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The cause and the selected fact are alike in that they are both ideas that have the power of being associated with an emotional experience that at one moment gives rise to a sense of creative synthesis and awareness of still unsynthesized discrete objects. Every emotional experience of knowledge gained is at the same time an emotional experience of ignorance unilluminated. The sense of creative success with its accompanying elation is therefore inseparable from a sense of failure to synthesize the discrete objects, the elementary particles, which are revealed by the success.
Dominance of the life instincts carries with it the continued repetition of this experience. In extreme form, fear of this experience can lead to repudiation of the life instincts, and the reinforcement of the death instincts that are idealized and libidinized.
The fear and intolerance of the cause or selected fact ultimately contribute to increasing attacks on the individual's equipment for feeling and satisfying curiosity, and therefore contribute to the forces operating in producing senility. Senility is a process analogous to destruction of the ego and of α. It thus contributes to the shortening of physical life, just as destruction of α and the associated loss of contact with reality in infancy endanger life.
The selected fact relates to synthesis of objects felt to be contemporaneous or without any time component. The selected fact thus differs from the cause that relates to the synthesis of objects scattered in time and therefore with a time component.
The suicide of the Sphinx, and the Oedipus myth, are both verbal accounts of pictorial solutions (visual images) of the same problem: one solves it by death; the other by re-entry into the mother's womb. Both solutions are intended to evade the emotional experience of cause or selected fact, i.e. the interplay between paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions. This interplay cannot be carried out without visual imagery of the Sphinx, or of an