Page:Psychology of the Unconscious (1916).djvu/131

 erotic tension, in the elevated feelings of religious poetry, in which perhaps many other people can find joy and consolation. One is wrong to storm against this conception from the radical standpoint of fanaticism for truth.

I think that one should view with philosophic admiration the strange paths of the libido and should investigate the purposes of its circuitous ways.

It is not too much to say that we have herewith dug up the erotic root, and yet the problem remains unsolved. Were there not bound up with that a mysterious purpose, probably of the greatest biological meaning, then certainly twenty centuries would not have yearned for it with such intense longing. Doubtless, this sort of libidian current moves in the same direction as, taken in the widest sense, did that ecstatic ideal of the Middle Ages and of the ancient mystery cults, one of which became the later Christianity. There is to be seen biologically in this ideal an exercise of psychologic projection (of the paranoidian mechanism, as Freud would express it).23 The projection consists in the repressing of the conflict into the unconscious and the setting forth of the repressed contents into seeming objectivity, which is also the formula of paranoia. The repression serves, as is well known, for the freeing from a painful complex from which one must escape by all means because its compelling and oppressing power is feared. The repression can lead to an apparent complete suppression which corresponds to a strong self-control. Unfortunately, however, selfcontrol has limits which are only too narrowly drawn.