Page:Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology (1916).djvu/194

 lower sexuality to the latter. As soon as we approach the territory of the neurosis, the antithesis is stretched to the utmost limit. God becomes the symbol of the most complete sexual repression, the Devil the symbol of sexual lust. Thus it is that the conscious expression of the father constellation, like every expression of an unconscious complex when it appears in consciousness, gets its Janus-face, its positive and its negative components. A curious, beautiful example of this crafty play of the Unconscious is seen in the love-episode in the Book of Tobias. Sarah, the daughter of Raguel in Ecbatana, desires to marry; but her evil fate wills it that seven times, one after another, she chooses a husband who dies on the marriage-night. The evil spirit Asmodi, by whom she is persecuted, kills these husbands. She prays to Jehovah to let her die rather than suffer this shame again. She is despised even by her father’s maid-servants. The eighth bridegroom, Tobias, is sent to her by God. He too is led into the bridal-chamber. Then the old Raguel, who has only pretended to go to bed, gets up again and goes out and digs his son-in-law’s grave beforehand, and in the morning sends a maid to the bridal-chamber to make sure of the expected death. But this time Asmodi’s part is played out, Tobias is alive.

Unfortunately medical etiquette forbids me to give a case of hysteria which fits in exactly with the above instance, except that there were not seven husbands, but only three, ominously chosen under all the signs of the infantile constellation. Our first case too comes under this category and in our third we see the old peasant at work preparing to dedicate his daughter to a like fate.

As a pious and obedient daughter (compare her beautiful prayer in chapter iii.) Sarah has brought about the usual sublimation and cleavage of the father-complex and on the one side has elevated her childish love to the adoration of God, on the other has turned the obsessive force of her father’s attraction into the persecuting demon Asmodi. The legend is so beautifully worked out that it displays the father in his twofold aspect, on the one hand as the