as a means of escaping from the complex into reality; introversion as a means of detaching one’s self from reality through the complex. After we have informed ourselves about the general purposes of prayer, we are prepared to hear more about the vision of our dreamer. After the prayer, “the head of a sphinx with an Egyptian headdress” appeared, only to vanish quickly. Here the author was disturbed, so that for a moment she awoke. This vision recalls the previously mentioned phantasy of the Egyptian statue, whose rigid gesture is entirely in place here as a phenomenon of the so-called functional category. The light stages of the hypnosis are designated technically as “Engourdissement” (stiffening). The word Sphinx in the whole civilized world signifies the same as riddle: a puzzling creature who proposes riddles, like the Sphinx of Oedipus, standing at the portal of his fate like a symbolic proclamation of the inevitable. The Sphinx is a semi-theriomorphic representation of that “mother image” which may be designated as the “terrible mother,” of whom many traces are found in mythology. This interpretation is correct for Oedipus. Here the question is opened. The objection will be raised that nothing except the word “Sphinx” justifies the allusion to the Sphinx of Oedipus. On account of the lack of subjective materials, which in the Miller text are wholly lacking in regard to this vision, an individual interpretation would also be excluded. The suggestion of an “Egyptian” phantasy (Part I, Chapter II) is entirely insufficient to be employed here. Therefore we are compelled, if we wish to venture at all upon an understanding of this vision, to direct ourselves—perhaps in all too daring a manner—to the available ethnographic material under the assumption that the unconscious of the present-day man coins its symbols as was done in the most remote past. The Sphinx, in its traditional form, is a half-human, half-animal creature, which we must, in part, interpret in the way that is applicable to such phantastic products. The reader is directed to the deductions in the first part of this volume where the theriomorphic representations of the libido were discussed. This manner of representation is very familiar to the analyst, through the dreams and phantasies of neurotics (and of normal men). The impulse is readily represented as an animal, as a bull, horse, dog, etc. One of my patients, who had questionable relations with women, and who began the treatment with the fear, so to speak, that I would surely forbid him his sexual adventures, dreamed that I (his physician) very skilfully speared to the wall a strange animal, half pig, half crocodile. Dreams swarm with such theriomorphic representations of the libido. Mixed beings, such as are in this dream, are not rare. A series of very beautiful illustrations, where especially the lower half of the animal was represented theriomorphically, has been furnished by