CHAPTER VIII
THE SACRIFICE
After this long digression, let us return to Miss Miller's
vision. We can now answer the question as to
the significance of Siegfried's longing for Brunhilde. It
is the striving of the libido away from the mother
towards the mother. This paradoxical sentence may be
translated as follows: as long as the libido is satisfied
merely with phantasies, it moves in itself, in its own
depths, in the mother.[1] When the longing of our author
rises in order to escape the magic circle of the incestuous
and, therefore, pernicious, object, and it does not succeed
in finding reality, then the object is and remains irrevocably
the mother. Only the overcoming of the obstacles
of reality brings the deliverance from the mother, who is
the continuous and inexhaustible source of life for the
creator, but death for the cowardly, timid and sluggish.
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
