Miss Miller’s vision again—The paradoxical striving of the libido away from the mother toward the mother—The destroying mother becomes beneficent on being conquered—Chiwantopel a hero of words, not deeds—He has not that will to live which breaks the magic circle of the incestuous—His identification with the author, and her wish for the parents—The end is the devouring of the daughter’s libido by the mother—Sexuality of the unconscious merely a symbol—Idle dreaming the mother of the fear of death—This downward path in the poetry of Hölderlin—The estrangement from reality, the introversion leading to death—The necessity of freeing libido for a complete devotion to life—Otherwise bound by unconscious compulsion: Fate—Sublimation through voluntary work—Creation of the world through cosmic sacrifice—Man discovers the world when he sacrifices the mother—The incest barrier as the producer of thought—Budding sexuality drawing the individual from the family—The mind dawns at the moment the child begins to be free of the mother—He seeks to win the world, and leave the mother—Childish regression to the presexual brings archaic phantasies—The incest problem not physical, but psychological—Sacrifice of the horse: sacrifice of the animal nature—The sacrifice of the “mother libido”: of the son to the mother—Superiority of Christian symbol: the sacrifice, not only of lower nature, but the whole personality—Miss Miller’s phantasy passes from sacrifice of the sexual, to sacrifice of the infantile personality—Problem of psychoanalysis, expressed mythologically, the sacrifice and rebirth of the infantile hero—The libido wills the destruction of its creation: horse and serpent—The end of the hero by means of earthquake—The one who understands him is the mother.
“_Therefore theory, which gives to facts their value and significance, is often very useful, even if it is partially false, for it throws light on phenomena which no one observed, it forces an examination, from many angles, of facts which no one had hitherto studied, and it gives the impulse for more extended and more productive researches._
“_It is, therefore, a moral duty for the man of science to expose himself to the risk of committing error and to submit to criticism, in order that science may continue to progress. A writer has attacked the author for this very severely, saying, here is a scientific ideal very limited and very paltry. But those who are endowed with a mind sufficiently serious and impersonal as not to believe that all that they write is the expression of truth absolute and eternal, approve of this theory which places the aims of science well above the miserable vanity and paltry ‘amour propre’ of the scientist._”—GUGLIELMO FERRERO.
_Les Lois Psychologiques du Symbolisme—1895. Preface, p. viii._
