Page:Psychology of the Unconscious (1916).djvu/253

 and causes their manifestation in the form of separate tendencies; it is only thus that they become willingness and unwillingness, which interfere with each other. The Bhagavad-Gîtâ says, "Be thou free of the pairs of opposites."[5] The harmony thus becomes disharmony. It cannot be my task here to investigate whence the unknown third arises, and what it is. Taken at the roots in the case of our patients, the "nuclear complex" (Freud) reveals itself as the incest problem. The sexual libido regressing to the parents appears as the incest tendency. The reason this path is so easily travelled is due to the enormous indolence of mankind, which will relinquish no object of the past, but will hold it fast forever. The "sacrilegious backward grasp" of which Nietzsche speaks reveals itself, stripped of its incest covering, as an original passive arrest of the libido in its first object of childhood. This indolence is also a passion, as La Rochefoucauld[6] has brilliantly expressed it:

"Of all passions, that which is least known to ourselves is indolence: it is the most ardent and malignant of them all, although its violence may be insensible, and the injuries it causes may be hidden; if we will consider its power attentively, we will see that it makes itself, upon all occasions, mistress of our sentiments, of our interests, and of our pleasures; it is the anchor, which has the power to arrest the largest vessels; it is a calm more dangerous to the most important affairs than rocks and the worst tempest. The repose of indolence is a secret charm of the soul which suddenly stops the most ardent pursuits and the firmest resolutions; finally to give the true idea of this passion, one must say that indolence is like a beatitude of the soul which consoles it for all its losses and takes the place of all its possessions."