Psychology of the Unconscious: A Study of the Transformations and Symbolisms of the Libido. A Contribution to the History of the Evolution of ThoughtJung, C. G. (Carl Gustav)
Philosophy
Psychology of the Unconscious: A Study of the Transformations and Symbolisms of the Libido. A Contribution to the History of the Evolution of Thought
Jung, C. G. (Carl Gustav)
Libido (Psychology); Mother and child; Psychoanalysis; Subconsciousness; Symbolism (Psychology)
“What lies enclosed in the intellect, comes to development in the
world-soul as logos, fills it with meaning and makes it as if
intoxicated with nectar.”[262]
Nectar is analogous to soma, the drink of fertility and of life, also to
sperma. The soul is fructified by the intellect; as oversoul it is
called heavenly Aphrodite, as the undersoul the earthly Aphrodite. “It
knows the birth pangs,”[263] and so on. The bird of Aphrodite, the dove,
is not without good cause the symbol of the Holy Ghost.
This fragment of the history of philosophy, which may easily be
enlarged, shows the significance of the endopsychic perception of the
libido and of its symbolism in human thought.
In the diversity of natural phenomena we see the desire, the libido, in
the most diverse applications and forms. We see the libido in the stage
of childhood almost wholly occupied in the instinct of nutrition, which
takes care of the upbuilding of the body. With the development of the
body there are successively opened new spheres of application for the
libido. The last sphere of application, and surpassing all the others in
its functional significance, is sexuality, which seems at first almost
bound up with the function of nutrition. (Compare with this the
influence on procreation of the conditions of nutrition in lower animals
and plants.) In the territory of sexuality, the libido wins that
formation, the enormous importance of which has justified us in the use
of the term libido in general. Here the libido appears very properly as
an impulse of procreation, and almost in the form of an undifferentiated
sexual primal libido, as an energy of growth, which clearly forces the
individual towards division, budding, etc. (The clearest distinction
between the two forms of libido is to be found among those animals in
whom the stage of nutrition is separated from the sexual stage by a
chrysalis stage.)
From that sexual primal libido which produced millions of eggs and seeds
from one small creature derivatives have been developed with the great
limitation of the fecundity; derivatives in which the functions are
maintained by a special differentiated libido. This differentiated
libido is henceforth desexualized because it is dissociated from its
original function of egg and sperma production; nor is there any
possibility of restoring it to its original function. Thus, in general,
the process of development consists in an increasing transformation of
the primal libido which only produced products of generation to the
secondary functions of allurement and protection of the young. This now
presupposes a very different and very complicated relation to reality, a
true function of reality, which, functionally inseparable, is bound up
with the needs of procreation. Thus the altered mode of procreation
carries with it as a correlate a correspondingly heightened adaptation
to reality.[264]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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