American Imago

Wilbur, George B. The Reciprocal Relationship of Man and His Idealogical Milieu.

Kohen, Max. The Venus of Willendorf.

Sachs, Hanns. What Would Happen If.

Sachs, Hanns. The Transformation of Impulses into the Obsessional Ritual.

Wilbur, George B. The Reciprocal Relationship of Man and His Idealogical Milieu. This paper is subtitled, A Primal Scene from Ancient Egypt and its Role in the Genesis of a Cosmology. A forty six page article. The analogy is recalled of psychoanalysis as a sort of archaeological process. Egyptian remains are studied to show Egyptian religious construction corresponds to the tri-partite structure of the personality as worked out by psychoanalysis. Man first creates a God and then says that the God created him. A man and woman in a temple scene, supported in the air by two Goddesses holding their feet, is interpreted as a primal scene that has gone through suppression and spiritualization. Figures of Egyptian history, notably Hatshepsut, a Queen later depicted in male guise; possibly penis envy. While the ideas are suppressed from social consciousness, an attempt is made to retain the effects of the circumstances that led to those ideas. Inasmuch as the chief officient had to be a man, later suppression finally converted her image into a man. A principle is advanced, comparable to the principle of free association; if a symbolic equation is possible in a given culture it will have been made and can be found somewheres at some time to have been made by somebody and recorded in an explicit form in the media provided by that culture. The primal scene described, tells of the God fecundating the woman. Smell and a manual object replace the phallus and semen. The idea of self generation seems to be strongly present. Later Egyptian mythology is related to this scene; Isis engenders herself, though she is a woman. The story traces out the sequence from the delusion of auto-erotic solipsism to the construction of the superego. The primal sce