Page:The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis II 1921 1.djvu/64

 56 CAVENDISH MOXON

at puberty a satisfying fatlicr substitute. In many cases she fails to find one, and therefore she is inclined to be religious. If hex hold on reality is weak she turns back to her first love in the sublimated form of the Father in heaven.

The impulses to the creation of a father God are not only the conscious feelings of inferiority, incapacity, and the fear cau.sed by hard times and lack of earthly love, but cliicfly the uncon.scioiis feeling that one's actual father is all loo human, the desire for ii(L ideal lover on to whom one may project one's will to power, and the need of a refuge in the transcendental family of God. The ultimate causes of the Father symbol are the repressed parental complexes that are satisfied by this belief. By turning as a child to God, the repressed psyche gains self-esteem, salvation from guilt, and peace in place of restless uncertainty.

"AlmiRlity"

God the Father in the Christian Creed is omnipotent and, as such, gives a substitutionary satisfaction to a universal desire of childhood. From the psycho-analytical point of view the life of man has been well defined by Ferenczi as a struj^gle to retain some part of his original feeling of omnipotence. Only the infant in the womb is completely omnipotent. The baby at birth struggles hard to regain complete satisfaction of all its desires. Gradually its dawning sense of reality forbids it to maintain the illusion of almightiness. It has to make elTorts to fulfil its desires and to adapt itself to external compulsion. Magic gestures and cries (as Ferenczi puts it) are used at first to retain its power. But with the growth of a social sense, the charming illusion of omnipotence must be consciously renounced. This renunciation is not shared by the unconscious, which proceeds to finti some symbolic satis- faction for its infantile belief in free and almighty will. When the libido is progressive the self is identified with a powerful social or intellectual movement; wTien the libido is regressive the ego is identified with a projected image of its unconscious desires, namely, an omnipotent God. The soul that seems impotent in a heartless world of law takes the path of religious regression in order to regain a pleasant sense of power reflected from on high. Like Paul, such a soul feels able to do all things through the divine power within.