Chapter Iii.) Sarah Has Brought About the Usual Sublimation and Cleavage

of the father-complex and on the one side has elevated her childish love to the adoration of God, on the other has turned the obsessive force of her father's attraction into the persecuting demon Asmodi. The legend is so beautifully worked out that it displays the father in his twofold aspect, on the one hand as the inconsolable father of the bride, on the other as the secret digger of his son-in-law's grave, whose fate he foresees. This beautiful fable has become a cherished paradigm for my analysis, for by no means infrequent are such cases where the father-demon has laid his hand upon his daughter, so that her whole life long, even when she does marry, there is never a true union, because her husband's image never succeeds in obliterating the unconscious and eternally operative infantile father-ideal. This is valid not only for daughters, but equally for sons. A fine instance of such a father-constellation is given in Dr. Brill's recently published: "Psychological factors in dementia præcox. An analysis."

In my experience the father is usually the decisive and dangerous object of the child's phantasy, and if ever it happens to be the mother, I have been able to discover behind her a grandfather to whom she belonged in her heart.

I must leave this question open: my experience does not go far enough to warrant a decision. It is to be hoped that the experience of the coming years will sink deeper shafts into this still dark land which I have been able but momentarily to light up, and will discover to us more of the secret workshop of that fate-deciding demon of whom Horace says:

"Scit Genius natale comes qui temperat astrum, Naturæ deus humanæ, mortalis in unum, Quodque caput, vultu mutabilis, albus et ater."

FOOTNOTES:

"Fate show thy force: ourselves we do not owe; What is decreed must be, and be this so!"

Schopenhauer, "Ueber die anscheinende Absichtlichkeit im Schicksale des Einzelnen. Parerga und Paralipomena."]