[The] conception of the creative will as a victory of the individual over the biological sexual instinct explains the guilt which the development and affirmation of the creative personality necessarily produces. It is this going beyond the limits set by nature as manifested in the will accomplishment to which the ego reacts with guilt. Only this guilt reaction makes completely intelligible the projection of the God idea by means of which the individual again subjects himself to a higher power. For the primitives who spiritualized the world, this was nature itself, for heroic man triumphing over nature it was the creative God made by himself, therefore his own will at once glorified, denied and justified, and finally for the man of our western culture, it is the really fateful powers of parental authority and love choice, to which he wishes to submit voluntarily, that is, ethically.
This entire conflict complex we find represented on a grand scale in the myth of the fall of man, which presents the level of knowledge on which consciousness wants to control and rule sexuality, that is, to use it for its own pleasure and satisfaction. The hero Adam is not punished because he exults in his Godlike knowledge, but because he wants to use it to force the sex instinct into service of his individual will. It is not the father complex that can give us understanding here, as little as can the contrasting Greek figure Prometheus. It is just the reverse. The utilization of the sexual instinct in the service of the individual will on the basis of knowledge of good and evil, that is, the affirmation of the evil willing, brings suffering and punishment. The punishment consists in the loss of paradisical naïveté, of oneness with nature and her laws, and the recently won order among them. Adam is punished for not wanting to become a father and the punishment is the obligation to become one, that is, subordination under the compulsion of the biological sexual drive, in spite of knowledge of the moral problem which has branded the pleasure will as evil, and the attempt to overcome this morality through will affirmation.