Page:Psychology of the Unconscious (1916).djvu/498

 CHAPTER VIII

THE SACRIFICE

After this long digression, let us return to Miss Miller's vision. We can now answer the question as to the significance of Siegfried's longing for Brunhilde. It is the striving of the libido away ''from the mother towards the mother''. This paradoxical sentence may be translated as follows: as long as the libido is satisfied merely with phantasies, it moves in itself, in its own depths, in the mother.[1] When the longing of our author rises in order to escape the magic circle of the incestuous and, therefore, pernicious, object, and it does not succeed in finding reality, then the object is and remains irrevocably the mother. Only the overcoming of the obstacles of reality brings the deliverance from the mother, who is the continuous and inexhaustible source of life for the creator, but death for the cowardly, timid and sluggish.

Whoever is acquainted with psychoanalysis knows how often neurotics cry out against their parents. To be sure, such complaints and reproaches are often justified on account of the common human imperfections, but still more often they are reproaches which should really be directed towards themselves. Reproach and hatred are always futile attempts to free one's self apparently from the parents, but in reality from one's own hindering longing for