"What I now feel for thee, Alcmene dearest, Ah, see! it soars far, far beyond the sun, Which even a husband owes thee. Depart, beloved, flee from this thy spouse, And choose between us, either him or me. I suffer with this shameful interchange, The thought to me is all unbearable, That this vain fellow's been received by thee, Whose cold heart thinks he holds a right o'er thee. Oh! might I now to thee, my sweetest light, A being of another sort appear, Thy conqueror since the art to conquer thee Was taught me by the mighty gods." In truth Kleist, like every other poet, chose the most of his material in accordance with unconscious wishes, where beyond all else the mother complex presses for poetic expression. Let us apply once more that which has been so far discovered to the "Prinz von Homburg." This is rendered yet more easy from the fact that the electress is repeatedly designated by the hero as "Mother." His real mother had indeed at her death delivered him over to the friend of her youth with the words: "Be a mother to him when I am no longer here." And the electress had answered in similar strain, "He shall be mine as if my own in birth!" But since on the other hand Natalie also addresses her repeatedly as Mother as she does the elector as Father, so Natalie is Kleist's beloved sister in disguise. The poet would desire the laurel wreath thus from his own sister. Why then the father's acquiescence? If we now appeal to our psychoanalytic experience, this teaches us that regularly the sister incest represents a later form of the older and more serious mother incest. The boy, who first desires the mother, satisfies himself later with the less forbidden and more easily accessible sister. All poets follow very significantly this psychoanalytically established relationship, as Rank[31] has recently convincingly shown. The poets often represent this, that the phantasies and wishes are displaced from the mother to the sister or they are split up between mother and sister, which then makes their origin especially clear. [31] _L. c._