e it would be at
once comprehensible how a product of the imagination harmonizes with
several expositions (problem of multiple interpretation); because this
variety of sense had already operated in the selection of the symbol and
indeed, in those cases as well where we did not at first sight suspect the
cooeperation of the anagogic thoughts; secondly, the anagogic and the
psychoanalytic interpretations are somehow reconciled to each other,
whereby possibly also the position of the natural science interpretation
can be made somewhat clearer.

The possibility that the anagogic has some part in the creation of the
functional, will be brought nearer by the fact that our previously offered
anagogic expositions (fairy tales, parabola) markedly resemble functional
interpretations. In the tale of the six swans Hitchcock explains the
reception of the maiden into the castle as the reception of sin into the
heart; the seven children are the seven virtues (consequently spiritual
tendencies). The small maiden is conscience, the tissues are processes of
thought. In the story of the three feathers, again, one son is conscience;
the secret door is the entrance to the inner life, to spiritual
absorption, the three feathers are spiritual tendencies, etc. In the dream
of the "flying post" conscience appears as the conductor. The "Mills of
God," which psychologically also represents conscience, the more
strikingly because the burden of sin, guilty feeling, drives them, also
appear in the parable. The lion or the dragon which must be overcome on
the mystic path is again a spiritual force. The approximation to the
functional category is not to be denied. Processes that show an interplay
of spiritual powers are symbolically represented there. But we are at once
struck with a difference. The true functional phenomenon, as I have so far
described it, pictures the actual psychic state or process; the anagogic
image appears on the contrary to point to a state or process that is to be
experienced in the future. We shall pass over for a time the last topic,
which will not, however, be forgotten, and turn to the question as to the
point on which the anagogic and the functional interpretations can best be
brought together. This point appears to me to be introversion, first
because it is related to the previously mentioned intro-determination, and
second, because it is familiar to psychoanalysis and is of great
importance in anagogic method.

The ter