Page:Psychology of the Unconscious (1916).djvu/52

herself—The return to the real world with erotic impression
of officer singing in the night-watch—The under-*valuing
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.