Psychology of the Unconscious quotes

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 are 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, …

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.

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 …

We will not heap up references and examples to bear witness to the existence of a belief in 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.

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, leads us out into the far-reaching experiences and trains of thought of the Freudian psychology.

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.

“

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.

”

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.

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.

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.

“

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.

”

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.

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.

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.

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”;

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.

“

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?

”

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.

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;

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.

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 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 means of a representation of a beautiful landscape.

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 means 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 …

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.

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.

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;

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.

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.

The conflict, which is the condition of every neurosis, is 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 …

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

The only reality here is the libido, for which “all that is perishable is merely a symbol.” It is not the physical actual mother, but the libido of the son, the object of which was once the mother.

We take mythologic symbols much too concretely and wonder at every step about the endless contradictions.

These contradictions arise only because we constantly forget that in the realm of phantasy “feeling is all.” Whenever we read, therefore, “his mother was a wicked sorcerer,” the translation is as follows:

In certain parts of Revelation the unconscious psychology of religious longing is revealed, namely, the longing for the mother.[452] The expectation of Revelation ends in the mother: καὶ πᾶν κατάθεμα οὐκ ἔσται ἔτι (“and there shall be no more curse”).

There shall be no more sins, no repression, no disharmony with one’s self, no guilt, no fear of death and no pain of separation more!

Thus Revelation echoes that same radiant mystical harmony which was caught again 2,000 years later and expressed poetically in the last prayer of Dr. Marianus:

Exactly the same thing has occurred as with the hysteric who at first indulges in some quite unbeautiful, infantile sexual manifestations and afterwards develops a hyperæsthetic negation in order to convince every one of his special purity.

Christianity, with its repression of the manifest sexual, is the negative of the ancient sexual cult.

The original cult has changed its tokens.[460] One only needs to realize how much of the gay paganism, even to the inclusion of unseemly Gods, has been taken into the Christian church. Thus the old indecent Priapus celebrated a gay festival of resurrection in St.

… to be snobs when they come in contact with analytic psychology, because the moral man has imagined an objective and cheap verdict on sexuality and the unmoral man is entirely unaware of the vulgarity of his sexuality and of his incapacity for an unselfish love.

One completely forgets that one can most miserably be carried away, not only by a vice, but also by a virtue.

There is a fanatic orgiastic self-righteousness which is just as base and which entails just as much injustice and violence as a vice.

One completely forgets that one can most miserably be carried away, not only by a vice, but also by a virtue.

There is a fanatic orgiastic self-righteousness which is just as base and which entails just as much injustice and violence as a vice.

At this time, when a large part of mankind is beginning to discard Christianity, it is worth while to understand clearly why it was originally accepted. It was accepted in order to escape at last from the brutality of antiquity.

But these are the ones who under other circumstances would have prematurely perished in some other way. However, I well know the most effectual and most inexorable regulator of human sexuality.

This is necessity. With this leaden weight human lust will never fly too high.

To-day there are countless neurotics who are so simply because they do not know how to seek happiness in their own manner. They do not even realize where the lack lies.

But these are the ones who under other circumstances would have prematurely perished in some other way. However, I well know the most effectual and most inexorable regulator of human sexuality. This is necessity. With this leaden weight human lust will never fly too high.

To-day there are countless neurotics who are so simply because they do not know how to seek happiness in their own manner.

They do not even realize where the lack lies. And besides these neurotics there are many more normal people—and precisely people of the higher type—who feel restricted and discontented.

This other side is the devil, the adversary or, expressed in modern terms, the corrective of reality, of the infantile world picture, which has been made acceptable through the predominating pleasure principle.[465]

But the world is not a garden of God, of the Father, but a place of terrors.

Not only is heaven no father and earth no mother and the people not brothers nor sisters, but they represent hostile, destroying powers, to which we are abandoned the more surely, the more childishly and thoughtlessly we have entrusted ourselves to the so-called Fatherly hand …

… is heaven no father and earth no mother and the people not brothers nor sisters, but they represent hostile, destroying powers, to which we are abandoned the more surely, the more childishly and thoughtlessly we have entrusted ourselves to the so-called Fatherly hand of God.

One should never forget the harsh speech of the first Napoleon, that the good God is always on the side of the heaviest artillery.

The religious myth meets us here as one of the greatest and most significant human institutions which, despite misleading symbols, nevertheless gives man assurance and strength, so that he may not be overwhelmed by the monsters of the universe.

This would be the course of moral autonomy, of perfect freedom, when man could without compulsion wish that which he must do, and this from knowledge, without delusion through belief in the religious symbols.

It is a positive creed which keeps us infantile and, therefore, ethically inferior.

Although of the greatest significance from the cultural point of view and of imperishable beauty from the æsthetic standpoint, this delusion can no longer ethically suffice humanity striving after moral autonomy.

we merely remove the dangerous object. But the object is not dangerous; the danger is our own infantile mental state, for love of which we have lost something very beautiful and ingenious through the simple abandonment of the religious symbol.

I think belief should be replaced by understanding; then we would keep the beauty of the symbol, but still remain free from the depressing results of submission to belief.

This would be the psychoanalytic cure for belief and disbelief.

The “original sin” caused men to wish to go back into the mother again, that is, the incestuous desire for the mother, condemned by law, is the ruse supposedly invented by Typhon. The fact is, the ruse is very significant.

Man tries to sneak into rebirth through subterfuge in order to become a child again.

An early Egyptian hymn[470] even raises an accusation against the mother Isis because she destroys the sun-god Rê by treachery. It was interpreted as the ill-will of the mother towards her son that she banished and betrayed him.

There must be contained in this many sensitive memories of the animal age, where there was not any “thou shalt” and “thou shalt not,” but all was just simple occurrence.

Even yet a deep animosity seems to live in man because a brutal law has separated him from the instinctive yielding to his desires and from the great beauty of the harmony of the animal nature.

This separation manifested itself, among other things, in the incest prohibition and its correlates (laws of marriage, etc.); therefore pain and anger relate to the mother, as if she were responsible for the domestication of the sons of men.

This conflict faces us in the Gilgamesh epic in its original freshness and passion, where also the incest wish is projected onto the mother.

The neurotic who cannot leave the mother has good reasons; the fear of death holds him there.

It seems as if no idea and no word were strong enough to express the meaning of this. Entire religions were constructed in order to give words to the immensity of this conflict.

Such an outcome merely adds beauty and value to the pose under certain conditions. That the highest summit of life is expressed through the symbolism of death is a well-known fact; for creation beyond one’s self means personal death.

The coming generation is the end of the preceding one.

This symbolism is frequent in erotic speech. The lascivious speech between Lucius and the wanton servant-maid in Apuleius (“Metamorphoses,” lib. ii: 32) is one of the clearest examples:

Both heroes prepare to die effectively, in which attempt Cyrano succeeds. This attitude betrays a wish for death in the unconscious of our author, the meaning of which we have already discussed at length as the motive for her poem of the moth.

The wish of young girls to die is only an indirect expression, which remains a pose, even in case of real death, for death itself can be a pose.

Such an outcome merely adds beauty and value to the pose under certain conditions. That the highest summit of life is expressed through the symbolism of death is a well-known fact; for creation beyond one’s self means personal death.

… heart was continually pierced by arrows.[600] These arrows—and this represented the still worse mental suffering—she recognized as the thoughts, plots, secret speeches, misunderstandings, scandal and uncharitableness, in which her fellow-sisters, wholly without reason and unscrupulously, were engaged against her and her god-fearing way of life.”

It is difficult to be a saint, because even a patient and long-suffering nature will not readily bear such a violation, and defends itself in its own way.

The companion of sanctity is temptation, without which no true saint can live. We know from analytic experience that these temptations can pass unconsciously, so that only their equivalents would be produced in consciousness in the form of symptoms.

The wounding and painful arrows do not come from without through gossip, which only attacks externally, but they come from ambush, from our own unconscious. This, rather than anything external, creates the defenseless suffering.

It is our own repressed and unrecognized desires which fester like arrows in our flesh.

[603] In another connection this was clear to the nun, and that most literally.

… possesses its power solely and exclusively from the son’s tendency not only to look and to work forwards, but also to glance backwards to the pampering sweetness of childhood, to that glorious state of irresponsibility and security with which the protecting mother-care once surrounded him.[617]

The retrospective longing acts like a paralyzing poison upon the energy and enterprise; so that it may well be compared to a poisonous serpent which lies across our path.

Apparently, it is a hostile demon which robs us of energy, but, in reality, it is the individual unconscious, the retrogressive tendency of which begins to overcome the conscious forward striving.

Hauptmann also says: “

Poetic rendering is that which allows the echo of the primitive word to resound through the form.

”[625]

These are subjective wish-fulfilment deliria which need no contra arguments. This misuse makes the wish to be “understood” highly suspicious, if the natural demands of life have not been fulfilled.

Nature has first claim on man; only long afterwards does the luxury of intellect come.

The mediæval ideal of life for the sake of death needs gradually to be replaced by a natural conception of life, in which the normal demands of men are thoroughly kept in mind, so that the desires of the animal sphere may no longer be …

“

Ah, my brother, you will never learn to know the happiness of thinking nothing and doing nothing: this is next to sleep; this is the most delightful thing there is.

Thus we were before birth, thus we shall be after death.”[646]

but this, when he is home again, is retaken from him by a serpent.

When one has slain the father, one can obtain possession of his wife, and when one has conquered the mother, one can free one’s self.

On the return journey Hiawatha stops at the clever arrow-maker’s, who possesses a lovely daughter:

Such parallels show how little human personality and how much divine, that is to say, universally human, is found in the Christ mystery.

No man is or, indeed, ever was, a hero, for the hero is a god, and, therefore, impersonal and generally applicable to all.

Christ is a “spirit,” as is shown in the very early Christian interpretation.

If, like Peirithoos, he tarries too long in this place of rest and peace, he is overcome by torpidity, and the poison of the serpent paralyzes him for all time.

If he is to live he must fight and sacrifice his longing for the past, in order to rise to his own heights.

And having reached the noonday heights, he must also sacrifice the love for his own achievement, for he may not loiter. The sun also sacrifices its greatest strength in order to hasten onwards to the fruits of autumn, which are the seeds of immortality;

If he is to live he must fight and sacrifice his longing for the past, in order to rise to his own heights. And having reached the noonday heights, he must also sacrifice the love for his own achievement, for he may not loiter.

The sun also sacrifices its greatest strength in order to hasten onwards to the fruits of autumn, which are the seeds of immortality; fulfilled in children, in works, in posthumous fame, in a new order of things, all of which in their turn begin and complete the sun’s course over again.

The “Song of Hiawatha” contains, as these extracts show, a material which is very well adapted to bring into play the abundance of ancient symbolic possibilities, latent in the human mind, and to stimulate it to the creation of mythologic figures.

… of him, but bearing him within himself as a deadly longing for the depths within, for drowning in his own source, for becoming absorbed into the mother, his life is a constant struggle with death, a violent and transitory delivery from the always lurking night.

This death is no external enemy, but a deep personal longing for quiet and for the profound peace of non-existence, for a dreamless sleep in the ebb and flow of the sea of life.

Even in his highest endeavor for harmony and equilibrium, for philosophic depths and artistic enthusiasm, he seeks death, immobility, satiety and rest.

Nietzsche knows this conception:[769]

The hero is himself a serpent, himself a sacrificer and a sacrificed.

The hero himself is of serpent nature; therefore, Christ compares himself with the serpent; therefore, the redeeming principle of the world of that Gnostic sect which styled itself the Ophite was the serpent. The serpent is the Agatho and Kako demon.

Whoever is acquainted with psychoanalysis knows how often neurotics cry out against their parents. To be sure, such complaints and reproaches are often justified on account of the common human imperfections, but still more often they are reproaches which should really be directed towards themselves.

Reproach and hatred are always futile attempts to free one’s self apparently from the parents, but in reality from one’s own hindering longing for the parents.

Our author proclaims through the mouth of her infantile hero Chiwantopel a series of insults against her own family. We can assume that she must renounce all these tendencies, because they contain an unrecognized wish.

Here the unconscious ego expands to an enormous degree, evidently in order to cover with its boastfulness a large part of the neglected duty of life. But punishment follows at its heels.

Whoever prides himself too much on having sustained no wound in the battle of life lays himself open to the suspicion that his fighting has been with words only, whilst actually he has remained far away from the firing-line.

This spirit is just the reverse of the pride of those savage women, who point with satisfaction to the countless scars which were given them by their men in the sexual fight for supremacy.

“

Free dost thou call thyself? Thy dominant thought would I hear and not that thou hast thrown off a yoke.

Art thou one who had the right to throw off a yoke? There are many who throw away their last value when they throw away their servitude.”

“Free dost thou call thyself? Thy dominant thought would I hear and not that thou hast thrown off a yoke. Art thou one who had the right to throw off a yoke?

There are many who throw away their last value when they throw away their servitude.

”

man wishes to keep his childhood and eternal youth, rather than to die and suffer corruption in the grave. (“O, do not suffer my body to fall into decay and corruption.”)

Nothing brings the relentless flight of time and the cruel perishability of all blossoms more painfully to our consciousness than an inactive and empty life.

Idle dreaming is the mother of the fear of death, the sentimental deploring of what has been and the vain turning back of the clock.

(“O, do not suffer my body to fall into decay and corruption.”) Nothing brings the relentless flight of time and the cruel perishability of all blossoms more painfully to our consciousness than an inactive and empty life.

Idle dreaming is the mother of the fear of death, the sentimental deploring of what has been and the vain turning back of the clock.

Although man can forget in the long- (perhaps too long) guarded feelings of youth, in the dreamy state of stubbornly held remembrances, that the wheel rolls onward, nevertheless mercilessly does the gray hair, the relaxation of the skin and the wrinkles in the face tell …

Indolence is the beginning of all vice, because in a condition of slothful dreaming the libido has abundant opportunity for sinking into itself, in order to create compulsory obligations by means of regressively reanimated incestuous bonds. The best liberation is through regular work.[806]

Work, however, is salvation only when it is a free act, and has in itself nothing of infantile compulsion.

In this respect, religious ceremony appears in a high degree as organized inactivity, and at the same time as the forerunner of modern work.

It is evident that by this is meant not a physical, but a psychological cosmogony.

The world arises when man discovers it.

He discovers it when he sacrifices the mother; that is to say, when he has freed himself from the midst of his unconscious lying in the mother.

The Ostian head of Mithra Tauroctonos, illustrated in Cumont, has, indeed, an expression which we recognize in our patients as one of sentimental resignation.

Sentimentality is repressed brutality.

Hence the exceedingly sentimental pose, which had its counterpart in the symbolism of the shepherd and the lamb of contemporaneous Christianity, with the addition of infantilism.[837]

… irresistible striving forward, an endless life and will for construction, such as Schopenhauer has formulated in his world will, death and every end being some malignancy or fatality coming from without, but the libido, corresponding to the sun, also wills the destruction of its creation.

In the first half of life its will is for growth, in the second half of life it hints, softly at first, and then audibly, at its will for death.

And just as in youth the impulse to unlimited growth often lies under the enveloping covering of a resistance against life, so also does the will of the old to die frequently lie under the covering of a stubborn resistance against the end.

The thing common to these expressions is the surrounding, the enfolding. And there is no doubt that there is nothing in the world which so completely enfolds us as the mother.

When the neurotic complains that the world has no understanding, he says indirectly that he misses the mother.

Paul Verlaine has expressed this thought most beautifully in his poem, “Mon Rêve Familier”:

We find in this name those lisped syllables familiar to us from the early childhood of the hero, Hiawatha, Wawa, wama, mama.

The only one who really understands us is the mother.

For verstehen, “to understand” (Old High German firstân), is probably derived from a primitive Germanic prefix fri, identical with περὶ, meaning “roundabout.” The Old High German antfristôn, “to interpret,” is considered as identical with firstân.

Sensuality is the first moving wheel in our machinery. It stirs our being and makes it joyous and living. Everything we dream of as beautiful and noble is included here. Sexuality and sensuousness are the spirit of music, of painting and of all art.

All wishes of mankind rotate around this center like moths around a burning light.

The sense of beauty and the feeling for art are only other expressions of it. They signify nothing more than the impulse of mankind towards expression. I consider devoutness itself as a diverted channel of the sexual desire.”

It is a question here of a relentless fulfilment of the standpoint of the theory of cognition, established by Kant, not merely for the theory, but, what is more important, for the practice.

One should avoid playing with the infantile image of the world, because all this tends only to separate man from his essential and highest ethical goal, moral autonomy.

The religious symbol should be retained after the inevitable obliteration of certain antiquated fragments, as postulate or as transcendent theory, and also as taught in precepts, but is to be filled with new meaning according to the demand of the culture of the present day.

(In Middle High German, to wish is really “to have the power to create something extraordinary.”)

When a man dies, then only the wish that he might live remains, an unfulfilled wish, a fluttering wish, wherefore souls are birds.

The soul is wholly only libido, as is illustrated in many parts of this work; it is “to wish.” Thus the helpful bird, who assists the hero in the whale to come again into the light, who opens the rocks, is the wish for rebirth.

568. One need not be amazed at this formula because it is the animal in us, the primitive forces of which appear in religion. In this connection Dieterich’s words (“Mithrasliturgie,” p. 108) take on an especially important aspect. “

The old thoughts come from below in new force in the history of religion. The revolution from below creates a new life of religion in primitive indestructible forms.

”