Page:The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis II 1921 2.djvu/29

 I

THE CASTRATION COMPLEX 185

My brother was friendly with Paul van Eeden. Then I think of a poem written by my brother shortly before his death, entitled, "Hir^polis". "Hir^polis" is a word he had dreamed, and was meant to signify the "Egyptian sand-martin" {Uferschwalbe, literally, beach swallow). This word, Hir6polis, is a condensation of Hirundo (swallow— again a bird of passage) and polis (the last syllables of the name of Egyptian towns). It is an acrostic about a phthis- ical girl with kindly eyes; the initial letters form the word Hir6- polis. The acrostic, literally translated, is as follows:

/falfway descended

/nto the depth of death

i?eachest thou with kind eyes

^'er the last light fades away.

Pleadest thou with me to come

(?'er the feast to which He invites thee.

Z.ast swallows of the eyes

/n the Nile Valley of death.

^o to die is not to my liking.

The idea of death is here thought of ambivalently; that is to say, as enticement to return to the womb of Mother Earth; the Nile Valley of death is mentioned, the NUe Valley where the first known history of mankind was enacted. The idea of death is also elaborated into the idea of re-birth (birds of passage, swallows). The idea of the return of something lost is well re- presented in the associations (Paul's awakening, birds of passage, the return of the lost brother as Lohengrin).

The walking-stick I borrow from another Wagnerian drama. It is Tannhauser's magic wand which bursts into leaf. Paul is also my little son's first name. I had previously thought that the motive of the Lohengrin Saga was a castration idea: the losing the penis through guilt, with a prelude in which the "brother" is innocently lost. At that time the thought crossed my mind that this might mean the loss of the mother's nipple which returns as a penis (Lohengrin— Swan— Husband), the magic oi which, neverthe- less, would be broken if origin and name is investigated, that is to say, when it is established that the lost brother is really him- self; so that the incest prohibition falls on him and he is recalled. In other words, love disappears when it becomes conscious as repetition-