Santa Claus ain't coming ...

[Richard Fiero]

At 12:38 PM 12/23/00, Dave Monroe wrote:
>... to Puritan New England, at any rate.  From Stephen Nissenbaum, The
>Battle for Christmas: A Cultural History of America's Most Cherished
>Holiday (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), Chapter 1, "New England's War
>on Christmas," pp. 3-48 ...
>
>In New England, for the first two centuries of white settlement most
>people did not celbrate Christmas.  In fact, the holiday was
>systematically suppressed . . .


Very nice indeed. Thanks for that. A couple of quotes from Dr. 
C.G. Jung in "Psychology of the Unconsious" subtitled "A Study 
of the Transformations and Symbolisms of the Libido," 
translated by Beatrice M. Hinkle, M.D. published 1916:
"We imagine that we have long renounced, sacrificed and cut off 
our incest wish, and that nothing of it is left. But it does 
not occur to us that this is not true, but that we 
unconsciously commit incest in another territory. In religious 
symbols, for example, we come across incest. We consider the 
incestuous wish vanished and lost, and then rediscover it in 
full force in religion. This process of transformation has 
taken place unconsciously in secular development. . . . I 
compared the Christianity of early Roman antiquity, where 
evidently licentiousness and brutality were strongly resisted, 
so here I must remark in regard to the sublimation of the 
incestuous libido, that belief in the religious symbol has 
ceased to be an ethical ideal; but it is an unconscious 
transformation of the incest wish into symbolic acts and 
symbolic concepts which cheat men, as it were, so that heaven 
appears to them as a father and earth as a mother and the 
people upon it children and brothers and sisters. Thus man can 
remain a child for all time and satisfy his incest wish all unawares."
I'm led in this direction in following Benny Profane's 
proto-schlemihl ancestor, Job.