[22] For an important discussion of the general laws of symbolism, see Ernest Jones's "Papers on Psycho-Analysis" 1918, 129. The whole Chapter is worth careful study in connection with the questions considered in the present chapter.
[23] "The Interpretation of Dreams," 286.
[24] "Problems of Mysticism and its Symbolism," translated by S. E. Jelliffe.
[25] As Silberer points out, students of mythology had already shown the possibility of still a third interpretation, the "naturalistic" one, according to which the representations of the incest motive in myth and legend may be taken as a symbolic portrayal of certain important and impressive natural occurrences—the sequence of day and night, summer and winter etc.
[26] "Contributions to Psycho-Analysis," translated by Ernest Jones, 214.
[27] It is interesting to note that in the naturalistic interpretation of myths the same influences are pretty clearly at work, as when Max Müller observes that one of the advantages of this naturalistic interpretation is that it absolves us from the necessity of taking literally many of the more objectionable features of the myths as they actually stand.
[28] In order to distinguish more clearly between the two kinds of symbolism with which we have been here concerned—that in which an unconscious (repressed) thought or tendency is expressed by something more permissible to consciousness, and that in which the thing expressed is of as high or even higher cultural value than the thing through which it finds expression, Ernest Jones has, in the chapter already referred to ("Papers on Psycho-Analysis," 129 ff.) proposed to confine the term symbolism to the former class, all examples of the latter class being included under the term metaphor.
[29] The somewhat sharp distinction here drawn between the sexual aspects of the family relationships and those here under consideration (which for the sake of convenience we may call the dependence aspects), although employed throughout this essay, is made primarily for purposes of exposition and is not intended to imply that the distinction is in fact so sharply cut as the present method of treatment might possibly suggest. In real life the sexual and the dependence aspects are inextricably interwoven, and it is probable that the majority of psycho-analysts would be inclined to lay somewhat less stress on the distinction than does the present writer.
[30] This, of course, is especially liable to be the case in those children—for example in most of those technically described as "mentally deficient" and in many of those technically described as "backward"—who do not readily acquire interest in the details of a process leading to a desired end, apart from the end itself (i. e. in whom work does not become pleasurable for its own sake), or in those in whom there is no strong self feeling associated with the idea of successful achievement. The granting of an undue amount of assistance will, however, in its turn tend to retard or prevent the formation of these desirable mental characteristics.
[31] There is good reason to believe that revolt against parental authority constitutes an important factor in the production of a certain class of delinquents. See e. g. several of the cases recorded in Healy's "Mental Conflicts and Misconduct," 1919.