y subject that I have recommended as so
desirable. Dr. Emil F. Lorenz, in the February number of _Imago_, 1913,
treats the "Titan Motiv in der allgemeinen Mythologie" in a manner that
approaches my conception of it. In the consideration of human primal
motives as apperception mass, there is particularly revealed a common
thought in the primitive interpretation of natural phenomenon.
Unfortunately the article appeared after this book was finished. So even
if I am not in a position to enter into this question, I will none the
less refer to it and at the same time express the hope that Lorenz will
further elaborate the interesting preliminary contribution, communicated
in the form of aphorisms, as he terms it.] The inadmissibility of these
omissions arises from the vital importance and gripping effect of the
objects thus (i.e., mythologically) regarded by humanity (e.g., of the
course of the sun, so infinitely important for them in their dependence
upon the moods of nature). If then, on the one hand, it will not be
possible for the psychoanalyst to force the nature mythologist out of his
position and somehow to prove that any symbol means not the sun but the
father, so on the other hand the nature mythologist who may understand his
own interpretations so admirably, must not attack the specifically
psychological question: why in the apperception of an object, this and not
that symbolic image offers itself to consciousness. So, for instance, why
the sunset and sunrise is so readily conceived as a swallowing and
eructation, or as a process of regeneration. Yet Frobenius (Zeitalt. d.
Sonneng., I, p. 30) finds the symbolism "negligible."

It is also conceivable that the obtrusive occurrence of incest, castration
of the father, etc., should make the mythologists ponder. It was bias on
the part of many of them to be unwilling to see the psychological value of
these things. I must therefore acknowledge the justice of Rank's view when
he (Inz-Mot., p. 278) says in reference to the OEdipus myth (rightly, in
all probability, interpreted by Goldziher as a sun myth): "Yet it is
indubitable that these ideas of incest with the mother and the murder of
the father are derived from human life, and that the myth in this human
disguise could never be brought down from heaven without a corresponding
psychic idea, which may really have been an unconscious one even at the
time of the formation of the myth, just as it is with the mythologists of
t