The retrospective longing acts like a paralyzing poison upon the energy and enterprise; so that it may well be compared to a poisonous serpent which lies across our path. Apparently, it is a hostile demon which robs us of energy, but, in reality, it is the individual unconscious, the retrogressive tendency of which begins to overcome the conscious forward striving. The cause of this can be, for example, the natural aging which weakens the energy, or it may be great external difficulties, which cause man to break down and become a child again, or it may be, and this is probably the most frequent cause, the woman who enslaves the man, so that he can no longer free himself, and becomes a child again.[618] It may be of significance also that Isis, as sister-wife of the sun-god, creates the poisonous animal from the spittle of the god, which is perhaps a substitute for sperma, and, therefore, is a symbol of libido. She creates the animal from the libido of the god; that means she receives his power, making him weak and dependent, so that by this means she assumes the dominating rôle of the mother. (Mother transference to the wife.) This part is preserved in the legend of Samson, in the rôle of Delilah, who cut off Samson’s hair, the sun’s rays, thus robbing him of his strength.[619] Any weakening of the adult man strengthens the wishes of the unconscious; therefore, the decrease of strength appears directly as the backward striving towards the mother. There is still to be considered one more source of the reanimation of the mother-imago. We have already met it in the discussion of the mother scene in “Faust,” that is to say, _the willed introversion of a creative mind_, which, retreating before its own problem and inwardly collecting its forces, dips at least for a moment into the source of life, in order there to wrest a little more strength from the mother for the completion of its work. It is a mother-child play with one’s self, in which lies much weak selfadmiration and self-adulation (“Among a hundred mirrors”—Nietzsche); _a Narcissus state_, a strange spectacle, perhaps, for profane eyes. The separation from the mother-imago, the birth out of one’s self, reconciles all conflicts through the sufferings. This is probably meant by Nietzsche’s verse: “Why hast thou enticed thyself Into the Paradise of the old serpent? Why hast thou crept Into thyself, thyself?...