Psychology of the Unconscious: A Study of the Transformations and Symbolisms of the Libido. A Contribution to the History of the Evolution of ThoughtJung, C. G. (Carl Gustav)
Philosophy
Psychology of the Unconscious: A Study of the Transformations and Symbolisms of the Libido. A Contribution to the History of the Evolution of Thought
Jung, C. G. (Carl Gustav)
Libido (Psychology); Mother and child; Psychoanalysis; Subconsciousness; Symbolism (Psychology)
(Kronos had
made Rhea pregnant, the relation was secret, and Rhea was his sister.
Helios, however, observed it and cursed the relation.) Osiris was killed
in a crafty manner by the god of the underworld, Typhon, who locked him
in a chest. He was thrown into the Nile, and so carried out to sea.
Osiris, however, mated in the underworld with his second sister,
Nephthys (motive of the night journey to the sea with incest). One sees
here how the symbolism is developed. In the mother womb, before the
outward existence, Osiris commits incest; in death, the second
intrauterine existence, Osiris again commits incest. Both times with a
sister who is simply substituted for the mother as a legal, uncensured
symbol, since the marriage with a sister in early antiquity was not
merely tolerated, but was really commended. Zarathustra also recommended
the marriage of kindred. This form of myth would be impossible to-day,
because cohabitation with the sister, being incestuous, would be
repressed. The wicked Typhon entices Osiris craftily into a box or
chest; this distortion of the true state of affairs is transparent. The
“original sin” caused men to wish to go back into the mother again, that
is, the incestuous desire for the mother, condemned by law, is the ruse
supposedly invented by Typhon. The fact is, the ruse is very
significant. Man tries to sneak into rebirth through subterfuge in order
to become a child again. An early Egyptian hymn[470] even raises an
accusation against the mother Isis because she destroys the sun-god Rê
by treachery. It was interpreted as the ill-will of the mother towards
her son that she banished and betrayed him. The hymn describes how Isis
fashioned a snake, put it in the path of Rê, and how the snake wounded
the sun-god with a poisonous bite, from which wound he never recovered,
so that finally he had to retire on the back of the heavenly cow. But
this cow is the cow-headed goddess, just as Osiris is the bull Apis. The
mother is accused as if she were the cause of man flying to the mother
in order to be cured of the wound which she had herself inflicted. This
wound is the prohibition of incest.[471] Man is thus cut off from the
hopeful certainty of childhood and early youth, from all the
unconscious, instinctive happenings which permit the child to live as an
appendage of his parents, unconscious of himself. There must be
contained in this many sensitive memories of the animal age, where there
was not any “thou shalt” and “thou shalt not,” but all was just simple
occurrence. Even yet a deep animosity seems to live in man because a
brutal law has separated him from the instinctive yielding to his
desires and from the great beauty of the harmony of the animal nature.
This separation manifested itself, among other things, in the incest
prohibition and its correlates (laws of marriage, etc.); therefore pain
and anger relate to the mother, as if she were responsible for the
domestication of the sons of men.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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