[10] Cf. _The Future of an Illusion_.
[11] Psycho-analytic material, as yet incomplete and not capable of
unequivocal interpretation, nevertheless admits of a surmise—which
sounds fantastic enough—about the origin of this human feat. It is
as if primitive man had had the impulse, when he came in contact
with fire, to gratify an infantile pleasure in respect of it and put
it out with a stream of urine. The legends that we possess leave no
doubt that flames shooting upwards like tongues were originally felt
to have a phallic sense. Putting out fire by urinating—which is also
introduced in the later fables of Gulliver in Lilliput and Rabelais’s
Gargantua—therefore represented a sexual act with a man, an enjoyment
of masculine potency in homosexual rivalry. Whoever was the first to
deny himself this pleasure and spare the fire was able to take it
with him and break it in to his own service. By curbing the fire of
his own sexual passion he was able to tame fire as a force of nature.
This great cultural victory was thus a reward for refraining from
gratification of an instinct. Further, it is as if man had placed woman
by the hearth as the guardian of the fire he had taken captive, because
her anatomy makes it impossible for her to yield to such a temptation.
It is remarkable how regularly analytic findings testify to the close
connection between the ideas of ambition, fire and urethral erotism.
[12] Cf. ‘Character and Anal Erotism’ (1908), _Collected Papers_, vol.
ii.; also numerous contributions to the subject by Ernest Jones and
others.