Psychology of the Unconscious A Study of the...

But, as once Gilgamesh, bringing back the magic herb from the west land, was robbed of his treasure by the demon serpent, so does Hölderlin’s poem die away in a painful lament, which betrays to us that no victorious resurrection will follow his descent to the shadows:

This recognition, that man must sacrifice the retrogressive longing (the incestuous libido) before the “heavenly ones” tear away the sacrifice, and at the same time the entire libido, came too late to the poet. Therefore, I take it to be a wise counsel which the unconscious gives our author, to sacrifice the infantile hero. This sacrifice is best accomplished, as is shown by the most obvious meaning, through a complete devotion to life, in which all the libido unconsciously bound up in familial bonds, must be brought outside into human contact. For it is necessary for the well-being of the adult individual, who in his childhood was merely an atom revolving in a rotary system, to become himself the centre of a new system. That such a step implies the solution or, at least, the energetic treatment of the individual sexual problem is obvious, for unless this is done the unemployed libido will inexorably remain fixed in the incestuous bond, and will prevent individual freedom in essential matters. Let us keep in mind that Christ’s teaching separates man from his family without consideration, and in the talk with Nicodemus we saw the specific endeavor of Christ to procure activation of the incest libido. Both tendencies serve the same goal—the liberation of man; the Jew from his extraordinary fixation to the family, which does not imply higher development, but greater weakness and more uncontrolled incestuous feeling, produced the compensation of the compulsory ceremonial of the cult and the religious fear of the incomprehensible Jehovah.

When man, terrified by no laws and no furious fanatics or prophets, allows his incestuous libido full play, and does not liberate it for higher purposes, then he is under the influence of unconscious compulsion. For compulsion is the unconscious wish. (Freud.) He is under the dominance of the libido εἱμαρμένη[803] and his destiny does not lie in his own hands; his adventures, Τύχαι καὶ Μοῖραι,[804] fall from the stars. His unconscious incestuous libido, which thus is applied in its most primitive form, fixes the man, as regards his love type, in a corresponding primitive stage, the stage of ungovernableness and surrender to the emotions. Such was the psychologic situation of the passing antiquity, and the Redeemer and Physician of that time was he who endeavored to educate man to the sublimation of the incestuous libido.[805] The destruction of slavery was the necessary condition of that sublimation, for antiquity had not yet recognized the duty of work and work as a duty, as a social need of fundamental importance. Slave labor was compulsory work, the counterpart of the equally disastrous compulsion of the libido of the privileged. It was only the obligation of the individual to work which made possible in the long run that regular “drainage” of the unconscious, which was inundated by the continual regression of the libido. Indolence is the beginning of all vice, because in a condition of slothful dreaming the libido has abundant opportunity for sinking into itself, in order to create compulsory obligations by means of regressively reanimated incestuous bonds.

The best liberation is through regular work.[806] Work, however, is salvation only when it is a free act, and has in itself nothing of infantile compulsion. In this respect, religious ceremony appears in a high degree as organized inactivity, and at the same time as the forerunner of modern work.

Miss Miller’s vision treats the problem of the sacrifice of the infantile longing, in the first place, as an individual problem, but if we cast a glance at the form of this presentation, then we will become aware that here it must concern something, which is also a problem of humanity in general. For the symbols employed, the serpent which killed the horse[807] and the hero voluntarily sacrificing himself, are primitive figures of phantasies and religious myths streaming up from the unconscious.

In so far as the world and all within it is, above all, a thought, which is credited with transcendental “substance” through the empirical need of the same, there results from the sacrifice of the regressive libido the creation of the world; and, psychologically speaking, the world in general. For him who looks backward the world, and even the infinite starry sky, is the mother[808] who bends over and encloses him on all sides, and from the renunciation of this idea and from the longing for this idea arises the image of the world. From this most simple fundamental thought, which perhaps appears strange to us only because it is conceived according to the principle of desire and not the principle of reality,[809] results the significance of the cosmic sacrifice. A good example of this is the slaying of the Babylonian primitive mother Tiâmat, the dragon, whose body is destined to form the heaven and the earth. We come upon this thought in its most complete form in Hindoo philosophy of the most ancient date; namely, in songs of Rigveda. In Rigveda 10: 81, 4, the song inquires:

This verse is very remarkable; if one wishes to stretch this mythology out on the procrustean bed of logic, sore violence would have to be committed. It is an incredibly phantastic conception that, beside the gods, ordinary “wise men” unite in sacrificing the primitive being, aside from the circumstance that, beside the primitive being, nothing had existed in the beginning (that is to say, before the sacrifice), as we shall soon see. If the great mystery of the mother sacrifice is meant thereby, then all becomes clear: