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On the seashore of endless worlds, children play.
In this chapter I wish to develop the theme that I stated briefly on the occasion of the Banquet organized by the British Psycho-Analytical Society to mark the completion of the Standard Edition of Freud's Works (London, 8 October 1966). In my attempt to pay tribute to James Strachey I said:
‘Freud did not have a place in his topography of the mind for the experience of things cultural. He gave new value to inner psychic reality, and from this came a new value for things that are actual and truly external. Freud used the word “sublimation” to point the way to a place where cultural experience is meaningful, but perhaps he did not get so far as to tell us where in the mind cultural experience is.’
Now I want to enlarge this idea and make an attempt at a positive statement which can be critically examined. I shall use my own language.
The quotation from Tagore has always intrigued me. In my adolescence I had no idea what it could mean, but it found a place in me, and its imprint has not faded.
When I first became a Freudian I knew what it meant. The sea and the shore represented endless intercourse between man and woman, and the child emerged from this union to have a brief moment before becoming in turn adult or parent. Then, as a student of unconscious symbolism, I knew (one always knows) that the sea is the mother, and onto the seashore the child is born. Babies come up out of the sea and