Too Long; Didn't Read

After the disappearance of the assailant, Chiwantopel begins the following monologue: “From the extreme ends of these continents, from the farthest lowlands, after having forsaken the palace of my father, I have been wandering aimlessly during a hundred moons, always pursued by my mad desire to find ‘her who will understand.’ With jewels I have tempted many fair ones, with kisses I have tried to snatch the secret of their hearts, with acts of bravery I have conquered their admiration. (He reviews the women he has known.) Chita, the princess of my race ... she is a little fool, vain as a peacock, having nought in her head but jewels and perfume. Ta-nan, the young peasant, ... bah, a mere sow, no more than a breast and a stomach, caring only for pleasure. And then Ki-ma, the priestess, a true parrot, repeating hollow phrases learnt from the priests; all for show, without real education or sincerity, suspicious poseur and hypocrite!... Alas! Not one who understands me, not one who resembles me, not one who has a soul sister to mine. There is not one among them all who has known my soul, not one who could read my thought; far from it; not one capable of seeking with me the luminous summits, or of spelling with me the superhuman word, love.” Here Chiwantopel himself says that his journeying and wandering is a quest for that other, and for the meaning of life which lies in union with her. In the first part of this work we merely hinted gently at this possibility. The fact that the seeker is masculine and the sought-for of 342feminine sex is not so astonishing, because the chief object of the unconscious transference is the mother, as has probably been seen from that which we have already learned. The daughter takes a male attitude towards the mother. The genesis of this adjustment can only be suspected in our case, because objective proof is lacking. Therefore, let us rather be satisfied with inferences. “She who will understand” means the mother, in the infantile language. At the same time, it also means the life companion. As is well known, the sex contrast concerns the libido but little. The sex of the object plays a surprisingly slight rôle in the estimation of the unconscious. The object itself, taken as an objective reality, is but of slight significance. (But it is of greatest importance whether the libido is transferred or introverted.) The original concrete meaning of erfassen, “to seize,” begreifen, “to touch,” etc., allows us to recognize clearly the under side of the wish—to find a congenial person. But the “upper” intellectual half is also contained in it, and is to be taken into account at the same time. One might be inclined to assume this tendency if it were not that our culture abused the same, for the misunderstood woman has become almost proverbial, which can only be the result of a wholly distorted valuation. On the one side, our culture undervalues most extraordinarily the importance of sexuality; on the other side, sexuality breaks out as a direct result of the repression burdening it at every place where it does not belong, and makes use of such an indirect manner of expression that one may expect to meet it suddenly almost anywhere. Thus the 343idea of the intimate comprehension of a human soul, which is in reality something very beautiful and pure, is soiled and disagreeably distorted through the entrance of the indirect sexual meaning.[628] The secondary meaning or, better expressed, the misuse, which repressed and denied sexuality forces upon the highest soul functions, makes it possible, for example, for certain of our opponents to scent in psychoanalysis prurient erotic confessionals. These are subjective wish-fulfilment deliria which need no contra arguments. This misuse makes the wish to be “understood” highly suspicious, if the natural demands of life have not been fulfilled. Nature has first claim on man; only long afterwards does the luxury of intellect come. The mediæval ideal of life for the sake of death needs gradually to be replaced by a natural conception of life, in which the normal demands of men are thoroughly kept in mind, so that the desires of the animal sphere may no longer be compelled to drag down into their service the high gifts of the intellectual sphere in order to find an outlet. We are inclined, therefore, to consider the dreamer’s wish for understanding, first of all, as a repressed striving towards the natural destiny. This meaning coincides absolutely with psychoanalytic experience, that there are countless neurotic people who apparently are prevented from experiencing life because they have an unconscious and often also a conscious repugnance to the sexual fate, under which they imagine all kinds of ugly things. There is only too great an inclination to yield to this pressure of the unconscious sexuality and to experience the dreaded (unconsciously hoped 344for) disagreeable sexual experience, so as to acquire by that means a legitimately founded horror which retains them more surely in the infantile situation. This is the reason why so many people fall into that very state towards which they have the greatest abhorrence.