J. Sadger

“ I became convinced that happiness would be found for me only where I shared it with another being, and that I could be satisfied only by a relationship similar to that in which I had stood toward my mother; an inner bond where only a single mutual interest controlled, where one soul found its happiness only in the other. Without such an absolute love, penetrating the whole being, life seemed to me worthless and stale. ”

“ The earliest love of the tiny maiden belongs almost always to her own father, who is in truth her first beloved. One can often hear it from the child's lips, “You know, Papa, when Mama dies then I will marry you.” That is in the childish sense meant quite properly and literally. The early, premature death of the mother gives reality to such infantile wishes, at least as far as concerns the care of the house. As soon then as Maria may begin to play this part, she fills it in a striking and inimitable fashion, although in years she is yet a mere child. ”

“ Why is the moon her beloved and her desire from childhood up, why can she stand by the hour looking at it, why does she long when sick to be laid so that she can look at it all the time? He who observes children knows that such extreme love, which endures for years without wearying of it, and finally that ability to stare steadily at the moon, must have a sexual content, although naturally no one will admit this. Only when the object, in our case the heavenly body, is sexually stimulating is the love for it enduring for all time, undergoing no change, no abatement of feeling for it. ”

“ Thus was Gro enlightened as to the source of her pregnancy. “She quivered with shame that the desire in her dreams had the power to drive her down to the lonely prisoner and she shook in her inmost soul at the memory of that happy dream, which she had had the night before her father's death. Now her love suddenly burst into the light like a wonderful flower, which suddenly springs up with a thousand fragrant buds. ”

“ I can never look upon you with the eyes of love. Passion seems to me like a glowing sword, which burns out one's eyes as it goes by. There was a day when you made the flaming sword of your desire pass by my face—since that time it is burned out. I have been blinded, Soelver, I am blind to the desire of your eyes, and all your fervent prayers. I have hated you, despised you, defied you, yet you have repaid evil with good 58and now I return good for good. Look not upon me with love's eyes, seek not to awaken the dead in me to life. ”

“ Now the unconscious, hitherto successfully repressed, avenges itself, now conscience awakes and as the husband leaves her completely alone she begins to wander, that is to seek to return to the infantile ideal. In her wandering she herself plays the rôle of father, who once approached her with the lighted candle and then called to her, “Come, come, come, come, give me your hand!” and bade her go to bed. ”

“ More extended walks were in general possible only in the light of the moon, which as a heavenly body shining everywhere threw its brightness over every thing, in the court, garden and over the street, while candles or lamps at the best lighted one or two rooms. The patient, given to sleep walking or moon walking, went after the light, which meanwhile represented to her from childhood on a symbol of the parents' love and gave hope of sexual enjoyment. ”

“ Then Soelver was conscious of an infinite weakness in his love toward this pure maiden, whom his coarseness had taken into his arms, his desire had scorched with its hot breath but who had nevertheless left him benumbed in his baseness, cowardliness and weakness. Now he understood that love, in order to triumph, must first humble its own power, still its own movement and soften its brutal will. ”

“ Her body is almost illuminated by its own light, her hair sparkles electrically when it is touched, “warm waves of light” emanate from her, which Soelver noticed at their first meeting, the sun seems expressly to seek her, a halo of impalpable beauty surrounds her and above all glows from the depths of her eyes. Not only so, Gro seems to dwell chiefly in the light, whose last drops she greedily absorbs within herself. When the light fades, her body becomes cold as ice like a corpse. ”

“ Only the thought of love had not yet arisen from the depths of her soul like pearls to the light. Nevertheless the wonderful flower of her affection was growing in the golden light of dreams. He longed after Gro as after his bride, although he was only the bridegroom of her dreams, who dared to kiss her only when her eyes were closed. ”

“ Scarcely in any other tale is the fierce strife between the clearly active sexual longing, and the conscious sexual denial present at the same time, as well as the final victory which the unconscious attains, so plainly shown as in Gustav Frenssen's romance, where the moon walking, exhibitionistic woman completely overthrows the reasoning of the man. The poet expresses it clearly and decisively: They each knew the desire of the other. Joern Uhl saw through the meaning of a maiden's scorn and Lena's eyes said, I am too proud to love you, but I do love you. ”

“ I can only reply to this apparently justified indignation that the assumption I here make concerning Shakespeare is fundamentally and universally human and is true with every male child. We go for proof to what we have earlier discovered, that the first inclination of every child, also already erotically colored, belongs to the parent of the opposite sex, the love of the girl to the father, the leaning of the boy to his mother, while the child sets himself against the parent of the same sex, who may be only justly concerned in his education without over indulging him. ”

“ She defended herself from her lover's craving by force and blow; even when conquered finally through the noble spirit of her enemy, she would see in him only the friend for life and death. She directly refused to think of love and displaced it to external things, she even bade the young man go rather than desire her as his wife. Soelver's devotion reminded her most significantly of her mother's tenderness, his pride, of the brother of her childhood. “It is as if in you the proud brother of my childhood had returned. Your spirit is his. ”

“ This is the one who summons her to walk in her sleep, the lighted candle in her hand. It is quite an everyday experience, which holds for everyone, for the well as for every one who later becomes ill, that in reality the first love, which bears quite clearly features of sense pleasure, belongs to the earliest years of childhood, and that its objects are none other than the child's own parents and in the second place the brothers and sisters. ”

“ She is warm only where it concerns the attainment of her goal; it is her ambition which demands satisfaction. She is always to her husband “my dearest partner of my greatness” as he once appropriately writes her. It is not to be considered that Shakespeare, who always overmotivates his situations, should have at the height of his power so obscured from recognition all the love impulses, which would have seemed to be decisive for her whole character. The truth is simply that Lady Macbeth is no loving wife, but merely greedy of fame, as already represented in the Chronicle. ”

“ If I had only at that time been obstinate about the planning of this thing, I would have foreseen the wrong of it and have known that the mother was an old woman, and with many conscience grows when reason is going to sleep. Faith, honor and peace he would never have squandered, for the farmer's position does not play with so high a stake. Still today the little fellow runs gaily about the yard under my eyes.... Ah, you poor sin child, how wantonly was the joy of living destroyed for you! ”

“ How Rosalinde then became pregnant and in spite of her resistance toward Emil, still married him to reëstablish her honor, how though after the wedding feast two acquaintances of the young husband, whom he had not invited, played him so mischievous a trick that he lost his reason in consequence, that deserves no further rendering.
We find here also as the nucleus of moon walking, when we strip from the foregoing all its mystical setting, the longing to approach the love object and there to be able to indulge oneself without punishment because it is done unconsciously. ”

“ And he went on thinking to himself, “It is pleasanter to go thus alone and let one's thoughts run on. Marry? Marry now? I will be on my guard. After I am thirty!” Then his thought came back to Lena. “She looked well as she flung the stool at the bull. Prancing like a three-year-old horse. Yesterday she did not look so well, her eyes were not so bright, she spoke harshly to Wieten (the old housekeeper) and said to her afterwards, ‘Do not mind it, Wieten, I slept badly,’ and laughed. Funny thing, slept badly? When one is on the go as she must be all day, one should sleep like a log. ”

“ Be thou my happiness, take me with thee, only pleasure of the senses do I desire for myself. Thou Moon, most beautiful and best, save me, take my maidenhood, I am not evil to thee. Draw me mightily to thyself, do not leave off, thy kisses have been so good to me.’” As may be seen, she loved the moon like a lover to whom she would yield herself entirely. The grossly sexual relationship is evident. It is after this fragment doubly regrettable that a penetrating psychoanalysis was not here possible. ”

“ As the early inclination of the small maiden is generally toward the father, so the first love of the boy is for the mother. It is she who teaches him to love and to seek the woman of his heart according to her own image. Later, just before puberty we might say, the boy becomes acquainted with the secrets of sexual life, then, clinging to certain impulses of his childhood, he begins to desire the mother also in the newly acquired sense, while he begins to hate the father as a favored rival, who stands in the way of this wish, and develops a conscious antagonism toward him. ”

“ Therefore he wished to call forth in his only daughter the traits of his own blood, his pride, disdainfulness and stiff-neckedness. “She must know neither fear nor weakness; her will must be hardened and her courage steeled like that of a man. When he heard that his daughter had been in danger but had saved herself, he swore revenge to the perpetrator of the outrage, yet at the same time his heart laughed with pride at Gro's fearlessness. He took the young nobleman prisoner and rewarded him with heavy and tedious torture as penance for his insolence. ”

“ The influence of the moon in this moon affectivity is very little known, especially in its psychic overdetermination. Yet there is little doubt that the moon's light is reminiscent of the light in the hand of a beloved parent, who every night came in loving solicitude to assure himself or herself of the child's sleep. Nothing so promptly wakes the sleep walker as the calling of his name, which accords with his being spoken to as a child by the parent. Fixed gazing upon the planet also has probably an erotic coloring like the staring of the hypnotizer to secure hypnosis. ”

“ Convention demands that the maiden wait until the lover approaches her, but in that unconscious state she may surrender herself. The need for repression explains then the subsequent amnesia. Yet wandering by night is not concerned merely with sexual enjoyment, over and above that it fulfills a second desire that arises out of childhood, as we know from psychoanalysis. Every small maiden has, that is, the wish to have a child by her father, her first love, which is often in later years defined thus, one might have a child, but without a husband. ”

“ As Maria's erotism later found satisfaction in her father, her love toward the moon steadily receded. But at the entrance upon puberty her sexual impulse increased and she began to wander in the moonlight. The love finally which Eisener inspires in her, together with the strong sexual excitement, which the fête the day before had called forth in her, occasions again an attack, in which she surrenders herself willingly to the beloved.
The folk, like the family physician, have not a doubt of the sexual basis of the moon mania with her as with individuals in general. ”

“ It is my purpose to bring also our beautiful literature to the solution of the exceedingly difficult and obscure problem of sleep walking and moon walking. Our poets, for all our psychiatrists and psychologists, possess the finest knowledge of the psyche and during the centuries before science was able to throw light upon the puzzles of the mind, they solved them prophetically with discerning spirit. ”

“ Then she pretends to be asleep, talks in her sleep, throws herself about in her sleep, that she may be able to do everything without punishment and without being blamed, finally plays the mother in a manner which corresponds completely to child's play. Also later, before and after wandering in the bright moonlight, she produces specially deep sleep and first as if in an obsession tries the door repeatedly to see if it is closed. ”

“ The second sleep walking appears much more difficult of explanation. In this Burdach sought plainly a definite goal, which seemed so clear and transparent to him that he could not at all understand why anyone should question him about it. If we consider that his first thought on waking was that he need not betray this purpose, that moreover there enters at once a repression and causes him completely to forget it, there remains then no other possibility than that we have to do with a strongly forbidden wish, which the conscious censor will not allow to pass. ”

“ As long as Lady Macbeth is fighting only for the childish goal, she is an unshakeable rock amid the storms of danger. She shrinks from no wrong and no crime that she may be queen at her husband's side. But she must gradually perceive that her husband will never win satisfaction, he will never recover from the king-father murder, her hopes will 129never be fulfilled and she will never live in quiet satisfaction at the side of her father. ”

“ The striving after poetic fame does not remain with our poet within the usual, normal limits but becomes much more a peculiar neurotic characteristic. No less a hope for instance had Heinrich von Kleist than with an unheard of creation to strike at Sophocles, Shakespeare and Goethe and concerning the last named he uttered this audacious sentiment, “I will rend the crown from his brow!” Since he fails to attain this goal in spite of repeated most earnest onslaughts, he rushes away to die upon the battlefield. ”

“ You look too sharply, you look too deeply. You look so deeply that it hurts me very much. No, stand so Soelver, turn your eyes away!’—‘Are you afraid of me?’—‘No, no—why should I be afraid? But I do not feel comfortable to have you all the time wanting to read my heart, to have your eyes searching for some writing that does not stand written there. My friend and beloved brother, I fear what your look would draw from me—what would you drag out from my soul?’—‘The spring day, Gro, when we first met.’—‘Ah! ”

“ So severe is this struggle between conscious sexual denial and unconscious desire, that it even forces itself through in her sleep and her night wandering. Her dreams had indeed, as she later acknowledged with shame, the force and the power to compel her below into the young nobleman's dungeon. She had clasped Soelver's 62hand in her sleep, she had told him everything in the moonlight, with eyes closed, everything which she secretly felt, and had pressed him to herself. ”