Glossary: Libido

Psychological energy; from the Latin meaning “desire,” or “love.” Unlike Freud, for Jung libido was not limited to sexual energy but was all mental and emotional energy. Where the libido goes, there goes one’s fascination and attention. This psychic energy manifests as drives, aspirations, compulsions, etc.

As Jung believed that the psyche is a self regulating system, he felt that a person’s libido “knew” where it needed to go for one’s growth. Our job is to figure out where that is. You can’t control or decide this because one’s libido is governed by something larger than the ego, namely, the Self. When there is intense activity in the unconscious the Self pulls libido out of consciousness resulting in the feeling of depression, or a general lack of energy.

Libido can be blocked, in which case it will find another channel, or change direction. Because of psyche’s tendency to balance itself out, it will often do this naturally when the conscious self has gone too far in one direction, often changing into its complete opposite (compensation, enantiodromia).

[Libido] denotes a desire or impulse which is unchecked by any kind of authority, moral or otherwise. Libido is appetite in its natural state. From the genetic point of view it is bodily needs like hunger, thirst, sleep, and sex, and emotional states or affects, which constitute the essence of libido.

- Jung "The Concept of Libido," CW 5, par. 194

For Jung, the hero is a symbol of the developing ego's libido. By libido, Jung means not simply desire or psychological energy but psychological purpose as well. For him, the hero myth expresses the ego's desire to replace dependency upon the unconscious with self-direction - a purpose that necessitates an ambivalent struggle with the mother, who symbolizes the unconscious

- Beebe, Aspects of the Masculine (p. 9)

Libido can never be apprehended except in a definite form; that is to say, it is identical with fantasy-images. And we can only release it from the grip of the unconscious by bringing up the corresponding fantasy-images.

- Jung, "The Technique of Differentiation," CW 7, par. 345

Always in advance of consciousness, calling us into new activity. Libido in turn is a part of the life energy that drives all organisms to grow and develop. Its first expression is in the energy of growth that causes cell division, budding, etc. (so it IS sexual at first). As you climb the phylogenetic ladder, libido used for sexuality loses its sexual character and flows into other forms.

Libido contains two opposite urges or instincts (see ambivalence/ambitendency): to live and to die, to go forwards and backwards (death drive) into instinctuality/womb/uncon. The libido contains both or no movement could happen.

- Craig Chalquist, PhD, A Glossary of Jungian Terms

It does not lie in our power to transfer "disposable" energy at will to a rationally chosen object. The same is true in general of the apparently disposable energy which is disengaged when we have destroyed its unserviceable forms through the corrosive of reductive analysis. [It] can at best be applied voluntarily for only a short time. But in most cases it refuses to seize hold, for any length of time, of the possibilities rationally presented to it. Psychic energy is a very fastidious thing which insists on fulfilment of its own conditions. However much energy may be present, we cannot make it serviceable until we have succeeded in finding the right gradient.

- Jung, "The Problem of the Attitude-Type," CW 7, par. 76

What is it, at this moment and in this individual, that represents the natural urge of life? That is the question.

- Jung, "The Structure of the Unconscious," CW 7, par. 488


Jung quotes from: Daryl Sharp's "Jung Lexicon"



See also:
Compensation
Enantiodromia
Hero

Symbolism: Snake

[An overview will be written at some point in the future.]

Posts:

The Snake Pt. 1 (Fire)

The Snake Pt. 2 (The Child)
The golden shadow

Symbolism: Journey

[An overview will be written at some point in the future.]

Posts:

"A Journey from Where to Where"

Attis' sacrifice

Symbolism: Incest

[An overview will be written at some point in the future.]

Posts:

Attis' sacrifice

 

Symbolism: Child

[An overview will be written at some point in the future.]

Posts:

The Snake Pt. 2 (The Child)

The golden shadow
"The Fate of Depth Psychology in the New Millennium"

Symbolism: The Hero

[An overview will be written at some point in the future.]

Posts:

Attis' sacrifice
The hero sun
 

Attis' sacrifice

As the son and lover of his mother [Attis] raises the incest problem. Incest leads logically to ritual castration in the Attis-Cybele cult; for according to legend the hero, driven mad by his mother, mutilates himself. I must refrain from going into this question more deeply at present, as I would prefer to discuss the incest problem at the end of this book. Here I would only point out that the incest motif is bound to arise, because when the regressing libido is introverted for internal or external reasons it always reactivates the parental imagos and thus apparently re-establishes the infantile relationship. But this relationship cannot be re-established, because the libido is an adult libido which is already bound to sexuality and inevitably imports an incompatible, incestuous character into the reactivated relationship to the parents.66 It is this sexual character that now gives rise to the incest symbolism. Since incest must be avoided at all costs, the result is either the death of the son-lover or his self-castration as punishment for the incest he has committed, or else the sacrifice of instinctuality, and especially of sexuality, as a means of preventing or expiating the incestuous longing. Sex being one of the most obvious examples of instinctuality, it is sex which is liable to be most affected by these sacrificial measures, i.e., through abstinence. The heroes are usually wanderers,67 and wandering is a symbol of longing, of the restless urge which never finds its object, of nostalgia for the lost mother. The sun comparison can easily be taken in this sense: the heroes are like the wandering sun, from which it is concluded that the myth of the hero is a solar myth. It seems to us, rather, that he is first and foremost a self-representation of the longing of the unconscious, of its unquenched and unquenchable desire for the light of consciousness. But consciousness, continually in danger of being led astray by its own light and of becoming a rootless will o’ the wisp, longs for the healing power of nature, for the deep wells of being and for unconscious communion with life in all its countless forms.

Footnotes:
66   This explanation is not satisfactory, because I found it impossible to go into the archetypal incest problem and all its complications here. I have dealt with it at some length in my “Psychology of the Transference”
67   Like Gilgamesh, Dionysus, Heracles, Mithras, etc.

- Jung, Aspects of the Masculine, p.5