correctness of his assumptions, for he continued to retain the magic technique.
As pointed out elsewhere, spirits and demons were nothing but the projection of primitive man’s emotional impulses;[1] he personified the things he endowed with affects, populated the world with them and then rediscovered his inner psychic processes outside himself, quite like the ingenious paranoiac Schreber, who found the fixations and detachments of his libido reflected in the fates of the “God-rays” which he invented.[2]
As on a former occasion,[3] we want to avoid the problem as to the origin of the tendency to project psychic processes into the outer world. It is fair to assume, however, that this tendency becomes stronger where the projection into the outer world offers psychic relief. Such a state of affairs can with certainty be expected if the impulses struggling for omnipotence have come into conflict with each other, for then they evidently cannot all become omnipotent. The mor-
- ↑ We assume that in this early narcistic stage feelings from libidinous and other sources of excitement are perhaps still indistinguishably combined with each other.
- ↑ Schreber, “Denwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken,” 1903.—Freud, Psychoanalytic Observations concerning an autobiographically described case of Paranoia, “Jahrbuch für Psychoanalyt. Forsch,” Vol. Ill, 1911.
- ↑ Compare the latest communication about the Schreber case, p. 59.
