What lay in truth behind that unattainable goal that Kleist tried again and again to carry by force? He himself confesses that it was not the highest poetic art or at least not exclusively so. Otherwise Kleist would have been able to content himself with his so commanding talent and with that which he was able to accomplish with it, like so many other great poets. Let us not forget that he sought to outdo especially the three greatest. Therefore I think, in accordance with all my psychoanalytic experience, that Sophocles, Shakespeare and Goethe are together only father incarnations, that Kleist thus wanted to remove the father from the field. One has a right to definite surmisings on the basis of various works of Kleist, although nothing is known to us of the poet's relations to his parents. The incest motive is one of the chief determining factors of artistic creation, as Rank has outlined in his beautiful book.[29] It is in the first place the desired and striven for incest with the mother herself, in the way of which the father naturally stands. The poet realizes in the freer land of poetry what is impossible in life, by displacing it over a discovered or given material. [29] Otto Rank, "Das Inzest-Motiv in Dichtung und Sage," 1912, Franz Deuticke. I discussed in a larger work,[30] previous to Rank's book, how Heinrich von Kleist made the incest phantasies of his childhood the foundation of many poems. So for instance the Marquise von O., assaulted in a fainting fit, is protected from the foe pressing upon her by some one who loves her and will subsequently surely marry her. I need hardly explain that the evil one who will positively force himself upon her is the father, from whom the son defends the mother, that he may subsequently woo her. It is again only the poet himself who sets himself as a youthful ideal god in place of the aging father, as Jupiter descended from his throne renewed in beauty and youth according to his divine power, to visit Alcmene in the form of her spouse Amphitryon. In the "Zerbrochenen Krug" (Broken Pitcher) the judge breaks violently into the room of the beloved one--a typical symbol for one's own father who is also in fact the child's first judge--and is driven out by the rightful lover. [30] "Heinrich von Kleist. Eine pathographisch-psychologische Studie," 1910, J. F. Bergmann. The objection need not be made that the poet has simply held to his pattern. The choice of material betrays the purpose, which frequently remains unconscious. What, we may say, impelled the poet although he wished to translate it wholly, to take up Molière's Amphitryon, one of his weakest productions too, and then change it in so striking a fashion? Quite unlike the French version, Jupiter becomes for Kleist the advocate with the wife-mother: