[794]. This portion is especially noteworthy. In childhood everything was given him, and man is disinclined to obtain it once more for himself, because it is won only through “toil and compulsion”: even love costs trouble. In childhood the well of the libido gushed forth in bubbling fulness. In later life it involves hard work to even keep the stream flowing for the onward striving life, because with increasing age the stream has a growing inclination to flow back to its source, if effectual mechanisms are not created to hinder this backward movement or at least to organize it. In this connection belongs the generally accepted idea, that love is absolutely spontaneous; only the infantile type of love is something absolutely spontaneous. The love of an adult man allows itself to be purposefully directed. Man can also say “I will love.” The heights of culture are conditioned by the capacity for displacement of the libido.
[795]. Motive of immortality in the fable of the death of Empedocles. Horace: Deus immortalis haberi—Dum cupit Empedocles ardentem frigidus Aetnam—Insiluit (Empedocles deliberately threw himself into the glowing Aetna because he wanted to be believed an immortal god).
[796]. Compare the beautiful passage in the journey to Hades of Odysseus, where the hero wishes to embrace his mother.
“But I, thrilled by inner longing,
Wanted to embrace the soul of my departed mother.
Three times I endeavored, full of passionate desire for the embrace:
Three times from my hands she escaped
Like nocturnal shades and the images of dreams,
And in my heart sadness grew more intense.” (“Odyss.,” XI, 204.)
The underworld, hell, is indeed the place of unfulfilled longing. The Tantalus motive is found through all of hell.