Psychology of the Unconscious A Study of the...

That quotation, which, apparently, skips lightly over the situation, “Only this, and nothing more,” comes from a text which depicts in an affecting manner the despair over the lost Lenore. That quotation also misleads our poet in the most striking manner. Therefore, she undervalues the erotic impression and the wide-reaching effect of the commotion caused by it. It is this undervaluation, which Freud has formulated more precisely as “repression,” which is the reason why the erotic problem does not attain directly conscious treatment, and from this there arise “these psychologic riddles.” The erotic impression works in the unconscious, and, in its stead, pushes symbols forth into consciousness. Thus, one plays hide-and-seek with one’s self. First, it is “the morning stars which sing together”; then “Paradise Lost”; then the erotic yearning clothes itself in an ecclesiastical dress and utters dark words about “World Creation” and finally rises into a religious hymn to find there, at last, a way out into freedom, a way against which the censor of the moral personality can oppose nothing more. The hymn contains in its own peculiar character the marks of its origin. It thus has fulfilled itself—the “Law of the Return of the Complex.” The night singer, in this circuitous manner of the old transference to the Father-Priest, has become the “Eternal,” the “Creator,” the God of Tone, of Light, of Love.

The indirect course of the libido seems to be a way of sorrow; at least “Paradise Lost” and the parallel reference to Job lead one to that conclusion. If we take, in addition to this, the introductory intimation of the identification with Christian, which we see concludes with Cyrano, then we are furnished with material which pictures the indirect course of the libido as truly a way of sorrow. It is the same as when mankind, after the sinful fall, had the burden of the earthly life to bear, or like the tortures of Job, who suffered under the power of Satan and of God, and who himself, without suspecting it, became a plaything of the superhuman forces which we no longer consider as metaphysical, but as metapsychological. Faust also offers us the same exhibition of God’s wager.

While in Job the two great tendencies are characterized simply as good and bad, the problem in Faust is a pronouncedly erotic one; viz., the battle between sublimation and eros, in which the Devil is strikingly characterized through the fitting rôle of the erotic tempter. The erotic is lacking in Job; at the same time Job is not conscious of the conflict within his own soul; he even continuously disputes the arguments of his friends who wish to convince him of evil in his own heart. To this extent, one might say that Faust is considerably more honorable since he openly confesses to the torments of his soul.

Miss Miller acts like Job; she says nothing, and lets the evil and the good come from the other world, from the metapsychologic. Therefore, the identification with Job is also significant in this respect. A wider, and, indeed, a very important analogy remains to be mentioned. The creative power, which love really is, rightly considered from the natural standpoint, remains as the real attribute of the Divinity, sublimated from the erotic impression; therefore, in the poem God is praised throughout as Creator.

Job offers the same illustration. Satan is the destroyer of Job’s fruitfulness. God is the fruitful one himself, therefore, at the end of the book, he gives forth, as an expression of his own creative power, this hymn, filled with lofty poetic beauty. In this hymn, strangely enough, two unsympathetic representatives of the animal kingdom, behemoth and the leviathan, both expressive of the crudest force conceivable in nature, are given chief consideration; the behemoth being really the phallic attribute of the God of Creation.

God says this in order to bring his power and omnipotence impressively before Job’s eyes. God is like the behemoth and the leviathan; the fruitful nature giving forth abundance,—the untamable wildness and boundlessness of nature,—and the overwhelming danger of the unchained power.[80]