PART I

CHAPTER

INTRODUCTION 3

Relation of the Incest Phantasy to the Oedipus Legend—Moral revulsion over such a discovery—The unity of the antique and modern psychology—Followers of Freud in this field—The need of analyzing historical material in relation to individual analysis.

I.— CONCERNING THE TWO KINDS OF THINKING 8

Antiquity of the belief in dreams—Dream-meanings psychological, not literal—They concern wish-fulfilments—A typical dream: the sexual assault—What is symbolic in our every-day thinking?—One kind of thinking: intensive and deliberate, or directed—Directed thinking and thinking in words—Origin of speech in primitive nature sounds—The evolution of speech—Directed thinking a modern acquisition—Thinking, not directed, a thinking in images: akin to dreaming—Two kinds of thinking: directed and dream or phantasy thinking—Science an expression of directed thinking—The discipline of scholasticism as a forerunner—Antique spirit created not science but mythology—Their world of subjective phantasies similar to that we find in the childmind of to-day; or in the savage—The dream shows a similar type—Infantile thinking and dreams a re-echo of the prehistoric and the ancient—The myths a mass-dream of the people: the dream the myth of the individual—Phantastic thinking concerns wishes—Typical cases, showing kinship with ancient myths—Psychology of man changes but slowly—Phantastic thinking tells us of mythical or other material of undeveloped and no longer recognized wish tendencies in the soul—The sexual base—The wish, because of its disturbing nature, expressed not directly, but symbolically.

II.— THE MILLER PHANTASIES 42

Miss Miller’s unusual suggestibility—Identifying herself with others—Examples of her autosuggestibility and suggestive effect—Not striking in themselves, but from analytic viewpoint they afford a glance into the soul of the writer—Her phantasies really tell of the history of her love.

III.— THE HYMN OF CREATION 49

Miss Miller’s description of a sea-journey—Really a description of “introversion”—A retreat from reality into herself—The return to the real world with erotic impression of officer singing in the night-watch—The undervaluing of such erotic impressions—Their often deep effect—The succeeding dream, and poem—The denied erotic impression usurps an earlier transference: it expresses itself through the Father-Imago—Analysis of the poem—Relation to Cyrano, Milton and Job—The attempt to escape the problem by a religious and ethical pose—Contrast with real religion—Escape from erotic by transference to a God or Christ—This made effective by mutual transference: “Love one another”—The erotic spiritualized, however—The inner conflict kept conscious by this method—The modern, however, represses the conflict and so becomes neurotic—The function of Christianity—Its biologic purpose fulfilled—Its forms of thought and wisdom still available.

IV.— THE SONG OF THE MOTH 87

The double rôle of Faust: creator and destroyer—“I came not to send peace, but a sword”—The modern problem of choice between Scylla of world-renunciation and Charybdis of world-acceptance—The ethical pose of The Hymn of Creation having failed, the unconscious projects a new attempt in the Moth-Song—The choice, as in Faust—The longing for the sun (or God) the same as that for the ship’s officer—Not the object, however: the longing is important—God is our own longing to which we pay divine honors—The failure to replace by a real compensation the libido-object which is surrendered, produces regression to an earlier and discarded object—A return to the infantile—The use of the parent image—It becomes synonymous with God, Sun, Fire—Sun and snake—Symbols of the libido gathered into the sun-symbol—The tendency toward unity and toward multiplicity—One God with many attributes: or many gods that are attributes of one—Phallus and sun—The sun-hero, the well-beloved—Christ as sun-god—“Moth and sun” then brings us to historic depths of the soul—The sun-hero creative and destructive—Hence: Moth and Flame: burning one’s wings—The destructiveness of being fruitful—Wherefore the neurotic withdraws from the conflict, committing a sort of self-murder—Comparison with Byron’s Heaven and Earth.