It is principally from this source that there is apt to rise the fruitless search for the "ideal" man or woman--a search which is bound to end in disappointment, because the object of the search is to be found nowhere but in the distorted and idealised memories cherished in the mind of the searcher himself.
[Sidenote: Don Juanism and the search for the ideal]
It is this search for the ideal that has been found to underlie the inability to find permanent satisfaction in any individual of the opposite sex; an inability of a most distressing nature which characterises the love life of a certain class of persons[41]. These unhappy Don Juans are perpetually attracted to a fresh object by the promise of some new and indefinable charm, only to suffer disappointment as each new object in turn is found in some inexplicable way to fall short of the lover's hopes and expectations. The misery which these individuals, through their instability and faithlessness, are apt to bring not only on themselves but on the unfortunate objects of their love, is too well known to need further emphasis or description. It is, however, paradoxically enough, the extreme steadfastness of their love towards its original object that is the cause of their fickleness towards all subsequent objects of affection.
[Sidenote: "Myth of the birth of the hero"]
As a result of this same process of idealisation, it may also happen that the realisation of the true nature of the real parents when compared with the beings corresponding to them in imagination, may give rise to feelings of very bitter disappointment. This disappointment is an experience so widespread and of such deep emotional significance as to have found expression in a frequently recurring type of myth and legend, which has received illuminating treatment at the hands of Freud and Rank[42]. In these myths (of which the stories connected with Moses, Perseus, Œdipus, Romulus, Cyrus, Christ, Siegfried, Lohengrin afford typical examples) a child is born of noble or divine parentage, but for some reason (usually connected with hostility on the part of the father) is lost or otherwise severed from his rightful home, and is reared by foster parents of lowly station (or sometimes by animals), only to be eventually restored to the position which is by birth his due. Here the foster parents of the myth correspond to the real parents as they are revealed to the disappointed insight of the child who, with widening experience of his human environment, begins to realise the discrepancy between the actual position of his parents in the world of men and the ideal qualities with which his infant's fancy had endowed them. Unwilling however to give up the lofty conception of his parents' dignity which he had formed for himself (the abandonment of which involves of course not only a loss of cherished ideals as regards his parents, but a serious readjustment of his views as to his own prospects and importance[43]), the individual finds in the noble parents of the myth the re-embodiment of those conceptions which had become untenable as regards the real world. The series of legends (in so far as they immediately concern us here) thus serve to express the persistence in the Unconscious of the original infantile idealisation of the parents as a consolation for the loss of the parent ideal which an appreciation of the actual human imperfections of the parents has inevitably brought in its train.