Before turning to this new creation arising from introversion, there is still a further significance of the preceding question to be considered: whether life is dependent upon “these things”? Life may depend upon these things in the degree that they serve for nourishment. We must infer in this case that suddenly the question of nutrition came very near the hero’s heart. (This possibility will be thoroughly proven in what follows.) The question of nutrition, indeed, enters seriously into consideration. First, because regression to the mother necessarily revives that special path of transference; namely, that of nutrition through the mother. As soon as the libido regresses to the presexual stage, there we may expect to see the function of nutrition and its symbols put in place of the sexual function. Thence is derived an essential root of the displacement from below upwards (Freud), because, in the presexual stage, the principal value belongs not to the genitals, but to the mouth. Secondly, because the hero fasted, his hunger becomes predominant. Fasting, as is well known, is employed to silence sexuality; also, it expresses symbolically the resistance against sexuality, translated into the language of the presexual stage. On the fourth day of his fast the hero ceased to address himself to nature; he lay exhausted, with half-closed eyes, upon his couch, sunk deep in dreams, the picture of extreme introversion.
We have already seen that, in such circumstances, an infantile internal equivalent for reality appears, in the place of external life and reality. This is also the case with Hiawatha:
“And he saw a youth approaching,
Dressed in garments green and yellow,
Coming through the purple twilight,
Through the splendor of the sunset;
Plumes of green bent o’er his forehead,
And his hair was soft and golden.”
This remarkable apparition reveals himself in the following manner to Hiawatha:
“From the Master of Life descending,