speaks reveals itself, stripped of its incest covering, as an original passive arrest of the libido in its first object of childhood. This indolence is also a passion, as La Rochefoucauld[346] has brilliantly expressed it: “Of all passions, that which is least known to ourselves is indolence: it is the most ardent and malignant of them all, although its violence may be insensible, and the injuries it causes may be hidden; if we will consider its power attentively, we will see that it makes itself, upon all occasions, mistress of our sentiments, of our interests, and of our pleasures; it is the anchor, which has the power to arrest the largest vessels; it is a calm more dangerous to the most important affairs than rocks and the worst tempest. The repose of indolence is a secret charm of the soul which suddenly stops the most ardent pursuits and the firmest resolutions; finally to give the true idea of this passion, one must say that indolence is like a beatitude of the soul which consoles it for all its losses and takes the place of all its possessions.” This dangerous passion, belonging above all others to primitive man, appears under the hazardous mask of the incest symbol, from which the incest fear must drive us away, and which must be conquered, in the first place, under the image of the “terrible mother.”[347] It is the mother of innumerable evils, not the least of which are neurotic troubles. For, especially from the fogs of the arrested remnants of the libido, arise the harmful phantasmagoria which so veil reality that adaptation becomes almost impossible. However, we will not investigate any further in this place the foundations of the incest phantasies. The preliminary suggestion of my purely psychologic conception of the incest problem may suffice. We are here only concerned with the question whether _resistance_ which leads to introversion in our author signifies a conscious external difficulty or not. If it were an external difficulty, then, indeed, the libido would be violently dammed back, and would produce a flood of phantasies, which can best be designated as schemes, that is to say, plans as to how the obstacles could be overcome. They would be very concrete ideas of reality which seek to pave the way for solutions. It would be a strenuous meditation, indeed, which would be more likely to lead to anything rather than to a hypnagogic poem. The passive condition depicted above in no way fits in with a real external obstacle, but, precisely through its passive submission, it indicates a tendency which doubtless scorns real solutions and prefers phantastic substitutes. Ultimately and essentially we are, therefore, dealing with an internal conflict, perhaps after the manner of those earlier conflicts which led to the two first unconscious creations. We, therefore, are forced to conclude that the external object cannot be loved, because a predominant amount of libido prefers a