Psychology of the Unconscious

PART I. Chapter

CHAPTER

INTRODUCTION 3

Relation of the Incest Phantasy to the Oedipus Legend—Moral revulsion over such a discovery—The unity of the antique and modern psychology—Followers of Freud in this field—The need of analyzing historical material in relation to individual analysis.

I.— CONCERNING THE TWO KINDS OF THINKING 8

Antiquity of the belief in dreams—Dream-meanings psychological, not literal—They concern wish-fulfilments—A typical dream: the sexual assault—What is symbolic in our every-day thinking?—One kind of thinking: intensive and deliberate, or directed—Directed thinking and thinking in words—Origin of speech in primitive nature sounds—The evolution of speech—Directed thinking a modern acquisition—Thinking, not directed, a thinking in images: akin to dreaming—Two kinds of thinking: directed and dream or phantasy thinking—Science an expression of directed thinking—The discipline of scholasticism as a forerunner—Antique spirit created not science but mythology—Their world of subjective phantasies similar to that we find in the childmind of to-day; or in the savage—The dream shows a similar type—Infantile thinking and dreams a re-echo of the prehistoric and the ancient—The myths a mass-dream of the people: the dream the myth of the individual—Phantastic thinking concerns wishes—Typical cases, showing kinship with ancient myths—Psychology of man changes but slowly—Phantastic thinking tells us of mythical or other material of undeveloped and no longer recognized wish tendencies in the soul—The sexual base—The wish, because of its disturbing nature, expressed not directly, but symbolically.

II.— THE MILLER PHANTASIES 42

Miss Miller’s unusual suggestibility—Identifying herself with others—Examples of her autosuggestibility and suggestive effect—Not striking in themselves, but from analytic viewpoint they afford a glance into the soul of the writer—Her phantasies really tell of the history of her love.

III.— THE HYMN OF CREATION 49

Miss Miller’s description of a sea-journey—Really a description of “introversion”—A retreat from reality into herself—The return to the real world with erotic impression of officer singing in the night-watch—The undervaluing of such erotic impressions—Their often deep effect—The succeeding dream, and poem—The denied erotic impression usurps an earlier transference: it expresses itself through the Father-Imago—Analysis of the poem—Relation to Cyrano, Milton and Job—The attempt to escape the problem by a religious and ethical pose—Contrast with real religion—Escape from erotic by transference to a God or Christ—This made effective by mutual transference: “Love one another”—The erotic spiritualized, however—The inner conflict kept conscious by this method—The modern, however, represses the conflict and so becomes neurotic—The function of Christianity—Its biologic purpose fulfilled—Its forms of thought and wisdom still available.

IV.— THE SONG OF THE MOTH 87

The double rôle of Faust: creator and destroyer—“I came not to send peace, but a sword”—The modern problem of choice between Scylla of world-renunciation and Charybdis of world-acceptance—The ethical pose of The Hymn of Creation having failed, the unconscious projects a new attempt in the Moth-Song—The choice, as in Faust—The longing for the sun (or God) the same as that for the ship’s officer—Not the object, however: the longing is important—God is our own longing to which we pay divine honors—The failure to replace by a real compensation the libido-object which is surrendered, produces regression to an earlier and discarded object—A return to the infantile—The use of the parent image—It becomes synonymous with God, Sun, Fire—Sun and snake—Symbols of the libido gathered into the sun-symbol—The tendency toward unity and toward multiplicity—One God with many attributes: or many gods that are attributes of one—Phallus and sun—The sun-hero, the well-beloved—Christ as sun-god—“Moth and sun” then brings us to historic depths of the soul—The sun-hero creative and destructive—Hence: Moth and Flame: burning one’s wings—The destructiveness of being fruitful—Wherefore the neurotic withdraws from the conflict, committing a sort of self-murder—Comparison with Byron’s Heaven and Earth.

PART II

I.— ASPECTS OF THE LIBIDO 127

A backward glance—The sun the natural god—Comparison with libido—Libido, “sun-energy”—The sun-image as seen by the mystic in introversion—The phallic symbol of the libido—Faust’s key—Mythical heroes with phallic attributes—These heroes personifications of the human libido and its typical fates—A definition of the word “libido”—Its etymological context.

II.— THE CONCEPTION AND THE GENETIC THEORY OF LIBIDO 139

A widening of the conception of libido—New light from the study of paranoia—The impossibility of restricting the conception of libido to the sexual—A genetic definition—The function of reality only partly sexual—Yet this, and other functions, originally derivations from procreative impulse—The process of transformation—Libido, and the conception of will in general—Examples in mythology—The stages of the libido: its desexualized derivatives and differentiations—Sublimation vs. repression—Splittings off of the primal libido—Application of genetic theory of libido to introversion psychoses—Replacing reality by archaic surrogates—Desexualizing libido by means of phantastic analogy formations—Possibly human consciousness brought to present state in this manner—The importance of the little phrase: “Even as.”

III.— THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE LIBIDO. A POSSIBLE SOURCE OF 157 PRIMITIVE HUMAN DISCOVERIES

An example of transition of the libido—Act of boring with forefinger: an infantile presexual activity—Similar activities in patient’s early childhood—Outcome in dementia præcox—Its phantasies related to mythological products: a reproduction of the creations of antiquity—The freeing of libido from the nutritive to enter the sexual function—The epoch of suckling and the epoch of displaced rhythmic activity—These followed by the beginnings of onanistic attempts—An obstacle in the sexual zone produces regression to a previous mode—These regressions easier in earlier stages of humanity than now—The ethnological phantasy of boring—Examples—The production of fire—Its sexual significance—A substitute for coitus—The invention of fire-making then due to the need of supplying a symbol for the sexual act—The psychological compulsion for such transitions of the libido based on an original division of the will—Regression to incestuous—Prohibition here sends incestuous component of libido back to presexual—Character of its application here—The substitution of Mother-Earth for the parent—Also of infantile boring—Leading then to discovery of fire—An example in Hindoo literature—The sexual significance of the mouth—Its other function: the mating call—The regression which produced fire through boring also elaborated the mating call—The beginnings of speech—Example from the Hindoo—Speech and fire the first fruits of transformation of libido—The fire-preparation regarded as forbidden, as robbery—The forbidden thing onanism—Onanism a cheating of sexuality of its purpose—The ceremonial fire-production a substitute for the possibility of onanistic regression—Thus a transformation of libido ensues.

IV.— THE UNCONSCIOUS ORIGIN OF THE HERO 191

The cause of introversion—The forward and backward flow of the libido—The abnormal third—The conflict rooted in the incest problem—The “terrible mother”—Miss Miller’s introversion—An internal conflict—Its product of hypnagogic vision and poem—The uniformity of the unconscious in all men—The unconscious the object of a true psychology—The individual tendency with its production of the hero cult—The love for the hero or god a love for the unconscious—A turning back to the mother of humanity—Such regressions act favorably within limits—Miss Miller’s mention of the Sphinx—Theriomorphic representations of the libido—Their tendency to represent father and mother—The Sphinx represents the fear of the mother—Miss Miller’s mention of the Aztec—Analysis of this figure—The significance of the hand symbolically—The Aztec a substitute for the Sphinx—The name Chi-wan-to-pel—The connection of the anal region with veneration—Chiwantopel and Ahasver, the Wandering Jew—The parallel with Chidher—Heroes generating themselves through their own mothers—Analogy with the Sun—Setting and rising sun: Mithra and Helios, Christ and Peter, Dhulqarnein and Chidher—The fish symbol—The two Dadophores: the two thieves—The mortal and immortal parts of man—The Trinity taken from phallic symbolism—Comparison of libido with phallus—Analysis of libido symbolism always leads back to the mother incest—The hero myth the myth of our own suffering unconscious—Faust.

V.— SYMBOLISM OF THE MOTHER AND OF REBIRTH 233

The crowd as symbol of mystery—The city as symbol of the mother—The motive of continuous “union”—The typical journey of the sun-hero—Examples—A longing for rebirth through the mother—The compulsion to symbolize the mother as City, Sea, Source, etc.—The city as terrible mother and as holy mother—The relation of the water-motive to rebirth—Of the tree-motive—Tree of life a mother-image—The bisexual character of trees—Such symbols to be understood psychologically, not anatomically—The incestuous desire aims at becoming a child again, not at incest—It evades incest by creating myths of symbolic rebirth—The libido spiritualized through this use of symbols—To be born of the spirit—This compulsion toward symbolism brings a release of forces bound up in incest—This process in Christianity—Christianity with its repression of the manifest sexual the negative of the ancient sexual cult—The unconscious transformation of the incest wish into religious exercise does not meet the modern need—A conscious method necessary, involving moral autonomy—Replacing belief by understanding—The history of the symbolism of trees—The rise of the idea of the terrible mother a mask of the incest wish—The myth of Osiris—Related examples—The motive of “devouring”—The Cross of Christ: tree of death and tree of life—Lilith: the devouring mother—The Lamias—The conquering of the mother—Snake and dragon: the resistance against incest—The father represents the active repulse of the incest wish of the son—He frequently becomes the monster to be overcome by the hero—The Mithraic sacrificing of the incest wish an overcoming of the mother—A replacing of archaic overpowering by sacrifice of the wish—The crucified Christ an expression of this renunciation—Other cross sacrifices—Cross symbol possesses significance of “union”—Child in mother’s womb: or man and mother in union—Conception of the soul a derivative of mother imago—The power of incest prohibition created the self-conscious individual—It was the coercion to domestication—The further visions of Miss Miller.

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