Page:Psychology of the Unconscious (1916).djvu/52

 herself—The return to the real world with erotic impression of officer singing in the night-watch—The under-*valuing of such erotic impressions—Their often deep effect—The succeeding dream, and poem—The denied erotic impression usurps an earlier transference: it expresses itself through the Father-Imago—Analysis of the poem—Relation to Cyrano, Milton and Job—The attempt to escape the problem by a religious and ethical pose—Contrast with real religion—Escape from erotic by transference to a God or Christ—This made effective by mutual transference: "Love one another"—The erotic spiritualized, however—The inner conflict kept conscious by this method—The modern, however, represses the conflict and so becomes neurotic—The function of Christianity—Its biologic purpose fulfilled—Its forms of thought and wisdom still available.

IV.—THE SONG OF THE MOTH             87

The double rôle of Faust: creator and destroyer—"I came not to send peace, but a sword"—The modern problem of choice between Scylla of world-renunciation and Charybdis of world-acceptance—The ethical pose of The Hymn of Creation having failed, the unconscious projects a new attempt in the Moth-Song—The choice, as in Faust—The longing for the sun (or God) the same as that for the ship's officer—Not the object, however: the longing is important—God is our own longing to which we pay divine honors—The failure to replace by a real compensation the libido-object which is surrendered, produces regression to an earlier and discarded object—A return to the infantile—The use of the parent image—It becomes synonymous with God, Sun, Fire—Sun and snake—Symbols of the libido gathered into the sun-symbol—The tendency toward unity and toward multiplicity—One God with many attributes: or many gods that are attributes of one—Phallus and sun—The sun-hero, the well-beloved—Christ as sun-god—"Moth and sun" then brings us to historic depths of the soul—The sun-hero creative and destructive—Hence: Moth and Flame: burning one's wings—The destructiveness of being fruitful—Wherefore the neurotic withdraws from the conflict, committing a sort of self-murder—Comparison with Byron's Heaven and Earth.

PART II

I.—ASPECTS OF THE LIBIDO                       127

A backward glance—The sun the natural god—Comparison with libido—Libido, "sun-energy"—The sun-image as seen by the mystic in introversion—The phallic symbol of the libido—Faust's key—Mythical heroes with phallic attributes—These heroes personifications of the human libido and its typical fates—A definition of the word "libido"—Its etymological context.