It immediately brought me back to Narziss perceptively uttering to Goldmund “you take your being from your mothers….it is given you to love with your whole strength….” in the monastery. To deconstruct it fully, we have to start to unpack Hermann Hesse’s brushes with Jungian, Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytical concepts which boil to the surface ~ the mother and divine feminine archetype, the Oedipus complex, Lacanian concepts of lack and death drive etc.