic, strength; influence, position, dignity.

8. Sperma.

This gives us a dim idea of how, for primitive thought, the so-called objective world was, and had to be, a subjective image. To this thought must be applied the words of the “Chorus Mysticus”:

The Sanskrit word for fire is agnis (the Latin ignis);^[327] the fire personified is the god Agni, the divine mediator,^[328] whose symbol has certain points of contact with that of Christ. In Avesta and in the Vedas the fire is the messenger of the gods. In the Christian mythology certain parts are closely related with the myth of Agni. Daniel speaks of the three men in the fiery furnace:

“Then Nebuchadnezar, the King, was astonished, and rose up in haste and spake, and said unto his counsellors: ‘Did not we cast three men bound into the midst of the fire?’

184“They answered and said: ‘True, O King!’

“He answered and said: ‘Lo, I see four men loose, walking in the midst of the fire, and they have no hurt; and the form of the fourth is like the Son of God.’”

In regard to that the “Biblia pauperum” observes (according to an old German incunabulum of 1471):

“One reads in the third chapter of the prophet Daniel that Nebuchadnezar, the King, caused three men to be placed in a glowing furnace and that the king often went there, looked in, and that he saw with the three, a fourth, who was like the Son of God. The three signify for us, the Holy Trinity and the fourth, the unity of the being. Christ, too, in His explanation designated the person of the Trinity and the unity of the being.”

According to this mystic interpretation, the legend of the three men in the fiery furnace appears as a magic fire ceremony by means of which the Son of God reveals himself. The Trinity is brought together with the unity, or, in other words, through coitus a child is produced. The glowing furnace (like the glowing tripod in “Faust”) is a mother symbol, where the children are produced.^[329] The fourth in the fiery furnace appears as Christ, the Son of God, who has become a visible God in the fire. The mystic trinity and unity are sexual symbols. (Compare with that the many references in Inman: “Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism.”) It is said of the Saviour of Israel (the Messiah) and of his enemies, Isaiah x:17:

“And the light of Israel shall be for a fire, and his Holy One for a flame.”

In a hymn of the Syrian Ephrem it is said of Christ: “Thou who art all fire, have mercy upon me.”

185Agni is the sacrificial flame, the sacrificer, and the sacrificed, as Christ himself. Just as Christ left behind his redeeming blood, φάρμακον ἀθανασίας,^[330] in the stimulating wine, so Agni is the Soma, the holy drink of inspiration, the mead of immortality.^[331] Soma and Fire are entirely identical in Hindoo literature, so that in Soma we easily rediscover the libido symbol, through which a series of apparently paradoxical qualities of the Soma are immediately explained. As the old Hindoos recognized in fire an emanation of the inner libido fire, so too they recognized, in the intoxicating drink (Firewater, Soma-Agni, as rain and fire), an emanation of libido. The Vedic definition of Soma as seminal fluid confirms this interpretation.^[332] The Soma significance of fire, similar to the significance of the body of Christ in the Last Supper (compare the Passover lamb of the Jews, baked in the form of a cross), is explained by the psychology of the presexual stage, where the libido was still in part the function of nutrition. The “Soma” is the “nourishing drink,” the mythological characterization of which runs parallel to fire in its origin; therefore, both are united in Agni. The drink of immortality was stirred by the Hindoo gods like fire. Through the retreat of the libido into the presexual stage it becomes clear why so many gods were either defined sexually or were devoured.

As was shown by our discussion of fire preparation, the fire tool did not receive its sexual significance as a later addition, but the sexual libido was the motor power which led to its discovery, so that the later teachings of the 186priests were nothing but confirmations of its actual origin. Other primitive discoveries probably have acquired their sexual symbolism in the same manner, being also derived from the sexual libido.

In the previous statements, which were based on the Pramantha of the Agni sacrifice, we have concerned ourselves only with one significance of the word manthâmi or mathnâmi, that is to say, with that which expresses the movement of rubbing. As Kuhn shows, however, this word also possesses the meaning of tearing off, taking away by violence, robbing.^[333] As Kuhn points out, this significance is already extant in the Vedic text. The legend of its discovery always expresses the production of fire as a robbery. (In this far it belongs to the motive widely spread over the earth of the treasure difficult to attain.) The fact that in many places and not alone in India the preparation of fire is represented as having its origin in robbery, seems to point to a widely spread thought, according to which the preparation of fire was something forbidden, something usurped or criminal, which could be obtained only through stratagem or deeds of violence (mostly through stratagem).^[334] When onanism confronts the physician as a symptom it does so frequently under the symbol of secret pilfering, or crafty imposition, which always signifies the concealed fulfilment of a forbidden wish.^[335] Historically, this train of thought probably implies that the ritual preparation of fire was employed with a magic purpose, and, therefore, was pursued by official religions; then it became a ritual mystery,^[336] guarded by the priests and surrounded with 187secrecy. The ritual laws of the Hindoos threaten with severe punishment him who prepares fire in an incorrect manner. The fact alone that something is mysterious means the same as something done in concealment; that which must remain secret, which one may not see nor do; also something which is surrounded by severe punishment of body and soul; therefore, presumably, something forbidden which has received a license as a religious rite. After all has been said about the genesis of the preparation of fire, it is no longer difficult to guess what is the forbidden thing; it is onanism. When I stated before that it might be lack of satisfaction which breaks up the autoerotic ring of the displaced sexual activity transferred to the body itself, and thus opens wider fields of culture, I did not mention that this loosely closed ring of the displaced onanistic activity could be much more firmly closed, when man makes the other great discovery, that of true onanism.^[337] With that the activity is started in the proper place, and this, under certain circumstances, may mean a satisfaction sufficient for a long time, but at the expense of cheating sexuality of its real purpose. It is a fraud upon the natural development of things, because all the dynamic forces which can and should serve the development of culture are withdrawn from it through onanism, since, instead of the displacement, a regression to the local sexual takes place, which is precisely the opposite of that which is desirable. Psychologically, however, onanism is a discovery of a significance not to be undervalued. One is protected from fate, since no sexual need then has the power to give one up to life. For with onanism one has 188the greatest magic in one’s hands; one needs only to phantasy, and with that to masturbate, then one possesses all the pleasure of the world, and is no longer compelled to conquer the world of one’s desires through hard labor and wrestling with reality.^[338] Aladdin rubs his lamp and the obedient genii stand at his bidding; thus the fairy tale expresses the great psychologic advantage of the easy regression to the local sexual satisfaction. Aladdin’s symbol subtly confirms the ambiguity of the magic fire preparation.

The close relation of the generation of fire to the onanistic act is illustrated by a case, the knowledge of which I owe to Dr. Schmid, in Cery, that of an imbecile peasant youth who set many incendiary fires. At one of these conflagrations he drew suspicion to himself by his behavior. He stood with his hands in his trouser pockets in the door of an opposite house and gazed with apparent delight at the fire. Under examination in the insane asylum, he described the fire in great detail, and made suspicious movements in his trouser pockets with his hands. The physical examination undertaken at once showed that he had masturbated. Later he confessed that he had masturbated at the time when he had enjoyed the fire which he had enkindled himself.

The preparation of fire in itself is a perfectly ordinary useful custom, employed everywhere for many centuries, which in itself involved nothing more mysterious than eating and drinking. However, there was always a tendency from time to time to prepare fire in a ceremonious and mysterious manner (exactly as with ritual eating and 189drinking), which was to be carried out in an exactly prescribed way and from which no one dared differ. This mysterious tendency associated with the technique is the second path in the onanistic regression, always present by the side of culture. The strict rules applied to it, the zeal of the ceremonial preparations and the religious awe of the mysteries next originate from this source; the ceremonial, although apparently irrational, is an extremely ingenious institution from the psychologic standpoint, for it represents a substitute for the possibility of onanistic regression accurately circumscribed by law. The law cannot apply to the content of the ceremony, for it is really quite indifferent for the ritual act, whether it is carried out in this way or in that way. On the contrary, it is very essential whether the restrained libido is discharged through a sterile onanism or transposed into the path of sublimation. These severe measures of protection apply primarily to onanism.^[339]

I am indebted to Freud for a further important reference to the onanistic nature of the fire theft, or rather the motive of the treasure difficult of attainment (to which fire theft belongs). Mythology contains repeated formulas which read approximately as follows: The treasure must be plucked or torn off from a taboo tree (Paradise tree, Hesperides); this is a forbidden and dangerous act. The clearest example of this is the old barbaric custom in the service of Diana of Aricia: only he can become a priest of the goddess who, in her sacred grove, dares to tear off (“abzureissen”) a bough. The tearing off has been retained in vulgar speech (besides 190“abreiben,” rubbing) as a symbol of the act of onanism. Thus “reiben,” to rub, is like “reissen,” to break off, both of which are contained in manthami and united apparently only through the myth of the fire theft bound up in the act of onanism in a deeper stratum wherein “reiben,” properly speaking, “reissen,” is employed, but in a transferred sense. Therefore, it might perhaps be anticipated that in the deepest stratum, namely, the incestuous, which precedes the autoerotic stage,^[340] the two meanings coincide, which, through lack of mythological tradition, can perhaps be traced through etymology only.

Prepared by the previous chapters, we approach the personification of the libido in the form of a conqueror, a hero or a demon. With this, symbolism leaves the impersonal and neuter realm, which characterizes the astral and meteorologic symbol, and takes human form: the figure of a being changing from sorrow to joy, from joy to sorrow, and which, like the sun, sometimes stands in its zenith, sometimes is plunged in darkest night, and arises from this very night to new splendor.^[341] Just as the sun, guided by its own internal laws, ascends from morn till noon, and passing beyond the noon descends towards evening, leaving behind its splendor, and then sinks completely into the all-enveloping night, thus, too, does mankind follow his course according to immutable laws, and also sinks, after his course is completed, into night, in order to rise again in the morning to a new cycle in his children. The symbolic transition from sun to man is easy and practicable. The third and last creation of Miss Miller’s also takes this course. She calls this piece “Chiwantopel,” a “hypnagogic poem.” She gives us the following information about the circumstances surrounding the origin of this phantasy:

“After an evening of care and anxiety, I lay down to sleep at about half past eleven. I felt excited and unable to sleep, 192although I was very tired. There was no light in the room. I closed my eyes, and then I had the feeling that something was about to happen. The sensation of a general relaxation came over me, and I remained as passive as possible. Lines appeared before my eyes,—sparks and shining spirals, followed by a kaleidoscopic review of recent trivial occurrences.”

The reader will regret with me that we cannot know the reason for her cares and anxieties. It would have been of great importance for what follows to have information on this point. This gap in our knowledge is the more to be deplored because, between the first poem in 1898 and the time of the phantasy here discussed (1902), four whole years have passed. All information is lacking regarding this period, during which the great problem surely survived in the unconscious. Perhaps this lack has its advantages in that our interest is not diverted from the universal applicability of the phantasy here produced by sympathy in regard to the personal fate of the author. Therefore, something is obviated which often prevents the analyst in his daily task from looking away from the tedious toil of detail to that wider relation which reveals each neurotic conflict to be involved with human fate as a whole.

The condition depicted by the author here corresponds to such a one as usually precedes an intentional somnambulism^[342] often described by spiritualistic mediums. A certain inclination to listen to these low nocturnal voices must be assumed; otherwise such fine and hardly perceptible inner experiences pass unnoticed. We recognize in this listening a current of the libido leading inward 193and beginning to flow towards a still invisible, mysterious goal. It seems that the libido has suddenly discovered an object in the depths of the unconscious which powerfully attracts it. The life of man, turned wholly to the external by nature, does not ordinarily permit such introversion; there must, therefore, be surmised a certain exceptional condition, that is to say, a lack of external objects, which compels the individual to seek a substitute for them in his own soul. It is, however, difficult to imagine that this rich world has become too poor to offer an object for the love of human atoms; nor can the world and its objects be held accountable for this lack. It offers boundless opportunities for every one. It is rather the incapacity to love which robs mankind of his possibilities. This world is empty to him alone who does not understand how to direct his libido towards objects, and to render them alive and beautiful for himself, for Beauty does not indeed lie in things, but in the feeling that we give to them. That which compels us to create a substitute for ourselves is not the external lack of objects, but our incapacity to lovingly include a thing outside of ourselves. Certainly the difficulties of the conditions of life and the adversities of the struggle for existence may oppress us, yet even adverse external situations would not hinder the giving out of the libido; on the contrary, they may spur us on to the greatest exertions, whereby we bring our whole libido into reality. Real difficulties alone will never be able to force the libido back permanently to such a degree as to give rise, for example, to a neurosis. The conflict, which is the condition of every neurosis, 194is lacking. The resistance, which opposes its unwillingness to the will, alone has the power to produce that pathogenic introversion which is the starting point of every psychogenic disturbance. The resistance against loving produces the inability to love. Just as the normal libido is comparable to a steady stream which pours its waters broadly into the world of reality, so the resistance, dynamically considered, is comparable, not so much to a rock rearing up in the river bed which is flooded over or surrounded by the stream, as to a backward flow towards the source. A part of the soul desires the outer object; another part, however, harks back to the subjective world, where the airy and fragile palaces of phantasy beckon. One can assume the dualism of the human will for which Bleuler, from the psychiatric point of view, has coined the word “ambitendency”^[343] as something generally present, bearing in mind that even the most primitive motor impulse is in opposition; as, for example, in the act of extension, the flexor muscles also become innervated. This normal ambitendency, however, never leads to an inhibition or prevention of the intended act, but is the indispensable preliminary requirement for its perfection and coördination. For a resistance disturbing to this act to arise from this harmony of finely attuned opposition an abnormal plus or minus would be needed on one or the other side. The resistance originates from this added third.^[344] This applies also to the duality of the will, from which so many difficulties arise for mankind. The abnormal third frees the pair of opposites, which are normally most intimately united, 195and causes their manifestation in the form of separate tendencies; it is only thus that they become willingness and unwillingness, which interfere with each other. The Bhagavad-Gîtâ says, “Be thou free of the pairs of opposites.”^[345] The harmony thus becomes disharmony. It cannot be my task here to investigate whence the unknown third arises, and what it is. Taken at the roots in the case of our patients, the “nuclear complex” (Freud) reveals itself as the incest problem. The sexual libido regressing to the parents appears as the incest tendency. The reason this path is so easily travelled is due to the enormous indolence of mankind, which will relinquish no object of the past, but will hold it fast forever. The “sacrilegious backward grasp” of which Nietzsche speaks reveals itself, stripped of its incest covering, as an original passive arrest of the libido in its first object of childhood. This indolence is also a passion, as La Rochefoucauld^[346] has brilliantly expressed it:

“Of all passions, that which is least known to ourselves is indolence: it is the most ardent and malignant of them all, although its violence may be insensible, and the injuries it causes may be hidden; if we will consider its power attentively, we will see that it makes itself, upon all occasions, mistress of our sentiments, of our interests, and of our pleasures; it is the anchor, which has the power to arrest the largest vessels; it is a calm more dangerous to the most important affairs than rocks and the worst tempest. The repose of indolence is a secret charm of the soul which suddenly stops the most ardent pursuits and the firmest resolutions; finally to give the true idea of this passion, one must say that indolence is like a beatitude of the soul which consoles it for all its losses and takes the place of all its possessions.”

196This dangerous passion, belonging above all others to primitive man, appears under the hazardous mask of the incest symbol, from which the incest fear must drive us away, and which must be conquered, in the first place, under the image of the “terrible mother.”^[347] It is the mother of innumerable evils, not the least of which are neurotic troubles. For, especially from the fogs of the arrested remnants of the libido, arise the harmful phantasmagoria which so veil reality that adaptation becomes almost impossible. However, we will not investigate any further in this place the foundations of the incest phantasies. The preliminary suggestion of my purely psychologic conception of the incest problem may suffice. We are here only concerned with the question whether resistance which leads to introversion in our author signifies a conscious external difficulty or not. If it were an external difficulty, then, indeed, the libido would be violently dammed back, and would produce a flood of phantasies, which can best be designated as schemes, that is to say, plans as to how the obstacles could be overcome. They would be very concrete ideas of reality which seek to pave the way for solutions. It would be a strenuous meditation, indeed, which would be more likely to lead to anything rather than to a hypnagogic poem. The passive condition depicted above in no way fits in with a real external obstacle, but, precisely through its passive submission, it indicates a tendency which doubtless scorns real solutions and prefers phantastic substitutes. Ultimately and essentially we are, therefore, dealing with an internal conflict, perhaps after the manner of those earlier conflicts 197which led to the two first unconscious creations. We, therefore, are forced to conclude that the external object cannot be loved, because a predominant amount of libido prefers a phantastic object, which must be brought up from the depths of the unconscious as a compensation for the missing reality.

The visionary phenomena, produced in the first stages of introversion, are grouped among the well-known phenomena^[348] of hypnagogic vision. They form, as I explained in an earlier paper, the foundation of the true visions of the symbolic autorevelations of the libido, as we may now express it.

Miss Miller continues:

“Then I had the impression that some communication was immediately impending. It seemed to me as if there were re-echoed in me the words, ‘Speak, O Lord, for Thy servant listens; open Thou mine ears!’”

This passage very clearly describes the intention; the expression “communication” is even a current term in spiritualistic circles. The Biblical words contain a clear invocation or “prayer,” that is to say, a wish (libido) directed towards divinity (the unconscious complex). The prayer refers to Samuel, i:3, where Samuel at night was three times called by God, but believed that it was Eli calling, until the latter informed him that it was God himself who spoke, and that he must answer if his name was called again—“Speak, O Lord, for Thy Servant hears!” The dreamer uses these words really in an inverse sense, namely, in order to produce God with them. 198With that she directs her desires, her libido, into the depths of her unconscious.

We know that, although individuals are widely separated by the differences in the contents of their consciousness, they are closely alike in their unconscious psychology. It is a significant impression for one working in practical psychoanalysis when he realizes how uniform are the typical unconscious complexes. Difference first arises from individualization. This fact gives to an essential portion of the Schopenhauer and Hartmann philosophies a deep psychologic justification.^[349] The very evident uniformity of the unconscious mechanism serves as a psychologic foundation for these philosophic views. The unconscious contains the differentiated remnants of the earlier psychologic functions overcome by the individual differentiation. The reaction and products of the animal psyche are of a generally diffused uniformity and solidity, which, among men, may be discovered apparently only in traces. Man appears as something extraordinarily individual in contrast with animals.

This might be a tremendous delusion, because we have the appropriate tendency always to recognize only the difference of things. This is demanded by the psychologic adaptation which, without the most minute differentiation of the impressions, would be absolutely impossible. In opposition to this tendency we have ever the greatest difficulty in recognizing in their common relations the things with which we are occupied in every-day life. This recognition becomes much easier with things which are more remote from us. For example, it 199is almost impossible for a European to differentiate the faces in a Chinese throng, although the Chinese have just as individual facial formations as the Europeans, but the similarity of their strange facial expression is much more evident to the remote onlooker than their individual differences. But when we live among the Chinese then the impression of their uniformity disappears more and more, and finally the Chinese become individuals also. Individuality belongs to those conditional actualities which are greatly overrated theoretically on account of their practical significance. It does not belong to those overwhelmingly clear and therefore universally obtrusive general facts upon which a science must primarily be founded. The individual content of consciousness is, therefore, the most unfavorable object imaginable for psychology, because it has veiled the universally valid until it has become unrecognizable. The essence of consciousness is the process of adaptation which takes place in the most minute details. On the other hand, the unconscious is the generally diffused, which not only binds the individuals among themselves to the race, but also unites them backwards with the peoples of the past and their psychology. Thus the unconscious, surpassing the individual in its generality, is, in the first place, the object of a true psychology, which claims not to be psychophysical.

Man as an individual is a suspicious phenomenon, the right of whose existence from a natural biological standpoint could be seriously contested, because, from this point of view, the individual is only a race atom, and has a significance only as a mass constituent. The ethical 200standpoint, however, gives to the human being an individual tendency separating him from the mass, which, in the course of centuries, led to the development of personality, hand in hand with which developed the hero cult, and has led to the modern individualistic cult of personages. The attempts of rationalistic theology to keep hold of the personal Jesus as the last and most precious remnant of the divinity which has vanished beyond the power of the imagination corresponds to this tendency. In this respect the Roman Catholic Church was more practical, because she met the general need of the visible, or at least historically believed hero, through the fact that she placed upon the throne of worship a small but clearly perceptible god of the world, namely, the Roman Pope, the Pater patrum, and at the same time the Pontifex Maximus of the invisible upper or inner God. The sensuous demonstrability of God naturally supports the religious process of introversion, because the human figure essentially facilitates the transference, for it is not easy to imagine something lovable or venerable in a spiritual being. This tendency, everywhere present, has been secretly preserved in the rationalistic theology with its Jesus historically insisted upon. This does not mean that men loved the visible God; they love him, not as he is, for he is merely a man, and when the pious wished to love humanity they could go to their neighbors and their enemies to love them. Mankind wishes to love in God only their ideas, that is to say, the ideas which they project into God. By that they wish to love their unconscious, that is, that remnant of ancient humanity and the centuries-old 201past in all people, namely, the common property left behind from all development which is given to all men, like the sunshine and the air. But in loving this inheritance they love that which is common to all. Thus they turn back to the mother of humanity, that is to say, to the spirit of the race, and regain in this way something of that connection and of that mysterious and irresistible power which is imparted by the feeling of belonging to the herd. It is the problem of Antæus, who preserves his gigantic strength only through contact with mother earth. This temporary withdrawal into one’s self, which, as we have already seen, signifies a regression to the childish bond to the parent, seems to act favorably, within certain limits, in its effect upon the psychologic condition of the individual. It is in general to be expected that the two fundamental mechanisms of the psychoses, transference and introversion, are to a wide extent extremely appropriate methods of normal reaction against complexes; transference as a means of escaping from the complex into reality; introversion as a means of detaching one’s self from reality through the complex.

After we have informed ourselves about the general purposes of prayer, we are prepared to hear more about the vision of our dreamer. After the prayer, “the head of a sphinx with an Egyptian headdress” appeared, only to vanish quickly. Here the author was disturbed, so that for a moment she awoke. This vision recalls the previously mentioned phantasy of the Egyptian statue, whose rigid gesture is entirely in place here as a phenomenon of the so-called functional category. The light 202stages of the hypnosis are designated technically as “Engourdissement” (stiffening). The word Sphinx in the whole civilized world signifies the same as riddle: a puzzling creature who proposes riddles, like the Sphinx of Oedipus, standing at the portal of his fate like a symbolic proclamation of the inevitable. The Sphinx is a semi-theriomorphic representation of that “mother image” which may be designated as the “terrible mother,” of whom many traces are found in mythology. This interpretation is correct for Oedipus. Here the question is opened. The objection will be raised that nothing except the word “Sphinx” justifies the allusion to the Sphinx of Oedipus. On account of the lack of subjective materials, which in the Miller text are wholly lacking in regard to this vision, an individual interpretation would also be excluded. The suggestion of an “Egyptian” phantasy (Part I, Chapter II) is entirely insufficient to be employed here. Therefore we are compelled, if we wish to venture at all upon an understanding of this vision, to direct ourselves—perhaps in all too daring a manner—to the available ethnographic material under the assumption that the unconscious of the present-day man coins its symbols as was done in the most remote past. The Sphinx, in its traditional form, is a half-human, half-animal creature, which we must, in part, interpret in the way that is applicable to such phantastic products. The reader is directed to the deductions in the first part of this volume where the theriomorphic representations of the libido were discussed. This manner of representation is very familiar to the analyst, through 203the dreams and phantasies of neurotics (and of normal men). The impulse is readily represented as an animal, as a bull, horse, dog, etc. One of my patients, who had questionable relations with women, and who began the treatment with the fear, so to speak, that I would surely forbid him his sexual adventures, dreamed that I (his physician) very skilfully speared to the wall a strange animal, half pig, half crocodile. Dreams swarm with such theriomorphic representations of the libido. Mixed beings, such as are in this dream, are not rare. A series of very beautiful illustrations, where especially the lower half of the animal was represented theriomorphically, has been furnished by Bertschinger.^[350] The libido which was represented theriomorphically is the “animal” sexuality which is in a repressed state. The history of repression, as we have seen, goes back to the incest problem, where the first motives for moral resistance against sexuality display themselves. The objects of the repressed libido are, in the last degree, the images of father and mother; therefore the theriomorphic symbols, in so far as they do not symbolize merely the libido in general, have a tendency to present father and mother (for example, father represented by a bull, mother by a cow). From these roots, as we pointed out earlier, might probably arise the theriomorphic attributes of the Divinity. In as far as the repressed libido manifests itself under certain conditions, as anxiety, these animals are generally of a horrible nature. In consciousness we are attached by all sacred bonds to the mother; in the dream she pursues us as a terrible animal. The Sphinx, mythologically 204considered, is actually a fear animal, which reveals distinct traits of a mother derivate. In the Oedipus legend the Sphinx is sent by Hera, who hates Thebes on account of the birth of Bacchus; because Oedipus conquers the Sphinx, which is nothing but fear of the mother, he must marry Jocasta, his mother, for the throne and the hand of the widowed queen of Thebes belonged to him who freed the land from the plague of the Sphinx. The genealogy of the Sphinx is rich in allusions to the problem touched upon here. She is a daughter of Echnida, a mixed being; a beautiful maiden above, a hideous serpent below. This double creature corresponds to the picture of the mother; above, the human, lovely and attractive half; below, the horrible animal half, converted into a fear animal through the incest prohibition. Echnida is derived from the All-mother, the mother Earth, Gaea, who, with Tartaros, the personified underworld (the place of horrors), brought her forth. Echnida herself is the mother of all terrors, of the Chimaera, Scylla, Gorgo, of the horrible Cerberus, of the Nemean Lion, and of the eagle who devoured the liver of Prometheus; besides this she gave birth to a number of dragons. One of her sons is Orthrus, the dog of the monstrous Geryon, who was killed by Hercules. With this dog, her son, Echnida, in incestuous intercourse, produced the Sphinx. These materials will suffice to characterize that amount of libido which led to the Sphinx symbol. If, in spite of the lack of subjective material, we may venture to draw an inference from the Sphinx symbol of our author, we must say that the Sphinx represents an original incestuous amount 205of libido detached from the bond to the mother. Perhaps it is better to postpone this conclusion until we have examined the following visions.

After Miss Miller had concentrated herself again, the vision developed further:

“Suddenly an Aztec appeared, absolutely clear in every detail; the hands spread open, with large fingers, the head in profile, armored, headdress similar to the feather ornaments of the American Indian. The whole was somewhat suggestive of Mexican sculpture.”

The ancient Egyptian character of the Sphinx is replaced here by American antiquity—by the Aztec. The essential idea is neither Egypt nor Mexico, for the two could not be interchanged; but it is the subjective factor which the dreamer produces from her own past. I have frequently observed in the analysis of Americans that certain unconscious complexes, i.e. repressed sexuality, are represented by the symbol of a Negro or an Indian; for example, when a European tells in his dream, “Then came a ragged, dirty individual,” for Americans and for those who live in the tropics it is a Negro. When with Europeans it is a vagabond or a criminal, with Americans it is a Negro or an Indian which represents the individual’s own repressed sexual personality, and the one considered inferior. It is also desirable to go into the particulars of this vision, as there are various things worthy of notice. The feather cap, which naturally had to consist of eagles’ feathers, is a sort of magic charm. The hero assumes at the same time something of the sun-like character of this bird when he adorns himself with 206its feathers, just as the courage and strength of the enemy are appropriated in swallowing his heart or taking his scalp. At the same time, the feather crest is a crown which is equivalent to the rays of the sun. The historical importance of the Sun identification has been seen in the first part.^[351]

Especial interest attaches to the hand, which is described as “open,” and the fingers, which are described as “large.” It is significant that it is the hand upon which the distinct emphasis falls. One might rather have expected a description of the facial expression. It is well known that the gesture of the hand is significant; unfortunately, we know nothing about that here. Nevertheless, a parallel phantasy might be mentioned, which also puts the emphasis upon hands. A patient in a hypnagogic condition saw his mother painted on a wall, like a painting in a Byzantine church. She held one hand up, open wide, with fingers spread apart. The fingers were very large, swollen into knobs on the ends, and each surrounded by a small halo. The immediate association with this picture was the fingers of a frog with sucking discs at the ends. Then the similarity to the penis. The ancient setting of this mother picture is also of importance. Evidently the hand had, in this phantasy, a phallic meaning. This interpretation was confirmed by a further very remarkable phantasy of the same patient. He saw something like a “sky-rocket” ascending from his mother’s hand, which at a closer survey becomes a shining bird with golden wings, a golden pheasant, as it then occurs to his mind. We have seen in the previous chapter that 207the hand has actually a phallic, generative meaning, and that this meaning plays a great part in the production of fire. In connection with this phantasy, there is but one observation to make: fire was bored with the hand; therefore it comes from the hand; Agni, the fire, was worshipped as a golden-winged bird.^[352] It is extremely significant that it is the mother’s hand. I must deny myself the temptation to enter more deeply into this. Let it be sufficient to have pointed out the possible significance of the hand of the Aztec by means of these parallel hand phantasies. We have mentioned the mother suggestively with the Sphinx. The Aztec taking the place of the Sphinx points, through his suggestive hand, to parallel phantasies in which the phallic hand really belongs to the mother. Likewise we encounter an antique setting in parallel phantasies. The significance of the antique, which experience has shown to be the symbol for “infantile,” is confirmed by Miss Miller in this connection in the annotation to her phantasies, for she says:

“In my childhood, I took a special interest in the Aztec fragments and in the history of Peru and of the Incas.”

Through the two analyses of children which have been published we have attained an insight into the child’s small world, and have seen what burning interests and questions secretly surround the parents, and that the parents are, for a long time, the objects of the greatest interest.^[353] We are, therefore, justified in suspecting that the antique setting applies to the “ancients,” that is to say, the parents, and that consequently this Aztec has 208something of the father or mother in himself. Up to this time indirect hints point only to the mother, which is nothing remarkable in an American girl, because Americans, as a result of the extreme detachment from the father, are characterized by a most enormous mother complex, which again is connected with the especial social position of woman in the United States. This position brings about a special masculinity among capable women, which easily makes possible the symbolizing into a masculine figure.^[354]

After this vision, Miss Miller felt that a name formed itself “bit by bit,” which seemed to belong to this Aztec—“the son of an Inca of Peru.” The name is “Chi-wan-to-pel.” As the author intimated, something similar to this belonged to her childish reminiscences. The act of naming is, like baptism, something exceedingly important for the creation of a personality, because, since olden times, a magic power has been attributed to the name, with which, for example, the spirit of the dead can be conjured. To know the name of any one means, in mythology, to have power over that one. As a well-known example I mention the fairy tale of “Rumpelstilzchen.” In an Egyptian myth, Isis robs the Sun god Rê permanently of his power by compelling him to tell her his real name. Therefore, to give a name means to give power, invest with a definite personality.^[355] The author observed, in regard to the name itself, that it reminded her very much of the impressive name Popocatepetl, a name which belongs to unforgettable school memories, and, to the greatest indignation of the patient, very often emerges 209in an analysis in a dream or phantasy and brings with it that same old joke which one heard in school, told oneself and later again forgot. Although one might hesitate to consider this unhallowed joke as of psychologic importance, still one must inquire for the reason of its being. One must also put, as a counter question, Why is it always Popocatepetl and not the neighboring Iztaccihuatl, or the even higher and just as clear Orizaba? The last has certainly the more beautiful and more easily pronounced name. Popocatepetl is impressive because of its onomatopoetic name. In English the word is “to pop” (popgun), which is here considered as onomatopoesy; in German the words are Hinterpommern, Pumpernickel; Bombe; Petarde (le pet = flatus). The frequent German word Popo (Podex) does not indeed exist in English, but flatus is designated as “to poop” in childish speech. The act of defecation is often designated as “to pop.” A joking name for the posterior part is “the bum.” (Poop also means the rear end of a ship.) In French, pouf! is onomatopoetic; pouffer = platzen (to explode), la poupe = rear end of ship, le poupard = the baby in arms, la poupée = doll. Poupon is a pet name for a chubby-faced child. In Dutch pop, German Puppe and Latin puppis = doll; in Plautus, however, it is also used jokingly for the posterior part of the body; pupus means child; pupula = girl, little dollie. The Greek word ποππύζω designates a cracking, snapping or blowing sound. It is used of kissing; by Theocritus also of the associated noise of flute blowing. The etymologic parallels show a remarkable relationship between the part of the 210body in question and the child. This relationship we will mention here, only to let it drop at once, as this question will claim our attention later.

One of my patients in his childhood had always connected the act of defecation with a phantasy that his posterior was a volcano and a violent eruption took place, explosion of gases and gushings forth of lava. The terms for the elemental occurrences of nature are originally not at all poetical; one thinks, for example, of the beautiful phenomenon of the meteor, which the German language most unpoetically calls “Sternschnuppe” (the smouldering wick of a star). Certain South American Indians call the shooting star the “urine of the stars.” According to the principle of the least resistance, expressions are taken from the nearest source available. (For example, the transference of the metonymic expression of urination as Schiffens, “to rain.”)

Now it seems to be very obscure why the mystical figure of Chiwantopel, whom Miss Miller, in a note, compares to the control spirit of the spiritualistic medium,^[356] is found in such a disreputable neighborhood that his nature (name) was brought into relation with this particular part of the body. In order to understand this possibility, we must realize that when we produce from the unconscious the first to be brought forth is the infantile material long lost in memory. One must, therefore, take the point of view of that time in which this infantile material was still on the surface. If now a much-honored object is related in the unconscious to the anus, then one must conclude that something of a high valuation was 211expressed thereby. The question is only whether this corresponds to the psychology of the child. Before we enter upon this question, it must be stated that the anal region is very closely connected with veneration. One thinks of the traditional fæces of the Great Mogul. An Oriental tale has the same to say of Christian knights, who anointed themselves with the excrement of the pope and cardinals in order to make themselves formidable. A patient who is characterized by a special veneration for her father had a phantasy that she saw her father sitting upon the toilet in a dignified manner, and people going past greeted him effusively.^[357] The association of the anal relations by no means excludes high valuation or esteem, as is shown by these examples, and as is easily seen from the intimate connection of fæces and gold.^[358] Here the most worthless comes into the closest relation with the most valuable. This also happens in religious valuations. I discovered (at that time to my great astonishment) that a young patient, very religiously trained, represented in a dream the Crucified on the bottom of a blue-flowered chamber pot, namely, in the form of excrements. The contrast is so enormous that one must assume that the valuations of childhood must indeed be very different from ours. This is actually the truth. Children bring to the act of defecation and the products of this an esteem and interest^[359] which later on is possible only to the hypochondriac. We do not comprehend this interest until we learn that the child very early connects with it a theory of propagation.^[360] The libido afflux probably accounts for the enormous interest in this act. The 212child sees that this is the way in which something is produced, in which something comes out. The same child whom I reported in the little brochure “Über Konflikte der kindlichen Seele,” and who had a well-developed anal theory of birth, like little Hans, whom Freud made known to us, later contracted a habit of staying a long time on the toilet. Once the father grew impatient, went to the toilet and called, “Do come out of there; what are you making?” Whereupon the answer came from within, “A little wagon and two ponies.” The child was making a little wagon and two ponies, that is to say, things which at that time she especially wished for. In this way one can make what one wishes, and the thing made is the thing wished for. The child wishes earnestly for a doll or, at heart, for a real child. (That is, the child practised for his future biological task, and in the way in which everything in general is produced he made the doll^[361] himself as representative of the child or of the thing wished for in general.^[362]) From a patient I have learned a parallel phantasy of her childhood. In the toilet there was a crevice in the wall. She phantasied that from this crevice a fairy would come out and present her with everything for which she wished. The “locus” is known to be the place of dreams where much was wished for and created which later would no longer be suspected of having this place of origin. A pathological phantasy in place here is told us by Lombroso,^[363] concerning two insane artists. Each of them considered himself God and the ruler of the world. They created or produced the world by making it come forth from the rectum, 213just as the egg of birds originates in the egg canal. One of these two artists was endowed with a true artistic sense. He painted a picture in which he was just in the act of creation; the world came forth from his anus; the membrum was in full erection; he was naked, surrounded by women, and with all insignia of his power. The excrement is in a certain sense the thing wished for, and on that account it receives the corresponding valuation. When I first understood this connection, an observation made long ago, and which disturbed me greatly because I never rightly understood it, became clear to me. It concerned an educated patient who, under very tragic circumstances, had to be separated from her husband and child, and was brought into the insane asylum. She exhibited a typical apathy and slovenliness which was considered as affective mental deterioration. Even at that time I doubted this deterioration, and was inclined to regard it as a secondary adjustment. I took especial pains to ascertain how I could discover the existence of the affect in this case. Finally, after more than three hours’ hard work, I succeeded in finding a train of thought which suddenly brought the patient into a completely adequate and therefore strongly emotional state. At this moment the affective connection with her was completely reëstablished. That happened in the forenoon. When I returned at the appointed time in the evening to the ward to see her she had, for my reception, smeared herself from head to foot with excrement, and cried laughingly, “Do I please you so?” She had never done that before; it was plainly destined for me. The impression which I received 214was one of a personal affront and, as a result of this, I was convinced for years after of the affective deterioration of such cases. Now we understand this act as an infantile ceremony of welcome or a declaration of love.

The origin of Chiwantopel, that is to say, an unconscious personality, therefore means, in the sense of the previous explanation, “I make, produce, invent him myself.” It is a sort of human creation or birth by the anal route. The first people were made from excrement, potter’s earth, or clay. The Latin lutum, which really means “moistened earth,” also has the transferred meaning of dirt. In Plautus it is even a term of abuse, something like “You scum.” The birth from the anus also reminds us of the motive of “throwing behind oneself.” A well-known example is the oracular command, which Deucalion and Pyrrha, who were the only survivors from the great flood, received. They were to throw behind them the bones of the great mother. They then threw behind them stones, from which mankind sprang. According to a tradition, the Dactyli in a similar manner sprang from dust, which the nymph Anchiale threw behind her. There is also humorous significance attached to the anal products. The excrements are often considered in popular humor as a monument or memorial (which plays a special part in regard to the criminal in the form of grumus merdæ); every one knows the humorous story of the man who, led by the spirit through labyrinthian passages to a hidden treasure, after he had shed all his pieces of clothing, deposited excrement as a last guide post on his road. 215In a more distant past a sign of this kind possessed as great a significance as the dung of animals to indicate the direction taken. Simple monuments (“little stone figures”) have taken the place of this perishable mark.

It is noteworthy that Miss Miller quotes another case, where a name suddenly obtruded itself, parallel to the emerging into consciousness of Chiwantopel, namely, A-ha-ma-ra-ma, with the feeling that it dealt with something Assyrian.^[364] As a possible source of this, there occurred to her “Asurabama, who made cuneiform bricks,”^[365] those imperishable documents made from clay: the monuments of the most ancient history. If it were not emphasized that the bricks are “cuneiform,” then it might mean ambiguously “wedged-shaped bricks,” which is more suggestive of our interpretation than that of the author.

Miss Miller remarks that besides the name “Asurabama” she also thought of “Ahasuerus” or “Ahasverus.” This phantasy leads to a very different aspect of the problem of the unconscious personality. While the previous materials betrayed to us something of the infantile theory of creation, this phantasy opens up a vista into the dynamics of the unconscious creation of personality. Ahasver is, as is well known, the Wandering Jew; he is characterized by endless and restless wanderings until the end of the world. The fact that the author has thought of this particular name justifies us in following this trail. The legend of Ahasver, the first literary traces of which belong to the thirteenth century, seems to be of Occidental origin, and belongs to those ideas which possess indestructible 216vital energy. The figure of the Wandering Jew has undergone more literary elaboration than the figure of Faust, and nearly all of this work belongs to the last century. If the figure is not called Ahasver, still it is there under another name, perhaps as Count of St. Germain, the mysterious Rosicrucian, whose immortality was assured, and whose temporary residence (the land) was equally known.^[366] Although the stories about Ahasver cannot be traced back any earlier than the thirteenth century, the oral tradition can reach back considerably further, and it is not an impossibility that a bridge to the Orient exists. There is the parallel figure of Chidr, or “al Chadir,” the “ever-youthful Chidher” celebrated in song by Rueckert. The legend is purely Islamitic. The peculiar feature, however, is that Chidher is not only a saint, but in Sufic circles^[367] rises even to divine significance. In view of the severe monotheism of Islam, one is inclined to think of Chidher as a pre-Islamitic Arabian divinity who would hardly be officially recognized by the new religion, but might have been tolerated on political grounds. But there is nothing to prove that. The first traces of Chidher are found in the commentaries of the Koran, Buchâri and Tabare and in a commentary to a noteworthy passage of the eighteenth sura of the Koran. The eighteenth sura is entitled “the cave,” that is, after the cave of the seven sleepers, who, according to the legend, slept there for 309 years, and thus escaped persecution, and awoke in a new era. Their legend is recounted in the eighteenth sura, and divers reflections were associated with it. The wish-fulfilment idea of the legend 217is very clear. The mystic material for it is the immutable model of the Sun’s course. The Sun sets periodically, but does not die. It hides in the womb of the sea or in a subterranean cave,^[368] and in the morning is “born again,” complete. The language in which this astronomic occurrence is clothed is one of clear symbolism; the Sun returns into the mother’s womb, and after some time is again born. Of course, this event is properly an incestuous act, of which, in mythology, clear traces are still retained, not the least of which is the circumstance that the dying and resurrected gods are the lovers of their own mothers or have generated themselves through their own mothers. Christ as the “God becoming flesh” has generated himself through Mary; Mithra has done the same. These Gods are unmistakable Sun-gods, for the Sun also does this, in order to again renew himself. Naturally, it is not to be assumed that astronomy came first and these conceptions of gods afterwards; the process was, as always, inverted, and it is even true that primitive magic charms of rebirth, baptism, superstitious usages of all sorts, concerning the cure of the sick, etc., were projected into the heavens. These youths were born from the cave (the womb of mother earth), like the Sun-gods, in a new era, and this was the way they vanquished death. In this far they were immortal. It is now interesting to see how the Koran comes, after long ethical contemplations in the course of the same sura, to the following passage, which is of especial significance for the origin of the Chidher myth. For this reason I quote the Koran literally:

218“Remember when Moses said to his servant, ‘I will not stop till I reach the confluence of the two seas, or for eighty years will I journey on.’

“But when they reached their confluence they forgot their fish, and it took its way in the sea at will.

“And when they had passed on, Moses said to his servant, ‘Bring us our morning meal, for now we have incurred weariness from this our journey.’

“He said, ‘What thinkest thou? When we repaired to the rock for rest, then verily I forgot the fish; and none but Satan made me forget it, so as not to mention it; and it hath taken its way in the sea in a wondrous sort.’

“He said, ‘It is this we were in quest of.’ So they both went back retracing their footsteps.

“Then found they one of our servants to whom we had vouchsafed our mercy, and whom we had instructed with our knowledge;^[369]

“Moses said to him, ‘Shall I follow thee that thou teach me, for guidance of that which thou hast been taught?’

“He said, ‘Verily, thou canst by no means have patience with me; and how canst thou be patient in matters whose meaning thou comprehendest not?’”—Trans. Rodwell, page 188.

Moses now accompanies the mysterious servant of God, who does divers things which Moses cannot comprehend; finally, the Unknown takes leave of Moses, and speaks to him as follows:

“They will ask thee of Dhoulkarnein (the two-horned).^[370] Say: ‘I will recite to you an account of him.’

“Verily, we established his power upon the earth and we gave him a means to accomplish every end, so he followed his way;

“Until when he reached the setting of the sun, he found it to set in a miry forest; and hard by, he found a people....”

Now follows a moral reflection; then the narrative continues:

219“Then he followed his course further until he came to the place where the sun rises....”

If now we wish to know who is the unknown servant of God, we are told in this passage he is Dhulqarnein, Alexander, the Sun; he goes to the place of setting and he goes to the place of rising. The passage about the unknown servant of God is explained by the commentaries in a well-defined legend. The servant is Chidher, “the verdant one,” the never-tiring wanderer, who roams for hundreds and thousands of years over lands and seas, the teacher and counsellor of pious men; the one wise in divine knowledge—the immortal.^[371] The authority of the Tabari associates Chidher with Dhulqarnein; Chidher is said to have reached the “stream of life” as a follower of Alexander, and both unwittingly had drunk of it, so that they became immortal. Moreover, Chidher is identified by the old commentators with Elias, who also did not die, but who was taken to Heaven in a fiery chariot. Elias is Helios.^[372] It is to be observed that Ahasver also owes his existence to an obscure place in the holy Christian scriptures. This place is to be found in Matthew xvi:28. First comes the scene where Christ appoints Peter as the rock of his church, and nominates him the governor of his power.^[373] After that follows the prophecy of his death, and then comes the passage:

“Verily, I say unto you, there be some standing here, which shall not taste of death till they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.”

Here follows the scene of the transfiguration:

220“And was transfigured before them: and his face did shine as the sun, and his raiment was white as the light.

“And behold there appeared unto them Moses and Elias talking with him.

“Then answered Peter and said unto Jesus, ‘Lord, it is good for us to be here; if thou wilt, let us make here three tabernacles; one for thee and one for Moses and one for Elias.’”^[374]

From these passages it appears that Christ stands on the same plane as Elias, without being identified with him,^[375] although the people consider him as Elias. The ascension places Christ as identical with Elias. The prophecy of Christ shows that there exist aside from himself one or more immortals who shall not die until Parousai. According to John xxi: 22nd verse, the boy John was considered as one of these immortals, and in the legend he is, in fact, not dead but merely sleeping in the ground until Parousai, and breathes so that the dust swirls round his grave.^[376] As is evident, there are passable bridges from Christ by way of Elias to Chidher and Ahasuerus. It is said in an account of this legend^[377] that Dhulqarnein led his friend Chidher to the “source of life” in order to have him drink of immortality.^[378] Alexander also bathed in the stream of life and performed the ritual ablutions. As I previously mentioned in a footnote, according to Matthew xvii: 12th verse, John the Baptist is Elias, therefore primarily identical with Chidher. Now, however, it is to be noted that in the Arabian legend Chidher appears rather as a companion or accompanied (Chidher with Dhulqarnein or with Elias, “like unto them”; or identified with them^[379]). There are therefore, two similar figures who resemble each other, 221but who, nevertheless, are distinct. The analogous situation in the Christian legend is found in the scene by the Jordan where John leads Christ to the “source of life.” Christ is there, the subordinate, John the superior, similar to Dhulqarnein and Chidher, or Chidher and Moses, also Elias. The latter relation especially is such that Vollers compares Chidher and Elias, on the one side, with Gilgamesh and his mortal brother Eabani; on the other side, with the Dioscuri, one of whom is immortal, the other mortal. This relation is also found in Christ and John the Baptist,^[380] on the one hand, and Christ and Peter, on the other. The last-named parallel only finds its explanation through comparison with the Mithraic mysteries, where the esoteric contents are revealed to us through monuments. Upon the Mithraic marble relief of Klagenfurt^[381] it is represented how with a halo Mithra crowns Helios, who either kneels before him or else floats up to him from below. Mithra is represented on a Mithraic monument of Osterburken as holding in his right hand the shoulder of the mystic ox above Helios, who stands bowed down before him, the left hand resting on a sword hilt. A crown lies between them on the ground. Cumont observes about this scene that it probably represents the divine prototype of the ceremony of the initiation into the degree of Miles, in which a sword and a crown were conferred upon the mystic. Helios is, therefore, appointed the Miles of Mithra. In a general way, Mithra seems to occupy the rôle of patron to Helios, which reminds us of the boldness of Hercules towards Helios. Upon his journey towards Geryon, Helios burns 222too hotly; Hercules, full of anger, threatens him with his never-failing arrows. Therefore, Helios is compelled to yield, and lends to the hero his Sun ship, with which he was accustomed to journey across the sea. Thus Hercules returns to Erythia, to the cattle herds of Geryon.^[382] On the monument at Klagenfurt, Mithra is furthermore represented pressing Helios’s hand, either in farewell or as a ratification. In a further scene Mithra mounts the Chariot of Helios, either for the ascension or the “Sea Journey.”^[383] Cumont is of the opinion that Mithra gives to Helios a sort of ceremonious investiture and consecrates him with his divine power by crowning him with his own hands. This relation corresponds to that of Christ to Peter. Peter, through his symbol, the cock, has the character of a sun-god. After the ascension (or sea journey) of Christ, he is the visible pontiff of the divinity; he suffers, therefore, the same death (crucifixion) as Christ, and becomes the great Roman deity (Sol invictus), the conquering, triumphant Church itself, embodied in the Pope. In the scene of Malchus he is always shown as the miles of Christ, to whom the sword is granted, and as the rock upon which the Church is founded. The crown^[384] is also given to him who possesses the power to bind and to set free. Thus, Christ, like the Sun, is the visible God, whereas the Pope, like the heir of the Roman Cæsars, is solis invicti comes. The setting sun appoints a successor whom he invests with the power of the sun.^[385] Dhulqarnein gives Chidher eternal life. Chidher communicates his wisdom to Moses.^[386] There even exists a report according to which 223the forgetful servant of Joshua drinks from the well of life, whereupon he becomes immortal, and is placed in a ship by Chidher and Moses, as a punishment, and is cast out to sea, once more a fragment of a sun myth, the motive of the “sea journey.”^[387]

The primitive symbol, which designates that portion of the Zodiac in which the Sun, with the Winter Solstice, again enters upon the yearly course, is the goat, fish sign, the αἰγωκέρως. The Sun mounts like a goat to the highest mountain, and later goes into the water as a fish. The fish is the symbol of the child,^[388] for the child before his birth lives in the water like a fish, and the Sun, because it plunges into the sea, becomes equally child and fish. The fish, however, is also a phallic symbol,^[389] also a symbol for the woman.^[390] Briefly stated, the fish is a libido symbol, and, indeed, as it seems predominately for the renewal of the libido.

The journey of Moses with his servant is a life-journey (eighty years). They grow old and lose their life force (libido), that is, they lose the fish which “pursues its course in a marvellous manner to the sea,” which means the setting of the sun. When the two notice their loss, they discover at the place where the “source of life” is found (where the dead fish revived and sprang into the sea) Chidher wrapped in his mantle,^[391] sitting on the ground. According to another version, he sat on an island in the sea, or “in the wettest place on earth,” that is, he was just born from the maternal depths. Where the fish vanished Chidher, “the verdant one,” was born as a “son of the deep waters,” his head veiled, a Cabir, 224a proclaimer of divine wisdom; the old Babylonian Oannes-Ea, who was represented in the form of a fish, and daily came from the sea as a fish to teach the people wisdom.^[392] His name was brought into connection with John’s. With the rising of the renewed sun all that lived in darkness, as water-animal or fish, surrounded by all terrors of night and death,^[393] became as the shining fiery firmament of the day. Thus the words of John the Baptist^[394] gain especial meaning:

“I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance, but he that cometh after me is mightier than I, whose shoes I am not worthy to bear; he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost and with fire.”

With Vollers we may also compare Chidher and Elias (Moses and his servant Joshua) with Gilgamesh and his brother Eabani. Gilgamesh wandered through the world, driven by anxiety and longing, to find immortality. His path led him across the seas to the wise Utnapishtim (Noah), who knew how to cross the waters of death. There Gilgamesh had to dive down to the bottom of the sea for the magical herb which was to lead him back to the land of men. When he had come again to his native land a serpent stole the magic plant from him (the fish again slid into the sea). But on the return from the land of the blessed an immortal mariner accompanied him, who, banished by a curse of Utnapishtim, was forbidden to return to the land of the blessed. Gilgamesh’s journey had lost its purpose on account of the loss of the magic herb; instead he is accompanied by an immortal, whose fate, indeed, we cannot learn from the fragments 225of the epic. This banished immortal is the model for Ahasver, as Jensen^[395] aptly remarked.

Again we encounter the motive of the Dioscuri, mortal and immortal, setting and rising sun. This motive is also represented as if projected from the hero.

The Sacrificium Mithriacum (the sacrifice of the bull) is in its religious representation very often flanked by the two Dadophores, Cautes and Cautopates, one with a raised and the other with a lowered torch. They represent brothers who reveal their character through the symbolic position of the torch. Cumont connects them, not without meaning, with the sepulchral “erotes” who as genii with the reversed torches have traditional meaning. The one is supposed to stand for death and the other for life. I cannot refrain from mentioning the similarity between the Sacrificium Mithriacum (where the sacrificed bull in the centre is flanked on both sides by Dadophores) to the Christian sacrifice of the lamb (ram). The Crucified is also traditionally flanked by the two thieves, one of whom ascends to Paradise, while the other descends to Hell.^[396] The idea of the mortal and the immortal seems to have passed also into the Christian worship. Semitic gods are often represented as flanked by two Paredroi; for example, Baal of Edessa, accompanied by Aziz and Monimoz (Baal as the Sun, accompanied by Mars and Mercury, as expressed in astronomical teachings). According to the Chaldean view, the gods are grouped into triads. In this circle of ideas belongs also the Trinity, the idea of the triune God, in which Christ must be considered in his unity with the 226Father and the Holy Ghost. So, too, do the two thieves belong inwardly to Christ. The two Dadophores are, as Cumont points out, nothing but offshoots^[397] from the chief figure of Mithra, to whom belongs a mysterious threefold character. According to an account of Dionysus Areopagita, the magicians celebrated a festival, “τοῦ τριπλασίου Μίθρου.”^[398][399] An observation likewise referring to the Trinity is made by Plutarch concerning Ormuzd: τρὶς ἑαυτὸν αὐξήσας ἀπέστησε τοῦ ἡλίου.^[400] The Trinity, as three different states of the unity, is also a Christian thought. In the very first place this suggests a sun myth. An observation by Macrobius 1:18 seems to lend support to this idea:

“Hæ autem ætatum diversitates ad solem referuntur, ut parvulus videatur hiemali solstitio, qualem Aegyptii proferunt ex adyto die certa, ... æquinoctio vernali figura iuvenis ornatur. Postea statuitur ætas ejus plenissima effigie barbæ solstitio æstivo ... exunde per diminutiones veluti senescenti quarta forma deus figuratur.”^[401][402]

As Cumont observes, Cautes and Cautapates occasionally carry in their hands the head of a bull, and a scorpion.^[403] Taurus and Scorpio are equinoctial signs, which clearly indicate that the sacrificial scene refers primarily to the Sun cycle; the rising Sun, which sacrifices itself at 227the summer solstice, and the setting Sun. In the sacrificial scene the symbol of the rising and setting Sun was not easily represented; therefore, this idea was removed from the sacrificial image.

We have pointed out above that the Dioscuri represent a similar idea, although in a somewhat different form; the one sun is always mortal, the other immortal. As this entire sun mythology is merely a psychologic projection to the heavens, the fundamental thesis probably is as follows; just as man consists of a mortal and immortal part, so the sun is a pair of brothers,^[404] one being mortal, the other immortal. This thought lies at the basis of all theology in general. Man is, indeed, mortal, but there are some who are immortal, or there is something in us which is immortal. Thus the gods, “a Chidher or a St. Germain,” are our immortal part, which, though incomprehensible, dwells among us somewhere.

Comparison with the sun teaches us over and over again that the gods are libido. It is that part of us which is immortal, since it represents that bond through which we feel that in the race we are never extinguished.^[405] It is life from the life of mankind. Its springs, which well up from the depths of the unconscious, come, as does our life in general, from the root of the whole of humanity, since we are indeed only a twig broken off from the mother and transplanted.

Since the divine in us is the libido,^[406] we must not wonder that we have taken along with us in our theology ancient representations from olden times, which give the triune figure to the God. We have taken this τριπλάσιον 228Θεόν^[407] from the phallic symbolism, the originality of which may well be uncontested.^[408] The male genitals are the basis for this Trinity. It is an anatomical fact that one testicle is generally placed somewhat higher than the other, and it is also a very old, but, nevertheless, still surviving, superstition that one testicle generates a boy and the other a girl.^[409] A late Babylonian bas-relief from Lajard’s^[410] collection seems to be in accordance with this view. In the middle of the image stands an androgynous god (masculine and feminine face^[411]); upon the right, male side, is found a serpent, with a sun halo round its head; upon the left, female side, there is also a serpent, with the moon above its head. Above the head of the god there are three stars. This ensemble would seem to confirm the Trinity^[412] of the representation. The Sun serpent at the right side is male; the serpent at the left side is female (signified by the moon). This image possesses a symbolic sexual suffix, which makes the sexual significance of the whole obtrusive. Upon the male side a rhomb is found—a favorite symbol of the female genitals; upon the female side there is a wheel or felly. A wheel always refers to the Sun, but the spokes are thickened and enlarged at the ends, which suggests phallic symbolism. It seems to be a phallic wheel, which was not unknown in antiquity. There are obscene bas-reliefs where Cupid turns a wheel of nothing but phalli.^[413] It is not only the serpent which suggests the phallic significance of the Sun; I quote one especially marked case, from an abundance of proof. In the antique collection at Verona 229I discovered a late Roman mystic inscription in which are the following representations:

These symbols are easily read: Sun—Phallus, Moon—Vagina (Uterus). This interpretation is confirmed by another figure of the same collection. There the same representation is found, only the vessel^[414] is replaced by the figure of a woman. The impressions on coins, where in the middle a palm is seen encoiled by a snake, flanked by two stones (testicles), or else in the middle a stone encircled by a snake; to the right a palm, to the left a shell (female genitals^[415]), should be interpreted in a similar manner. In Lajard’s “Researches” (“The Cult of Venus”) there is a coin of Perga, where Artemis of Perga is represented by a conical stone (phallic) flanked by a man (claimed to be Men) and by a female figure (claimed to be Artemis). Men (the so-called Lunus) is found upon an Attic bas-relief apparently with the spear but fundamentally a sceptre with a phallic significance, flanked by Pan with a club (phallus) and a female figure.^[416] The traditional representation of the Crucified flanked by John and Mary is closely associated with this circle of ideas, precisely as is the Crucified with the thieves. From this we see how, beside the Sun, there emerges again and again the much more primitive comparison 230of the libido with the phallus. An especial trace still deserves mention here. The Dadophor Cautapates, who represents Mithra, is also represented with the cock^[417] and the pineapple. But these are the attributes of the Phrygian god Men, whose cult was widely diffused. Men was represented with Pileus,^[418] the pineapple and the cock, also in the form of a boy, just as the Dadophores are boyish figures. (This last-named property relates them with Men to the Cabiri.) Men has a very close connection with Attis, the son and lover of Cybele. In the time of the Roman Cæsars, Men and Attis were entirely identified, as stated above. Attis also wears the Pileus like Men, Mithra and the Dadophores. As the son and lover of his mother he again leads us to the source of this religion-creating incest libido, namely, to the mother. Incest leads logically to ceremonial castration in the Attic-Cybele cult, for the Hero, driven insane by his mother, mutilates himself.^[419] I must at present forego entering more deeply into this matter, because the incest problem is to be discussed at the close. Let this suggestion suffice—that from different directions the analysis of the libido symbolism always leads back again to the mother incest. Therefore, we may surmise that the longing of the libido raised to God (repressed into the unconscious) is a primitive, incestuous one which concerns the mother. Through renouncing the virility to the first beloved, the mother, the feminine element becomes extremely predominant; hence the strongly androgynous character of the dying and resurrected Redeemer. That these heroes are nearly always wanderers^[420] is a psychologically 231clear symbolism. The wandering is a representation of longing,^[421] of the ever-restless desire, which nowhere finds its object, for, unknown to itself, it seeks the lost mother. The wandering association renders the Sun comparison easily intelligible; also, under this aspect, the heroes always resemble the wandering Sun, which seems to justify the fact that the myth of the hero is a sun myth. But the myth of the hero, however, is, as it appears to me, the myth of our own suffering unconscious, which has an unquenchable longing for all the deepest sources of our own being; for the body of the mother, and through it for communion with infinite life in the countless forms of existence. Here I must introduce the words of the Master who has divined the deepest roots of Faustian longings:

The vision following the creation of the hero is described by Miss Miller as a “throng of people.” This representation is known to us from dream interpretation as being, above all, the symbol of mystery.^[423] Freud thinks that this choice of symbol is determined on account of its possibility of representing the idea. The bearer of the mystery is placed in opposition to the multitude of the ignorant. The possession of the mystery cuts one off from intercourse with the rest of mankind. For a very complete and smooth rapport with the surroundings is of great importance for the management of the libido and the possession of a subjectively important secret generally creates a great disturbance. It may be said that the whole art of life shrinks to the one problem of how the libido may be freed in the most harmless way possible. Therefore, the neurotic derives special benefit in treatment when he can at last rid himself of his various secrets. The symbol of the crowd of people, chiefly the streaming and moving mass, is, as I have often seen, substituted for the great excitement in the unconscious, especially in persons who are outwardly calm.

234The vision of the “throng” develops further; horses emerge; a battle is fought. With Silberer, I might accept the significance of this vision as belonging, first of all, in the “functional category,” because, fundamentally, the conception of the intermingling crowds is nothing but the symbol of the present onrush of the mass of thought; likewise the battle, and possibly the horses, which illustrate the movement. The deeper significance of the appearance of the horses will be seen for the first time in the further course of our treatment of the mother symbolism. The following vision has a more definite and significantly important character. Miss Miller sees a City of Dreams (“Cité de Rêves”). The picture is similar to one she saw a short time before on the cover of a magazine. Unfortunately, we learn nothing further about it. One can easily imagine under this “Cité de Rêves” a fulfilled wish dream, that is to say, something very beautiful and greatly longed for; a sort of heavenly Jerusalem, as the poet of the Apocalypse has dreamed it. The city is a maternal symbol, a woman who fosters the inhabitants as children. It is, therefore, intelligible that the two mother goddesses, Rhea and Cybele, both wear the wall crown. The Old Testament treats the cities of Jerusalem, Babel, etc., as women (Isaiah xlvii:1–5):

“Come down and sit in the dust, O virgin daughter of Babylon, sit on the ground: there is no throne, O daughter of the Chaldeans; for thou shalt no more be called tender and delicate. Take the millstones and grind meal; uncover thy locks, make bare the leg, uncover the thigh, pass over the rivers. That thy nakedness 235shall be uncovered, yea, thy shame shall be seen; sit thou silent, and get thee into darkness, O daughter of the Chaldeans; for thou shalt no more be called the lady of the kingdoms.”

Jeremiah says of Babel (I:12):

“Your mother shall be sore confounded; she that bare you shall be ashamed.”

Strong, unconquered cities are virgins; colonies are sons and daughters. Cities are also whores. Isaiah says of Tyre (xxiii:16):

“Take an harp, go about the city, thou harlot; thou hast been forgotten.”

And:

“How does it come to pass that the virtuous city has become an harlot?”

We come across a similar symbolism in the myth of Ogyges, the mythical king who rules in Egyptian Thebes and whose wife was appropriately named Thebe. The Bœotian Thebes founded by Cadmus received on that account a surname, “Ogygian.” This surname was also given to the great flood, as it was called “Ogygian” because it occurred under Ogyges. This coincidence will be found later on to be hardly accidental. The fact that the city and the wife of Ogyges bear the same name indicates that somewhere a relation must exist between the city and the woman, which is not difficult to understand, for the city is identical with the woman. We meet a similar idea in Hindoo lore where Indra appears as the 236husband of Urvara, but Urvara means “the fertile land.” In a similar way the occupancy of a country by the king was understood as marriage with the ploughed land. Similar representations must have prevailed in Europe as well. Princes had to guarantee, for example, a good harvest at their accession. The Swedish King Domaldi was actually killed on account of the failure of the harvest (Ynglinga sâga 18). In the Rama sâga the hero Rama marries Sîtâ, the furrow of the field.^[424] To the same group of ideas belongs the Chinese custom of the Emperor ploughing a furrow at his ascension to the throne. This idea of the soil being feminine also embraces the idea of continual companionship with the woman, a physical communication. Shiva, the Phallic God, is, like Mahadeva and Parwati, male and female. He has even given one-half of his body to his consort Parwati as a dwelling place.^[425] Inman^[426] gives us a drawing of a Pundite of Ardanari-Iswara; one-half of the god is masculine, the other half feminine, and the genitals are in continuous cohabitation. The motive of continuous cohabitation is expressed in a well-known lingam symbol, which is to be found everywhere in Indian temples; the base is a female symbol, and within that is the phallus.^[427] The symbol approaches very closely the Grecian mystic phallic basket and chests. (Compare with this the Eleusinian mysteries.) The chest or box is here a female symbol, that is, the mother’s womb. This is a very well-known conception in the old mythologies.^[428] The chest, basket or little basket, with its precious contents, was thought of as floating on the water; a remarkable 237inversion of the natural fact that the child floats in the amniotic fluid and that this is in the uterus.

This inversion brings about a great advantage for sublimation, for it creates enormous possibilities of application for the myth-weaving phantasy, that is to say, for the annexation to the sun cycle. The Sun floats over the sea like an immortal god, which every evening is immersed in the maternal water and is born again renewed in the morning. Frobenius says:

“Perhaps in connection with the blood-red sunrise, the idea occurs that here a birth takes place, the birth of a young son; the question then arises inevitably, whence comes the paternity? How has the woman become pregnant? And since this woman symbolizes the same idea as the fish, which means the sea, (because we proceed from the assumption that the Sun descends into the sea as well as arises from it) thus the curious primitive answer is that this sea has previously swallowed the old Sun. Consequently the resulting myth is, that the woman (sea) has formerly devoured the Sun and now brings a new Sun into the world, and thus she has become pregnant.”

All these sea-going gods are sun symbols. They are enclosed in a chest or an ark for the “night journey on the sea” (Frobenius), often together with a woman (again an inversion of the actual situation, but in support of the motive of continuous cohabitation, which we have met above). During the night journey on the sea the Sun-god is enclosed in the mother’s womb, oftentimes threatened by dangers of all kinds. Instead of many individual examples, I will content myself with reproducing 238the scheme which Frobenius has constructed from numberless myths of this sort:

Frobenius gives the following legend to illustrate this:

“A hero is devoured by a water monster in the West (to devour). The animal carries him within him to the East (sea journey). Meanwhile, he kindles a fire in the belly of the monster (to set on fire) and since he feels hungry he cuts off a piece of the hanging heart (to cut off the heart). Soon after he notices that the fish glides upon the dry land (to land); he immediately begins to cut open the animal from within outwards (to open) then he slides out (to slip out). In the fish’s belly, it had been so hot, that all his hair had fallen out (heat-hair). The hero frequently frees all who were previously devoured (to devour all) and all now slide out (slip out).”

A very close parallel is Noah’s journey during the flood, in which all living creatures die; only he and the life guarded by him are brought to a new birth. In a Melapolynesian legend (Frobenius) it is told that the hero in the belly of the King Fish took his weapon and cut open the fish’s belly. “He slid out and saw a splendor, and he sat down and reflected. ‘I wonder where I am,’ he said. Then the sun rose with a bound and turned from 239one side to the other.” The Sun has again slipped out. Frobenius mentions from the Ramayana the myth of the ape Hanuman, who represents the Sun-hero. The sun in which Hanuman hurries through the air throws a shadow upon the sea. The sea monster notices this and through this draws Hanuman toward itself; when the latter sees that the monster is about to devour him, he stretches out his figure immeasurably; the monster assumes the same gigantic proportions. As he does that Hanuman becomes as small as a thumb, slips into the great body of the monster and comes out on the other side. In another part of the poem it is said that he came out from the right ear of the monster (like Rabelais’ Gargantua, who also was born from the mother’s ear). “Hanuman thereupon resumes his flight, and finds a new obstacle in another sea monster, which is the mother of Rahus, the sun-devouring demon. The latter draws Hanuman’s shadow^[429] to her in the same way. Hanuman again has recourse to the earlier stratagem, becomes small and slips into her body, but hardly is he there than he grows to a gigantic mass, swells up, tears her, kills her, and in that way makes his escape.”

Thus we understand why the Indian fire-bringer Mâtariçvan is called “the one swelling in the mother”; the ark (little box, chest, cask, vessel, etc.) is a symbol of the womb, just as is the sea, into which the Sun sinks for rebirth. From this circle of ideas we understand the mythologic statements about Ogyges; he it is who possesses the mother, the City, who is united with the mother; therefore under him came the great flood, for it is a 240typical fragment of the sun myth that the hero, when united with the woman attained with difficulty, is exposed in a cask and thrown into the sea, and then lands for a new life on a distant shore. The middle part, the “night journey on the sea” in the ark, is lacking in the tradition of Ogyges.^[430] But the rule in mythology is that the typical parts of a myth can be united in all conceivable variations, which adds greatly to the extraordinary difficulty of the interpretation of a particular myth without knowledge of all the others. The meaning of this cycle of myths mentioned here is clear; it is the longing to attain rebirth through the return to the mother’s womb, that is to say, to become as immortal as the sun. This longing for the mother is frequently expressed in our holy scriptures.^[431] I recall, particularly the place in the epistle to the Galatians, where it is said (iv:26):

(26) “But Jerusalem which is above is free, which is the mother of us all.

(27) “For it is written, Rejoice, thou barren that beareth not: break forth and cry, thou that travailest not: for the desolate hath many more children than she which hath an husband.

(28) “Now we, brethren, as Isaac was, are the children of promise.

(29) “But as he that was born after the flesh persecuted him that was born after the spirit, even so it is now.

(30) “Nevertheless, what sayeth the scripture? Cast out the bondwoman and her son; for the son of a bondwoman shall not be heir with the son of a freewoman.

(31) “So, then, brethren, we are not children of the bondwoman, but of the free.”

Chapter v:

241(1) “Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.”

The Christians are the children of the City Above, a symbol of the mother, not sons of the earthly city-mother, who is to be cast out; for those born after the flesh are opposed to those born after the spirit, who are not born from the mother in the flesh, but from a symbol for the mother. One must again think of the Indians at this point, who say the first people proceeded from the sword-hilt and a shuttle. The religious thought is bound up with the compulsion to call the mother no longer mother, but City, Source, Sea, etc. This compulsion can be derived from the need to manifest an amount of libido bound up with the mother, but in such a way that the mother is represented by or concealed in a symbol. The symbolism of the city we find well-developed in the revelations of John, where two cities play a great part, one of which is insulted and cursed by him, the other greatly desired. We read in Revelation (xvii:1):

(1) “Come hither: I will shew unto thee the judgment of the great whore that sitteth on many waters.

(2) “With whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication and the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her fornication.

(3) “So he carried me away in the spirit into the wilderness: and I saw a woman sit on a scarlet colored beast, full of the names of blasphemy, and having seven heads and ten horns.

(4) “And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colors, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup^[432] in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication.

(5) “And upon her forehead was a name written: Mystery. 242Babylon the great. The Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the Earth.

(6) “And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus: and when I saw her I wondered with a great admiration.”

Here follows an interpretation of the vision unintelligible to us, from which we can only emphasize the point that the seven heads^[433] of the dragon means the seven hills upon which the woman sits. This is probably a distinct allusion to Rome, the city whose temporal power oppressed the world at the time of the Revelation. The waters upon which the woman “the mother” sits are “peoples and throngs and nations and tongues.” This also seems to refer to Rome, for she is the mother of peoples and possessed all lands. Just as in common speech, for example, colonies are called daughters, so the people subject to Rome are like members of a family subject to the mother. In another version of the picture, the kings of the people, namely, the fathers, commit fornication with this mother. Revelation continues (xviii: 2):

(2) “And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the Great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird.

(3) “For all nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication.”

Thus this mother does not only become the mother of all abominations, but also in truth the receptacle of all that is wicked and unclean. The birds are images of 243souls;^[434] therefore, this means all souls of the condemned and evil spirits. Thus the mother becomes Hecate, the underworld, the City of the damned itself. We recognize easily in the ancient idea of the woman on the dragon,^[435] the above-mentioned representation of Echnida, the mother of the infernal horrors. Babylon is the idea of the “terrible” mother, who seduces all people to whoredom with devilish temptation, and makes them drunk with her wine. The intoxicating drink stands in the closest relation to fornication, for it is also a libido symbol, as we have already seen in the parallel of fire and sun. After the fall and curse of Babylon, we find in Revelation (xix:6–7) the hymn which leads from the under half to the upper half of the mother, where now everything is possible which would be impossible without the repression of incest:

(6) “Alleluia, the Lord God omnipotent reigneth.

(7) “Let us be glad and rejoice, and give honor to him: for the marriage of the Lamb is come,^[436] and his wife hath made herself ready.

(8) “And to her was granted that she should be arrayed in fine linen, clean and white: for the fine linen is the righteousness of saints.

(9) “And he saith unto me, ‘Write, Blessed are they which are called unto the marriage supper of the Lamb.’”

The Lamb is the son of man who celebrates his marriage with the “woman.” Who the “woman” is remains obscure at first. But Revelation (xxi:9) shows us which “woman” is the bride, the Lamb’s wife:

(9) “Come hither, I will show thee the bride, the Lamb’s wife.^[437]

244(10) “And he carried me away in the spirit to a great and high mountain, and showed me that great city, the holy Jerusalem, descending out of heaven from God, having the glory of God.”

It is evident from this quotation, after all that goes before, that the City, the heavenly bride, who is here promised to the Son, is the mother.^[438] In Babylon the impure maid was cast out, according to the Epistle to the Galatians, so that here in heavenly Jerusalem the mother-bride may be attained the more surely. It bears witness to the most delicate psychologic perception that the fathers of the church who formulated the canons preserved this bit of the symbolic significance of the Christ mystery. It is a treasure house for the phantasies and myth materials which underlie primitive Christianity.^[439] The further attributes which were heaped upon the heavenly Jerusalem make its significance as mother overwhelmingly clear:

(1) “And he shewed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb.

(2) “In the midst of the street of it, and on either side of the river, was there the tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month, and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of nations.

(3) “And there shall be no more curse.”

In this quotation we come upon the symbol of the waters, which we found in the mention of Ogyges in connection with the city. The maternal significance of water belongs to the clearest symbolism in the realm of mythology,^[440] so that the ancients could say: ἠ θάλασσα—τῆς γενέσεως σύμβολον.^[441] From water comes life;^[442] 245therefore, of the two gods which here interest us the most, Christ and Mithra, the latter was born beside a river, according to representations, while Christ experienced his new birth in the Jordan; moreover, he is born from the Πηγή,^[443] the “sempiterni fons amoris,” the mother of God, who by the heathen-Christian legend was made a nymph of the Spring. The “Spring” is also found in Mithracism. A Pannonian dedication reads, “Fonti perenni.” An inscription in Apulia is dedicated to the “Fons Aeterni.” In Persia, Ardvîçûra is the well of the water of life. Ardvîçûra-Anahita is a goddess of water and love (just as Aphrodite is born from foam). The neo-Persians designate the Planet Venus and a nubile girl by the name “Nahid.” In the temples of Anaitis there existed prostitute Hierodules (harlots). In the Sakaeen (in honor of Anaitis) there, occurred ritual combats as in the festival of the Egyptian Ares and his mother. In the Vedas the waters are called Mâtritamâh—the most maternal.^[443] All that is living rises as does the sun, from the water, and at evening plunges into the water. Born from the springs, the rivers, the seas, at death man arrives at the waters of the Styx in order to enter upon the “night journey on the sea.” The wish is that the black water of death might be the water of life; that death, with its cold embrace, might be the mother’s womb, just as the sea devours the sun, but brings it forth again out of the maternal womb (Jonah motive^[444]). Life believes not in death.

That ξύλον ζωῆς, the wood of life, or the tree of life, is a maternal symbol would seem to follow from the previous deductions. The etymologic connection of ὕο, ὕλε, υἱός, in the Indo-Germanic root suggests the blending of the meanings in the underlying symbolism of mother and of generation. The tree of life is probably, first of all, a fruit-bearing genealogical tree, that is, a mother-image. Countless myths prove the derivation of man from trees; many myths show how the hero is enclosed in the maternal tree—thus dead Osiris in the column, Adonis in the myrtle, etc. Numerous female divinities were worshipped as trees, from which resulted the cult of the holy groves and trees. It is of transparent significance when Attis castrates himself under a pine tree, i. e. he does it because of the mother. Goddesses were often worshipped in the form of a tree or of a wood. Thus Juno of Thespiæ was a branch of a tree, Juno of Samos was a board. Juno of Argos was a column. The Carian Diana was an uncut piece of wood. Athene of Lindus was a polished column. Tertullian calls Ceres of Pharos “rudis palus et informe lignum sine effigie.” Athenaeus remarks of Latona at Dalos that she is ξὐλινον ἄμορφον, a shapeless piece of wood.^[445] Tertullian calls an Attic Pallas “crucis stipes,” a wooden pale or mast. The wooden pale is phallic, as the name 247suggests, φάλης, Pallus. The φαλλός is a pale, a ceremonial lingam carved out of figwood, as are all Roman statues of Priapus. Φάλος means a projection or centrepiece on the helmet, later called κῶνος just as ἀναφαλ-αντίασις signifies baldheadedness on the forepart of the head, and φαλακρός signifies baldheadedness in regard to the φάλος-κῶνος of the helmet; a semi-phallic meaning is given to the upper part of the head as well.^[446] Φάλληνος has, besides φαλλός, the significance of “wooden”; φαλ-άγγωμα, “cylinder”; φάλαγξ, “a round beam.” The Macedonian battle array, distinguished by its powerful impetus, is called φάλαγξ; moreover, the finger-joint^[447] is called φάλαγξ. φάλλαινα or φάλαινα is a whale. Now φαλός appears with the meaning “shining, brilliant.” The Indo-Germanic root is bhale = to bulge, to swell.^[448] Who does not think of Faust?