Firm let him stand, and look around him well!
This world means something to the capable.
Why needs he through Eternity to wend?
He here acquires what he can apprehend.
Thus let him wander down his earthly day;
When spirits haunt go quietly his way;
In marching onward, bliss and torment find,
Though every moment, with unsated mind!"
This would be a happy solution if one really could succeed in throwing off the unconscious to such an extent as to withdraw the libido from it, and so render it inoperative. But experience proves that energy cannot be withdrawn from the unconscious; it continues operative, for the unconscious contains and is indeed itself the source of libido, from which issue the primary psychic elements, thought-feelings, or feeling-thoughts—undifferentiated germs of idea and sentiment. It would therefore be a delusion to believe that by means of some, so to say, magical theory or method, the libido could be conclusively wrested from the unconscious, or that it could be to a certain extent disconnected. One may yield to this illusion for a time, but some day he will be obliged to declare with Faust:—
"Now fills the air so many a haunting shape,