Who produced the bull of his mother,
Who is the procreator,’ etc.
“The poison did not depart, it went further,
The great God was not cured.
Then said Isis to Rê:
‘Thine is not the name thou hast told me.
Tell me true that the poison may leave thee,
For he whose name is spoken will live.’”
Finally Rê decides to speak his true name. He is approximately healed (imperfect composition of Osiris); but he has lost his power, and finally he retreats to the heavenly cow.
The poisonous worm is, if one may speak in this way, a “negative” phallus, a deadly, not an animating, form of libido; therefore, a wish for death, instead of a wish for life. The “true name” is soul and magic power; hence a symbol of libido. What Isis demands is the retransference of the libido to the mother goddess. This request is fulfilled literally, for the aged god turns back to the divine cow, the symbol of the mother.[[616]] This symbolism is clear from our previous explanations. The onward urging, living libido which rules the consciousness of the son, demands separation from the mother. The longing of the child for the mother is a hindrance on the path to this, taking the form of a psychologic resistance, which is expressed empirically in the neurosis by all manners of fears, that is to say, the fear of life. The more a person withdraws from adaptation to reality, and falls into slothful inactivity, the greater becomes his anxiety (cum grano salis), which everywhere besets him at each point as a hindrance upon his path. The fear springs from the mother, that is to say, from the longing to go back to the mother, which is opposed to the adaptation to reality. This is the way in which the mother has become apparently the malicious pursuer. Naturally, it is not the actual mother, although the actual mother, with the abnormal tenderness with which she sometimes pursues her child, even into adult years, may gravely injure it through a willful prolonging of the infantile state in the child. It is rather the mother-imago, which becomes the Lamia. The mother-imago, however, possesses its power solely and exclusively from the son’s tendency not only to look and to work forwards, but also to glance backwards to the pampering sweetness of childhood, to that glorious state of irresponsibility and security with which the protecting mother-care once surrounded him.[[617]]