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An episode in which the elder Cellini shows his son a salamander in the burning fire is linked with similar experiences of 'blissful' moments of surprised joy depicted in biography. These experiences are linked in their quality with mystical experience with or without religious content (which it is contended may be in the nature of a rationalization). All such experiences are ego-alien, come upon the self from 'elsewhere', and are tinged with awe which accounts for their frequently religious character. Pride in and triumphant assertion of the possession of a penis is the core of the phenomenon. The gratification arises because a conflict has been resolved by a lifting of the self to a higher plane, equivalent in the life of the child to the transition from the oedipal phase to latency.
In the literature the salamander is constantly linked with fire, a reversal of the fire-quenching properties of the penis. The revivified phoenix may symbolize the revivified penis after its state of flaccidity. The author quotes widely from biography and myth and suggests the unwisdom of confusing phenomena of this type with the frankly pathological. The psychologist who does so 'will undoubtedly catch some schizophrenics; he will scarcely see a salamander.'