Chapter II: 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.