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 "don d'amour." The medium in which these associations occur is the memory of a certain very much honored ecclesiastic who spoke those dark words. From the same period of time comes the remembrance of that excitement about the idea of the "creative thought" which from itself "produced its object." Here are two ways of creation intimated: the creative thought, and the mysterious reference to the "don d'amour."

At the time when I had not yet understood the nature of psychoanalysis, I had a fortunate opportunity of winning through continual observation a deep insight into the soul of a fifteen-year-old girl. Then I discovered, with astonishment, what the contents of the unconscious phantasies are, and how far removed they are from those which a girl of that age shows outwardly. There are wide-reaching phantasies of truly mythical fruitfulness. The girl was, in the split-off phantasy, the race-mother of uncounted peoples.13 If we deduct the poetically spoken phantasy of the girl, elements are left which at that age are common to all girls, for the unconscious content is to an infinitely greater degree common to all mankind than the content of the individual consciousness. For it is the condensation of that which is historically the average and ordinary.

Miss Miller's problem at this age was the common human problem: "How am I to be creative?" Nature knows but one answer to that: "Through the child (don d'amour!)." "But how is the child attained?" Here the terrifying problem emerges, which, as our analytic experience shows, is connected with the father,14 where