CHAPTER 4

ELABORATION OF THE EGO IDEAL

BY the term ego ideal, Freud understood a combination of those criticizing and censoring elements in mankind that normally carry out the repression of certain wishes and that ensure, through a function we call conscience, that these barriers are not broken through. This organ of control in psychic life is composed of two complementary and mutually regulating factors: an outer one, which stands for the demands of the surrounding world; and an inner one, which represents the claims in themselves.1 More precisely said, the ego ideal is really a representation of inner demands or claims, which have, however, already assimilated the external demands of society. The core of the ego ideal is made up of that part of primary narcissism which the child must renounce in favor of adaptation, but which is preserved in the ego ideal. The stimulus for the formation of the ego ideal comes from the critical and educational influence of the parents, "to whom were added, as time went on, those who trained and taught him and the innumerable and indefinable host of all the other people in his environment— his fellow-men—and public opinion" (Freud, 1914b, p. 96).

From this point, at which the ego ideal is formed, there is a clear path to the understanding of group psychology which Freud has further pursued in his book, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921). Drawing on the phenomena of crowds and groups, he succeeded in showing the roots of the ego ideal in the development of the primal horde, in which the powerful primal father opposed the desires of the sons and acted as an inhibitory principle that was only overcome through actual overthrow and destruction. Before this overthrow was possible, however, the father ruled over the primal horde on the basis of2 the members' attitude toward him, which Freud characterized as just such a primitive "group formation": A primary group of this kind is a number of individuals who have put one and the same object in the place of their ego ideal and have consequently identified themselves with each other in their ego. (1921, p. 116)This primal connection of the ego ideal with the father figure can also be demonstrated in the development of the individual, where the father becomes the first ideal of the child and, through the mechanism of identification, at a certain point becomes an inner claim that fuses with bound-up narcissism to become the ego ideal. We recognize the difficult transitional point of this whole development as the infantile Oedipus complex, which contains the identification with the father in his special role vis-avis the mother.

In one place Freud attempts to show the point in man's psychic development where the advance from group psychology to individual psychology took place (1921, pp. 135-36): it occurred after the unsatisfying primal deed—the murder of the father, which brought remorse instead of fulfillment and new complicated inner restrictions instead of the freedom that had been longed for. The advance resulted in fantasy, and the person who made this advance was the first epic poet. This poet distorted the reality in the direction of his own longings. He invented the heroic myth: that it was the hero alone who had slain the father while in fact only the entire horde (the "Band of Brothers") had dared to perform this primal deed. As the father had been the first ideal of the boy, so now the poet created the first ego ideal in the person of the hero who wishes to replace the father. Yet this hero, whose contrived deeds the poet now relates to the multitude, is essentially none other than the poet himself.

If we now look back at the principal male figures of the Don Juan play, we recognize the critical-ironic aspect of the ego ideal in Leporello's clumsy admonitions to reform, while the conscience and guilt feelings of the frivolous hero are split off in Leporello's anxious cowardice. Yet at the decisive tragic high point in the cemetery scene, which introduces the fall of Don Juan, the comic figure of Leporello, who is supposed to deal with the demands of the ego ideal in a mocking way, is cast aside for a far more powerful representative of the ego ideal. This is the consciousness of guilt, and we can readily recognize its representation in the statue of the Commander as a direct father-imago. At the same time, this gradual sharpening and strengthening of the demands of the ego ideal up to the last decisive appearance of the Stone Guest corresponds to an interpretation of the criticizing voice of conscience as the formation of the ideal from the father complex. This psychological elucidation, which is presented in the manner of a dream in the action of the opera itself, can in like manner be traced in the development of the material. In the Burlador and in Moliere (1665), as well as later in Zorilla (1844), the voice of the cautioner and admonisher devolves directly on the father, toward whom the hero always acts insultingly. In Dorimon (1659) and de Villiers (1660), the immediate predecessors of Moliere, it reaches the point of Don Juan's repellent action against his father—as expressed in the title of their plays.8 In Moliere, as also later in his countryman Dumas pere (1836), it concerns a quarrel about a will, in the course of which the hero shrinks from no crime—not even fratricide—to gain possession of the paternal inheritance.4 Holtei (1834), who elaborated the material after Mozart, even extended it to parricide: in the course of a chance argument, Don Juan strangles a hermit whom he does not recognize as his father:

The realization that he had been the slayer of his father made so little an impression on him that immediately after the terrible deed, and in the very hut of the victim, he made a burlesque joke with the coward Leporello. At the end, Don Juan soundly thrashed him. (Heckel, 1915, p. 42)

It is worth noting that in some of the puppet plays5 the hero also strangles his own father, whereupon the father appears to him as a ghost and dispatches him to hell; for example, in the Ulm and lower Austrian play, Don Juan der Wilde oder das nachtliche Gericht [oder das Steinere Gast] oder Junker Hans vom Stein [Don Juan the wild or the nocturnal meal or the stone guest or Junker Hans of stone].®

Here there emerges a significant point which will concern us in the course of our investigation, and which should become understandable in the concluding chapter: that through his transmitting and reworking of the material, the individual poet contributes to it some psychological interpretation, and this interpretation is consistently in accord with the genesis of the material as elucidated through analysis.

Besides the father, it is not unusual for a brother of the hero to be sent from the father to try to bring him to renounce his wicked way of life, as for example in Lenau (1851). In contrast to his predecessors, Lenau has the hero avoid offensive invective, thus raising the conflict to the height of a philosophical discussion of two [different] world views; but in the Don Juan of Dumas pere referred to above, the conflict leads to a duel between the brothers, during which the brother falls. Don Juan himself dies because the ghost of Sandoval, whom he had also slain in the duel (clearly a further brother-doublet), takes away his life. On the other hand, this Sandoval is an unambiguous double of the hero himself, a "spiritually kindred knight . . . and both are concerned to win over the other the prize for depravity" (Heckel, 1915, p. 55)· Here the double relationship is so complete that Sandoval gambles away his beloved to Don Juan, but she dies in order not to become his victim. A similar double motif is found in Zorilla (1844) in the figure of Don Luis Mejia, with whom Don Juan concluded a wager "to surpass him in the number of women seduced and men slain in duels . . . whereupon each can await the other with numbers that provoke astonishment" ([Heckel, 1915, p. 59] see Leporello's "Thousand and Three" aria in Don Giovanni). This motif is characteristic of the so-called "lying poems" [Liigendichtungen\ · some light will be shed on the relationship of these to the Don Juan material later and in another connection.7

The close psychological relationship of the doublemotif to the ego ideal explains why Leporello often appears as the outspoken double of his master, especially when they represent each other with women (Amphitryon motif:8 father-identification). The double motif itself certainly seems to correspond to a psychological elaboration of the Don Juan problem. For this reason, we find it only in the more recent Don Juan versions, most clearly in a quite modern one by Sternheim (1909), where an actual double joins himself to the hero as the successor to the servant, who died in the meantime, and accompanies his master till death. By inhibiting the will of his master, whose thirst for action he continually keeps in check with uncanny irony, he is characterized as the critical-ironic part of the ego. As in many of the double stories, this force seems to increase until it reaches the embodiment of madness, in complete agreement with our psychoanalytic interpretation.8 In contrast to such a "psychologizing" use of the double motif in poetry stands the use of a related motif, which has preserved the original meaning of the double as the messenger of death: namely, the living hero's participation in his own funeral procession. Merimee (1834) first added this motif to the Don Juan story when he took over from popular tradition the legend of the knight who saw his own burial and thereafter mended his ways.10 This motif leads us to the uncanny end of the hero, which is of such surpassing significance in the whole Don Juan tradition.

CHAPTER 5

THE FIGURE OF AVENGING DEATH

WE BEGAN with a psychological formulation of the identity or psychic unity of the figures of Don Juan and Leporello. We believe that this identity can be viewed as one typical expression of a process of poetic shaping that results from the formation and artistic representation of the ego ideal. We were able to interpret these two poetic figures purely in terms of mental1 mechanisms, because they involve products of artistic fantasy that spring full-blown from the mind of the poet. However, the figure of the Stone Guest is different. To be sure, we have interpreted this figure as an ultimate extension of the series of mental agencies: ego ideal—conscience— guilt feelings. Yet this does not exhaust the significance of the figure of the Stone Guest, nor does it fully explain its origin, for this figure involves an ancient folk-tradition upon which the first poet and creator of Don Juan drew. Let us read what Heckel says about this tradition:

Legends of avenging stone statues are already found in classical antiquity. Later we find similar fables among the most different peoples: French, Portuguese, Flemish, German, and Danish folk-traditions all recognize the story of the skull of a dead man, invited as a guest. Of particular importance is the Leontine Drama that was performed in 1615 at the Jesuit College in Ingolstadt; perhaps a version of this play came to the attention of the author of the Burlador.2 Some comedies of Lope de Vega offer related characteristics: in addition to the lnfa.mad.or, mentioned above, there are Dineros son Calidad and La Fianza Satisfecha. . . . The essence of all these representatives is the revenge of the dead man who was mocked, upon the arrogant blasphemer. (Heckel, 1915, p. 6 [Rank's emphasis])

One can already grasp that the story of the Stone Guest has surpassing significance for the Don Juan material from the fact that it is the subtitle of almost all Don Juan versions. In some versions it is even the main title. What is the meaning of this motif of avenging death?

The conception that the dead return to fetch the living is a very ancient one in human history. Primitive man expressed such a view in his anxiety about the Demons of the Dead, and even in present-day Western culture, "Death" is represented by the figure of a dead person (the skeleton). This significance of fetching by death (as in our "The devil take him!") is fully preserved in the Burlador: the Commander appears to Don Juan and invites him to his tomb in a church; 3 the fearless knight accepts this invitation with the result that he does not return. As the folklorist Kleinpaul (1898) has correctly noted, the elementary idea, which is more and more distorted over time, is that the dead man kills his murderer. In the Burlador this primitive notion is employed with good taste in a flippant way when Don Juan pledges his faithfulness to Aminta. He swears that if he betrays her, then a man should kill him—at the same time whispering, "A dead man, certainly not a living one!" by which he believes that he has annulled his oath. In later versions, the Commander appears only as a messenger of death who announces to Don Juan that he will die on the following morning. This sense of the interpretation of the motif, however, can only suggest that the magnificent final scene means that Don Juan is taken by death, therefore dies, and that in his last hours his previously suppressed conscience awakens. Such an explanation is banal, for it neither satisfies our intellectual interest nor makes understandable the terrifying effect of the scene on the audience,4 especially if we do not further investigate the traces of a connection between anxiety about death and feelings of guilt that are intimated here.

This strong effect of the final scene is, moreover, not further clarified by the simple reflection that the figure of "Death coming to get the living" stirs up one of the oldest and deepest human emotions. More than twentyfive years ago, Kleinpaul (1898) pointed out the great significance for cultural history of the belief in physical, embodied ghosts, closely connected with the corpse and its process of decay. Naumann (1921) quite recently indicated the wide range of material suggesting that countless customs, forms, and motifs are based on a kind of materialistic pre-animism, although it is remarkable that he made no reference to his predecessor Kleinpaul. Naumann sees as the basis of such "non-spiritual" beliefs:

that with the onset of death, a man certainly does not lose the features of his living body, as happens with the departure of the soul, according to the belief in souls. He only withdraws from the community of living persons into that of the uncanny, superhuman, and demonic. (p. 23)

Only with the process of decay do significant changes occur in the body. These lead to a second death, according to a widespread notion that was still real in the Homeric world with its rather naive and simple belief in souls. Even after this second death due to decay, however, there survives a further entity which is reflected in the Greek conception of the soul, as well as in our own folk-belief about the Grim Reaper. Anxiety about this dead person who lives on, materially or immaterially, gives rise to a series of customs which can be understood as measures of protection against the return of the dead person:

A crouched position, the binding and swathing of the dead, placing in narrow boxes and holes, piling up enormous stones and earth, and finally the hidden underground grave and so forth are today rightly understood as measures of protection and defense by the living against the dead. The intention of preventing their return is the principal answer (and perhaps the only one) to the question about the original cause of burying the dead, a practice that is demanded by the relendess strength of popular feeling. (Naumann, 1921, p. 57)

In this connection, Naumann also conceives the custom of burning the corpse, which appeared later, as an advanced rite of defense; yet the failure of this defense is betrayed in the extensiveness and tenacity of animistic beliefs in souls.

Here often in the history of a scientific idea, the emphasis upon what had been previously disregarded leads to the other extreme. While Naumann rightly emphasized as an explanatory principle the immediate, tangible, perceivable appearances of the physical world as against the over-valuation of later animism, he lost sight of the psychological element itself—that which in the last analysis is a legitimate descendant of animism.5 As a result, the whole problem of the belief in a dead person who continues a material existence, and the anxiety that this belief arouses, remain psychologically unexplained. Here the author obviously lacks the psychoanalytic point of view toward the understanding of the belief in demons that Freud gave us in Totem and Taboo (i9i3).For men come to the conception of anxiety which persists in the cult of the dead only because of guilt feelings that extend back to the ambivalence of the Oedipus complex. Only because of these guilt feelings do they thus view dying as the revenge of the dead; that is, that natural death, which in primitive times was not natural, is felt as punishment. This psychoanalytic interpretation presupposes that death was understood as the act of a murdered person who in turn had to avenge his own murder, a conception in which the primitive situation survives.

Such an interpretation explains why among many peoples the death of a person is always understood to be the act of revenge of a murdered man; and that while living humans cannot accomplish such revenge by natural means, the dead can do so through demons. As Naumann reports, Indian folktales clearly assert that men undergo a transition into demons through the medium of death. "The ascetic dies with the intention of bloodily avenging himself and would become a Rakshasa,® that is, a demon, vampire, or dragon" (Naumann, 1921, p. 51). Or a person takes his own life in order to be able to carry out particular threats. This is a magical motif that plays a role that should not be underestimated in the psychology of suicide,7 in which the suicide revenges himself on those whom he believes to have caused his misfortune.8

If we put together the psychoanalytic understanding of the belief in demons with another characteristic of these dangerous corpses that also has not been previously understood, then it is possible to reconstruct a further piece of primitive history. This in turn makes understandable the legend of the avenging corpse in the particular form that it takes in Don Juan. This characteristic is the belief that the corpse-demon frequently devours those living persons who have the misfortune to be caught by him, a belief illustrated in the rich material of Naumann and even Kleinpaul. Naumann cites a great number of such traditions from different peoples, though of course they are not understood or explained:

If a dead Fiji warrior falls in battle against the monster Samu, then the monster boils and devours him; thus both demon and warrior are thought of in strictly material terms, for otherwise boiling and eating a soul would hardly be worth the effort. The case of Samu also involves the appearance of the corpse who devours, as do the Nordic tales (Hraswelgr, Nidboggr), the Chinese tales, and many other forms. (1921, p. 29)

In Chinese tales, the profaner of graves who opens the heavy coffin the slightest bit is then pulled in by the dead person, torn to pieces, and devoured. From this belief we can explain a whole series of death customs, including that of the parting gift of food for the later "journey into the hereafter":

Thus Nordic corpses in mound-graves devour hawks, dogs, and horses that have been given to them. . . . The mouth of the corpse should not remain open, for otherwise the dead will have no peace in the grave and will become Nachzehrers.9 The edges of clothing should not come too near his mouth, otherwise he will become a nachzehrer. . . . And these Chinese and Nordic devourers in the coffin and grave are closely related to the German and Slavic belief in nachzehrers, bloodsuckers, and vampires. Even the belief in vampires rests on wholly pre-animistic conceptions. Corpses with fresh coloring and open left eyes keep themselves alive in the grave, come out at night, suck the blood of their victims, and quickly take away their family and later the whole village community. The ancient belief is especially active during times of severe plague. If one exhumed the nachzehrer, one found him swimming in blood, and torn and scratched to pieces. Perhaps from the struggle with the victim, which one cannot represent tangibly enough. . . . The first person affected and killed by the plague becomes the vampire; he sits upright in his grave and feeds on his shroud. The plague lasts as long a time as he takes to be finished with it. The nachzehrer is disinterred and his head is cut off with a spade, so that he "screams like a young pig." (Naumann, 1921, pp. 55, 41* 55-56)

Kleinpaul at least makes an attempt to understand these remarkable characteristics attributed to the dead; and if he views them "rationally," at least he intelligently indicates the deeper relationships, and in the end recognizes the consequence that cannibalism plays an important role. In primitive times, the main food of men would have been other men, and this deeply-rooted fact still survives today in many rudimentary forms, including the legend of the werewolf (Kleinpaul, 1898, p. 122). With support from prehistorical and ethnological discoveries, Kleinpaul at one point even ventures to assert that the devouring of the dead:

is the oldest and most widespread form of human obsequies for the dead. Thus it may be noted that the custom of themselves consuming the dead bodies of their fellows,10 and burying the bones, has been observed among many people and even among higher animals. W. M. Flinders Petrie found carefully arranged human bones, suggesting an artistic dismemberment of the skeleton, in many Egyptian stone graves dating from the Fourth Millennium B.C.11 Some were in coffins; some wrapped in simple shrouds. As a result of the discovery, he was led to ascribe this custom, called endocannibalism, to the ancient Egyptians (1898, p. 63).

When such a manner of disposal was felt to be too repulsive, this heritage of primitive humanity was left to animals·, and thereby arose a taboo which for thousands of years has made irreconcilable the gap between man and the animals related to him. In Egypt, it was evidently the vulture, who plays such a great role in the traditions of that culture that have come down to us; in other lands, various kinds of dogs and carnivorous animals of the dog family (jackals, wolves, hyenas, etc.). The custom of abandoning the dead as food for certain animals is preserved down to the present day among many peoples. The Parsis, descendants of the ancient Persians, take their dead to the "Towers of Silence"12 where, according to the ancient precepts of the Avesta,18 they are then set out and abandoned as prey for the birds. Kleinpaul convincingly demonstrates that the official devourer of corpses among the Persians was originally the dog, an animal that nowadays plays only a mute role in the ceremony (1898, p. 62).14 The Parsi is supposed to die while in the sight of a dog who has been brought into the room of the dying person in order to strike the fleeing soul with his glance. In order to direct the gaze of the dog to [the dead person], a loaf of bread is cut up into four pieces and thrown in the direction of the death-bed. Western scholars are here reminded of the honey cake, the Melitouta, which was once laid next to the corpse for the Cerberus16 in Greece. . . . This ceremony is called the Sagdid—literally: the dog (Sag) has seen (did). It is the endorsement of the holy animal, the Vidimus des Todes [We have seen the dead]. (1898, p, 59)

The ceremony is then repeated in the conveying of the dead person to the tower, and as soon as the dog has seen the face of the dead person for the second time, the body is left as food. Originally, the dog was to eat the corpse himself just like the Cerberus, who lets everyone in but no one out—a real watchman, as in the well-known passage of [Hesiod's] Theogony:

On those [dead] who go in he fawns with his tail and both his ears, but suffers them not to go out back again, but keeps watch and devours whomsoever he catches going out of the gates.16

Kleinpaul acutely comprehends that this "dog of hell" was the corpse dog who had been banished from the underworld because his earthly duty had become taboo. He draws a parallel to the vulture, who was banished to the underworld by the Greeks in the same way, and who while there devoured the liver of the giant Tytus, a torment of hell that the mythic Prometheus also suffered for his crime of stealing fire. "The terrors of the underworld are drawn from the burial customs of earthly life" (Kleinpaul, 1898, p. 88). Thus the Christian hell consisted of a confluence of individual funeral pyres into one mighty stream of fire, a fire that cuts off any return journey and, finally, is an all-encircling prison of flames for the souls of the damned, who are thereby immortal even as they suffer the eternal torments of hell.

Among primitive peoples who have not developed such an elaborate mythology, we find the customs for disposal of the dead at a still earlier stage of development. Thus according to the latest report of Hermann Consten,17 who travelled in Asia, the Mongolians of the Gobi Desert believe in a process of rebirth, which they would have the dead participate in as quickly as possible. Nevertheless, the arrangements that they prepare for it seem to us an effective way of preventing any possibility of rebirth. Usually the corpses are abandoned as food for dogs. Near large lakes they are thrown into the water to be destroyed by the fish. In high places they are exposed on a bundle of sticks or on the bare rocks as food for the vultures. Consten had the opportunity of attending the funeral of a distinguished lama, and from his description we shall give special attention to the drum and trumpet music. The double drums were made out of two pieces of wood, covered with stretched human skin. Human vertebrae and other bones were attached to these drums, so that with the rapid whirling movements of the drummers' wrists, the bones struck the drum with great force. The trumpets were likewise fashioned out of hollow human bones. These features of the musical instruments suggest that the original function of "music" is to be found in rites of mourning.18

Yet our own "civilized" burial customs are no more distant from their primitive precursors than we ourselves are from the men who practiced them. First, there is the fact that we also let our dead be devoured by maggots and worms, creatures that Kleinpaul classed among the carrion eaters (1898, p. 73). Then there is the grave itself, which derives from the belief in the soul, and was devised as a way of preventing carrion eaters from completely destroying the body. Yet the grave itself has become regarded as the symbol of one such carrion eater: our word "Sarg" [coffin] derives from the Greek sarcophagos, which literally means "flesh-eater" (Kleinpaul, 1898, pp. 7of). As Pliny reports, the Greeks actually derived this word from the very corrosive characteristic of the caustic substance that apparently was often used in sarcophagi. However, Kleinpaul argues plausibly enough that this etymological myth originated to account for the incomprehensibility of the "flesh-eating" grave itself (p. 77) .19 As a symbol of the vengeance of hell that devours humans, the stone sarcophagus appears in Hamlet as a simile:

Why the sepulchre Wherein we saw thee quietly interred Hath oped his ponderous and marble jaws To cast thee up again. (Hamlet to his father's ghost; act i, scene 4, 48-51)

Probably this symbolic aspect plays a great part in the meaning of the Stone Guest figure, which itself personifies the devouring grave. Such a symbolic connection appears in the strict sense that the "rigidity, coldness, and weight of the corpse is, through unbounded fantasy, transformed into stone," as Naumann thought (1921, pp. 42f.). Yet if we ask about the psychological motive for this particular conception [of the Stone Guest as the devouring grave], we see the operation of the guilt and punishment tendencies, since the stone statue set near the dead person represents the grave that one day will devour everyone. The interpretation of the stone tomb as

punishment possibly conceals a vestige of an early method of killing. Roheim alludes to this possibility in his observation that among primitive men the stone represented both a deadly murder weapon at a distance and also, at the grave, a barrier to the return of the murdered person.20 Certain customs relating to death still appear to have this double sense, which can be conceptualized as the "stoning of the dangerous spirit"—a custom that is familiar in the area around Mecca (Kleinpaul, 1898, p. 64). The motif also appears in a Chinese tale (#69 in Wilhelm, 1914) as an action of revenge by the dead: the living corpse comes out of his grave and, in the person of an ill-bred youth, throws stones at the living.

For a further understanding of the Stone Guest, we draw upon the traditions of demon corpses who devour men. These traditions also involve the motif of invitation. "One variation of the stone man is the iron or partlyiron man." Balkan Tale #59 (in Leskien, 1915) introduces the partly-iron demon who devours men—he smells human flesh and sucks the blood from the new arrival. "The Wolf with the Iron Head" of Balkan Tale #63 (in Leskien, 1915) is a dangerous demon. The tale is about a man-eating creature who according to his promise returns on the day of the marriage in order to take away the bridegroom. The man-eating iron dervish of the modern Greek Tale #60 (in Kretschmer, 1917) from Epirus is an exact parallel in purer form. However, the purest version of the motif is shown in the modern Icelandic legend of "The Bridegroom and the Ghost." Here also the demon, "a fearfully large man," appears on the day of the wedding to which he had been invited in jest five years before by the bridegroom, a young gravedigger, as he turned up a huge thigh bone while digging a grave (Naumann, 1921, p. 44; see also the cemetery scene in Hamlet [act 5, scene 1 ]!).

Thus we have approached a first understanding of the motif of the Stone Guest, who also appears in response to a flippant invitation in order to take the living away with him. The anxiety of those who are to be devoured appears to be reworked, through the mocking Don Juan character of the opera, into a mirthful banquet,21 a kind of Feast of the Dead, in which the dead person himself should participate.22 In the Burlador, the Stone Guest actually sits silently at the table while the others around him try to stifle their inner terror through redoubled exuberance. And at the tomb in the church, where he has come in response to the Commander's invitation, Don Juan is compelled to eat dishes of scorpions and serpents, to drink bitter vinegar as wine, and to hear songs of lament as dinner music. After the meal, the sentence of judgment is fulfilled—a judgment that Don Juan brought upon himself when he affirmed in making a promise of marriage, "If my word is the least bit false, may the hand of a dead man destroy me!" In this frightening hand of the corpse, threatening from the grave, we recognize the expression of an ineradicable feeling of guilt in the presence of the dreaded paternal punishment.

NOTES

1 [I have translated die Anspriiche as "claims." In the sense of inner demands, and in contrast with outer demands (die Forderungen der Umwelt), the German term is often translated by "aspirations" in English and American psychological usage. Rank is here referring to the two aspects of the ego ideal (external demands and inner aspirations); at this same time, Freud was developing the concept of the "superego" to denote the combination, thus reserving "ego ideal" unambiguously for the aspirations, or inner claims. In this book, I have always translated Ichideal as "ego ideal" since Rank never used the term ijberich (superego), but in some contexts "superego" would be the appropriate contemporary term.]

2 [In the original manuscript of B, Rank made an interesting slip in repeating this phrase ("auf Grund auf Grund der"), and then correcting the error.]

3 Dorimon: Le festin de Pierre ou Ie Fils criminel [The banquet of stone or the criminal son].

4 [I can find no evidence of such a quarrel, nor of fratricide, in Moliere's play, although they occur in Dumas pere.]

5 [In the manuscript of B, Rank deleted the folio-wing apposirive here: "—whose main contents involve the coarse jokes of Hanswurst or Kasperl, who play the role of Don Juan's servant—". Rank moved this sentence to Chapter 9 in B, i.e., from association with explicit parricide to a context suggesting a counterpoise to anxiety and the devaluation of the hero.]

6•Reported by KLralik and Winter (1885). [Note that "Gericht" can mean either "meal" or "judgment." Rank omits any reference to Shadwell's "The Libertine" (1676), which is probably the best known Don Juan play in which the hero actually kills his own father, perhaps because Heckel gives only brief mention to it.]

7 It would be worth the effort to treat this topic analytically.The literature can be found in Miiller-Fraureuth (1881).

8 [Amphitryon had been banished from Argolis as the result of the accidental murder of his wife's father. The wife refused to allow conjugal rights until Amphitryon had avenged the deaths of her brothers. During his absence on a military mission against these enemies, the wife was seduced by Zeus, who had disguised himself as Amphitryon. Heracles was born as the result of this liaison. Amphitryon accepted Heracles as his own son, although some accounts suggest that this was done with reluctance.]

9 See Rank (1914). [Rank's work on the double (Der Doppelganger) was expanded to a book in 1915, and, like this book, was radically revised after the break with Freud. An English translation of the 1925 German book was published in 1971.]

10 [Merimee's work, Les Ames du Purgatoire (The ghosts of purgatory) is based on the cluster of legends associated with Don Miguel de Mafiara as discussed in note 11 of Chapter i, although scholars have found no evidence that Don Miguel actually had such an experience. See Weinstein, 1959, Chapter io. ]

_________________

1 [Rank wrote "intrapsychic" mechanisms in the manuscript of B, then changed it to "seelisch," which I have translated as "mental," although in his later work the word tended to connote "spiritual." See the translator's introduction to the English language version of Rank (1930, p. vii).]

2[The careful dating of the composition of the Burlador worked out by Wade (1969) makes this almost certainly impossible. See also Weinstein (1959, p. 10).]

3 [Rank writes Grabkapelle (cemetery chapel), but in the Burlador this scene takes place at the Commander's tomb, which is located inside a church in Seville.]

4 [Rank here introduces the psychoanalytic issue of the motives behind the reaction of the audience, in addition to the motives behind the creation of the poet. The first issue is pursued in Holland (1968).]

5 [Rank developed this theme in Psychology and the Soul (1930).]

6 IRakshasas were demon powers of evil and enemies of the gods in Hindu legends. They had sexual relations with humans, and delighted in destroying people and drinking their blood. According to one account, the Rakshasas originated from the rebellious, cannibalistic sons of the god Brahma (Thomas, 1961, p. 13). Ravana, who was a Rakshasa, abducted Sita (the wife of Rama) and thus precipitated the battle described in the Ramayana epic.]

7 According to Indian popular belief, wishes uttered immediately before suicide are fulfilled. See Hertel (1921, p. 249).

8 [The last clause is added in version G.]

9 [Nachzehrer means, literally, "after-devourer." It is a German variant of the vampire. It "sucks and feeds on its own clothes and limbs in the grave, and extracts the vital energy of related family members through a form of sympathetic magic acting at a distance" (Brockhaus Enxyklopiidie, 17th edition, 1971). Because there seems to be no precise equivalent term in English, and because I think that the word nachzehrer has a certain vividness, I have used the German term.]

10 [Angehorigen. Version G, has "parents" as, presumably, a translation of Kleinpaul!]

11 How insignificant are these historical dates in the face of the prehistoric skeleton discoveries that attest to cannibalism in prehistoric Europe! As an example, one notes that Otto Hauser concluded from the find at Krapina (in Croatia) that anthropophagy [the eating of humans] stood in full flower about 40,000 years ago (Urmensch und Wilder. Berlin: Verlag Ullstein & Co., 1921).

12 [These towers are located in Bombay, where a majority of the Parsi community have lived for the past several hundred years, after migrating from Persia.]

13 [The Avesta is the original document of Zoroastrianism, from which the Parsis descend.]

14 Herodotus actually says of the Persians that no corpse could be buried until a dog or bird had torn at it [Histories, I, 140].

15 [A monstrous dog that guarded the entrance to the lower world.]

16 [English translation by H. G. Evelyn-White (Loeb Classical Library edition); lines 769 ff.]

17 CProbably based on a newspaper account of Consten's travels, "Barbarische Totenbrauche," in the Neues Wiener Journal, February 7, 1922, p. 5. The article is preserved in the Rank papers. See also Consten (1919).]

18 Here we refer only to the well-known Biblical legend of the invention of the lute: The first person to use the lute was Lamech [Lamek], who descended in a direct line from Adam. This Lamech had a son whom he loved dearly. As death took his son from him, he suspended the body from a tree. The joints fell apart, and there remained only the thigh and its bones, and the foot with toes. Lamech took a piece of wood, cut and polished it, and made a lute from it. He gave the instrument the shape of a thigh, and in each part of its construction he imitated the remaining bones of his son. Then he sang a song of mourning. This Lamech founded a whole family of musicians; his son Tubal invented the drums, and his daughter Julal the harp.

[This note was added in version C. Although I have searched Biblical reference works, reference works on Jewish legends and traditions, and music reference works—all in English and German—I am unable to find any trace of such a legend. The only mention of Lamech in the Old Testament occurs in Genesis 4:17-24. Lamech was a fifth-generation descendant from Cain; he had two wives (the earliest Biblical reference to polygamy), three sons (Jabal, Jubal, and Tubal-cain) and one daughter (Naamah). He sang a song of blood revenge:

Adah and Zillah, listen to me; wives of Lamech, mark what I say: I kill a man for wounding me, a young man for a blow. Cain may be avenged seven times, but Lamech seventy-seven. (New English Bible)

One Talmudic legend goes beyond this revenge song to suggest that while hunting with his son Tubal-cain, the aged and blind Lamech accidentally killed his ancestor Cain. Upon discovering this, he clapped his hands, and this act killed Tubalcain. Thereupon his wives deserted him. One source adds that Lamech in fact killed no one; but that his wives refused to associate with him because of their fear that all descendants of Cain would be destroyed after seven generations. This source has Lamech saying to the wives "Have I slain man or youth that my offspring should be destroyed? If Cain can expiate his crime after seven generations, surely Lamech, who killed no one, shall expiate his sins after seventy-seven generations" (From The Jewish Encyclopedia, 1904 edition).

There are other Biblical references to this Lamech story; and an additional reference in Genesis to a Lamech who was the father of Noah. Scholars are not certain whether this is a different Lamech or the same one.]

19 [Kleinpaul argues that while corrosive quicklime acts in such a way, "eating away" the flesh from the skeleton just as a dog would do, nevertheless the tomb or stone coffin itself has the opposite property: it does not corrode. Thus the phrase "flesh-eating" in reference to this non-corrosive stone must be a symbol for the overall "swallowing up" connotation of the grave.]

20 In his paper "Steinheiligtum und Grab" presented at a meeting of the Budapest Psychoanalytic Society on October 8, 1921: "Stone-throwing in religious rites is a relic of the primal struggle of mankind. The thrown stone was the characteristic weapon of the masses, in order to overpower the individual in whose close presence one did not venture." [See Roheim, 1921.] The punishment interpretation of piles of stones is preserved in the Israelite custom of piling up stones over the body of an executed criminal. (See Georg Beer, 1921.)

21 [In Act 2, Scene 6 of Don Giovanni, the statue appears at the banquet to which he has been invited just after the hero concludes a toast with the words: "Long live women, long live good wine! Sustenance and glory of humanity!"] 22 In a similar way, Prince Hamlet also philosophized in a famous passage:

King: Now, Hamlet, where's Polonius?

Hamlet: At supper.

King:At supper! Where?

Hamlet: Not where he eats, but where he is eaten: a certain convocation of politic worms are e'en at him. Your worm is your only emperor for diet: we fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots: your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service, two dishes, but to one table: that's the end. (Act 4, scene 3, 17-27.)

In the Hamlet legend, the motif is still preserved in its original form, as the hero, after killing the eavesdropper to the conversation with his mother, dismembers him and then throws him to the pigs as fodder. (See the motif of dismemberment in the next chapter.)