CHAPTER IV

THE UNCONSCIOUS ORIGIN OF THE HERO

Prepared by the previous chapters, we approach the personification of the libido in the form of a conqueror, a hero or a demon. With this, symbolism leaves the impersonal and neuter realm, which characterizes the astral and meteorologic symbol, and takes human form: the figure of a being changing from sorrow to joy, from joy to sorrow, and which, like the sun, sometimes stands in its zenith, sometimes is plunged in darkest night, and arises from this very night to new splendor.[341] Just as the sun, guided by its own internal laws, ascends from morn till noon, and passing beyond the noon descends towards evening, leaving behind its splendor, and then sinks completely into the all-enveloping night, thus, too, does mankind follow his course according to immutable laws, and also sinks, after his course is completed, into night, in order to rise again in the morning to a new cycle in his children. The symbolic transition from sun to man is easy and practicable. The third and last creation of Miss Miller’s also takes this course. She calls this piece “Chiwantopel,” a “hypnagogic poem.” She gives us the following information about the circumstances surrounding the origin of this phantasy:

“After an evening of care and anxiety, I lay down to sleep at about half past eleven. I felt excited and unable to sleep, although I was very tired. There was no light in the room. I closed my eyes, and then I had the feeling that something was about to happen. The sensation of a general relaxation came over me, and I remained as passive as possible. Lines appeared before my eyes,—sparks and shining spirals, followed by a kaleidoscopic review of recent trivial occurrences.”

The reader will regret with me that we cannot know the reason for her cares and anxieties. It would have been of great importance for what follows to have information on this point. This gap in our knowledge is the more to be deplored because, between the first poem in 1898 and the time of the phantasy here discussed (1902), four whole years have passed. All information is lacking regarding this period, during which the great problem surely survived in the unconscious. Perhaps this lack has its advantages in that our interest is not diverted from the universal applicability of the phantasy here produced by sympathy in regard to the personal fate of the author. Therefore, something is obviated which often prevents the analyst in his daily task from looking away from the tedious toil of detail to that wider relation which reveals each neurotic conflict to be involved with human fate as a whole.

The condition depicted by the author here corresponds to such a one as usually precedes an intentional somnambulism[342] often described by spiritualistic mediums. A certain inclination to listen to these low nocturnal voices must be assumed; otherwise such fine and hardly perceptible inner experiences pass unnoticed. We recognize in this listening a current of the libido leading inward and beginning to flow towards a still invisible, mysterious goal. It seems that the libido has suddenly discovered an object in the depths of the unconscious which powerfully attracts it. The life of man, turned wholly to the external by nature, does not ordinarily permit such introversion; there must, therefore, be surmised a certain exceptional condition, that is to say, a lack of external objects, which compels the individual to seek a substitute for them in his own soul. It is, however, difficult to imagine that this rich world has become too poor to offer an object for the love of human atoms; nor can the world and its objects be held accountable for this lack. It offers boundless opportunities for every one. It is rather the _incapacity to love which robs mankind of his possibilities_. This world is empty to him alone who does not understand how to direct his libido towards objects, and to render them alive and beautiful for himself, for Beauty does not indeed lie in things, but in the feeling that we give to them. That which compels us to create a substitute for ourselves is not the external lack of objects, but our incapacity to lovingly include a thing outside of ourselves. Certainly the difficulties of the conditions of life and the adversities of the struggle for existence may oppress us, yet even adverse external situations would not hinder the giving out of the libido; on the contrary, they may spur us on to the greatest exertions, whereby we bring our whole libido into reality. Real difficulties alone will never be able to force the libido back permanently to such a degree as to give rise, for example, to a neurosis. _The conflict, which is the condition of every neurosis, is lacking._ The resistance, which opposes its unwillingness to the will, alone has the power to produce that pathogenic introversion which is the starting point of every psychogenic disturbance. The resistance against loving produces the inability to love. Just as the normal libido is comparable to a steady stream which pours its waters broadly into the world of reality, so the resistance, dynamically considered, is comparable, not so much to a rock rearing up in the river bed which is flooded over or surrounded by the stream, as to a backward flow towards the source. A part of the soul desires the outer object; another part, however, harks back to the subjective world, where the airy and fragile palaces of phantasy beckon. One can assume the dualism of the human will for which Bleuler, from the psychiatric point of view, has coined the word “ambitendency”[343] as something generally present, bearing in mind that even the most primitive motor impulse is in opposition; as, for example, in the act of extension, the flexor muscles also become innervated. This normal ambitendency, however, never leads to an inhibition or prevention of the intended act, but is the indispensable preliminary requirement for its perfection and coördination. For a resistance disturbing to this act to arise from this harmony of finely attuned opposition an abnormal plus or minus would be needed on one or the other side. The resistance originates from this added third.[344] This applies also to the duality of the will, from which so many difficulties arise for mankind. The abnormal third frees the pair of opposites, which are normally most intimately united, 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.”[345] 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[346] 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.”

This dangerous passion, belonging above all others to primitive man, appears under the hazardous mask of the incest symbol, from which the incest fear must drive us away, and which must be conquered, in the first place, under the image of the “terrible mother.”[347] It is the mother of innumerable evils, not the least of which are neurotic troubles. For, especially from the fogs of the arrested remnants of the libido, arise the harmful phantasmagoria which so veil reality that adaptation becomes almost impossible. However, we will not investigate any further in this place the foundations of the incest phantasies. The preliminary suggestion of my purely psychologic conception of the incest problem may suffice. We are here only concerned with the question whether _resistance_ which leads to introversion in our author signifies a conscious external difficulty or not. If it were an external difficulty, then, indeed, the libido would be violently dammed back, and would produce a flood of phantasies, which can best be designated as schemes, that is to say, plans as to how the obstacles could be overcome. They would be very concrete ideas of reality which seek to pave the way for solutions. It would be a strenuous meditation, indeed, which would be more likely to lead to anything rather than to a hypnagogic poem. The passive condition depicted above in no way fits in with a real external obstacle, but, precisely through its passive submission, it indicates a tendency which doubtless scorns real solutions and prefers phantastic substitutes. Ultimately and essentially we are, therefore, dealing with an internal conflict, perhaps after the manner of those earlier conflicts which led to the two first unconscious creations. We, therefore, are forced to conclude that the external object cannot be loved, because a predominant amount of libido prefers a phantastic object, which must be brought up from the depths of the unconscious as a compensation for the missing reality.

The visionary phenomena, produced in the first stages of introversion, are grouped among the well-known phenomena[348] of hypnagogic vision. They form, as I explained in an earlier paper, the foundation of the true visions of the symbolic autorevelations of the libido, as we may now express it.

Miss Miller continues:

“Then I had the impression that some communication was immediately impending. It seemed to me as if there were re-echoed in me the words, ‘Speak, O Lord, for Thy servant listens; open Thou mine ears!’”

This passage very clearly describes the intention; the expression “communication” is even a current term in spiritualistic circles. The Biblical words contain a clear invocation or “prayer,” that is to say, a wish (libido) directed towards divinity (the unconscious complex). The prayer refers to Samuel, i:3, where Samuel at night was three times called by God, but believed that it was Eli calling, until the latter informed him that it was God himself who spoke, and that he must answer if his name was called again—“Speak, O Lord, for Thy Servant hears!” The dreamer uses these words really in an inverse sense, namely, in order to produce God with them. With that she directs her desires, her libido, into the depths of her unconscious.

We know that, although individuals are widely separated by the differences in the contents of their consciousness, they are closely alike in their unconscious psychology. It is a significant impression for one working in practical psychoanalysis when he realizes how uniform are the typical unconscious complexes. Difference first arises from individualization. This fact gives to an essential portion of the Schopenhauer and Hartmann philosophies a deep psychologic justification.[349] The very evident uniformity of the unconscious mechanism serves as a psychologic foundation for these philosophic views. The unconscious contains the differentiated remnants of the earlier psychologic functions overcome by the individual differentiation. The reaction and products of the animal psyche are of a generally diffused uniformity and solidity, which, among men, may be discovered apparently only in traces. Man appears as something extraordinarily individual in contrast with animals.

This might be a tremendous delusion, because we have the appropriate tendency always to recognize only the difference of things. This is demanded by the psychologic adaptation which, without the most minute differentiation of the impressions, would be absolutely impossible. In opposition to this tendency we have ever the greatest difficulty in recognizing in their common relations the things with which we are occupied in every-day life. This recognition becomes much easier with things which are more remote from us. For example, it is almost impossible for a European to differentiate the faces in a Chinese throng, although the Chinese have just as individual facial formations as the Europeans, but the similarity of their strange facial expression is much more evident to the remote onlooker than their individual differences. But when we live among the Chinese then the impression of their uniformity disappears more and more, and finally the Chinese become individuals also. Individuality belongs to those conditional actualities which are greatly overrated theoretically on account of their practical significance. It does not belong to those overwhelmingly clear and therefore universally obtrusive general facts upon which a science must primarily be founded. The individual content of consciousness is, therefore, the most unfavorable object imaginable for psychology, because it has veiled the universally valid until it has become unrecognizable. The essence of consciousness is the process of adaptation which takes place in the most minute details. On the other hand, the unconscious is the generally diffused, which not only binds the individuals among themselves to the race, but also unites them backwards with the peoples of the past and their psychology. Thus the unconscious, surpassing the individual in its generality, is, in the first place, the object of a true psychology, which claims not to be psychophysical.

Man as an individual is a suspicious phenomenon, the right of whose existence from a natural biological standpoint could be seriously contested, because, from this point of view, the individual is only a race atom, and has a significance only as a mass constituent. The ethical standpoint, however, gives to the human being an individual tendency separating him from the mass, which, in the course of centuries, led to the development of personality, hand in hand with which developed the hero cult, and has led to the modern individualistic cult of personages. The attempts of rationalistic theology to keep hold of the personal Jesus as the last and most precious remnant of the divinity which has vanished beyond the power of the imagination corresponds to this tendency. In this respect the Roman Catholic Church was more practical, because she met the general need of the visible, or at least historically believed hero, through the fact that she placed upon the throne of worship a small but clearly perceptible god of the world, namely, the Roman Pope, the Pater patrum, and at the same time the Pontifex Maximus of the invisible upper or inner God. The sensuous demonstrability of God naturally supports the religious process of introversion, because the human figure essentially facilitates the transference, for it is not easy to imagine something lovable or venerable in a spiritual being. This tendency, everywhere present, has been secretly preserved in the rationalistic theology with its Jesus historically insisted upon. This does not mean that men loved the visible God; they love him, not as he is, for he is merely a man, and when the pious wished to love humanity they could go to their neighbors and their enemies to love them. Mankind wishes to love in God only their ideas, that is to say, the ideas which they project into God. By that they wish to love their unconscious, that is, that remnant of ancient humanity and the centuries-old past in all people, namely, the common property left behind from all development which is given to all men, like the sunshine and the air. But in loving this inheritance they love that which is common to all. Thus they turn back to the mother of humanity, that is to say, to the spirit of the race, and regain in this way something of that connection and of that mysterious and irresistible power which is imparted by the feeling of belonging to the herd. It is the problem of Antæus, who preserves his gigantic strength only through contact with mother earth. This temporary withdrawal into one’s self, which, as we have already seen, signifies a regression to the childish bond to the parent, seems to act favorably, within certain limits, in its effect upon the psychologic condition of the individual. It is in general to be expected that the two fundamental mechanisms of the psychoses, transference and introversion, are to a wide extent extremely appropriate methods of normal reaction against complexes; transference as a means of escaping from the complex into reality; introversion as a means of detaching one’s self from reality through the complex.

After we have informed ourselves about the general purposes of prayer, we are prepared to hear more about the vision of our dreamer. After the prayer, “the head of a sphinx with an Egyptian headdress” appeared, only to vanish quickly. Here the author was disturbed, so that for a moment she awoke. This vision recalls the previously mentioned phantasy of the Egyptian statue, whose rigid gesture is entirely in place here as a phenomenon of the so-called functional category. The light stages of the hypnosis are designated technically as “Engourdissement” (stiffening). The word Sphinx in the whole civilized world signifies the same as riddle: a puzzling creature who proposes riddles, like the Sphinx of Oedipus, standing at the portal of his fate like a symbolic proclamation of the inevitable. The Sphinx is a semi-theriomorphic representation of that “mother image” which may be designated as the “terrible mother,” of whom many traces are found in mythology. This interpretation is correct for Oedipus. Here the question is opened. The objection will be raised that nothing except the word “Sphinx” justifies the allusion to the Sphinx of Oedipus. On account of the lack of subjective materials, which in the Miller text are wholly lacking in regard to this vision, an individual interpretation would also be excluded. The suggestion of an “Egyptian” phantasy (Part I,