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)
To-day there are countless neurotics who are so simply because they do
not know how to seek happiness in their own manner. They do not even
realize where the lack lies. And besides these neurotics there are many
more normal people—and precisely people of the higher type—who feel
restricted and discontented. For all these reduction to the sexual
elements should be undertaken, in order that they may be reinstated into
the possession of their primitive self, and thereby learn to know and
value its relation to the entire personality. In this way alone can
certain requirements be fulfilled and others be repudiated as unfit
because of their infantile character. In this way the individual will
come to realize that certain things are to be sacrificed, although they
are accomplished, _but in another sphere_. We imagine that we have long
renounced, sacrificed and cut off our incest wish, and that nothing of
it is left. But it does not occur to us that this is not true, but that
we unconsciously commit incest in another territory. In religious
symbols, for example, we come across incest.[463] We consider the
incestuous wish vanished and lost, and then rediscover it in full force
in religion. This process or transformation has taken place
unconsciously in secular development. Just as in Part I it is shown that
a similar unconscious transformation of the libido is an ethically
worthless pose, and with which I compared the Christianity of early
Roman antiquity, where evidently licentiousness and brutality were
strongly resisted, so here I must remark in regard to the sublimation of
the incestuous libido, that the belief in the religious symbol has
ceased to be an ethical ideal; but it is an unconscious transformation
of the incest wish into symbolic acts and symbolic concepts which cheat
men, as it were, so that heaven appears to them as a father and earth as
a mother and the people upon it children and brothers and sisters. Thus
man can remain a child for all time and satisfy his incest wish all
unawares. This state would doubtless be ideal[464] if it were not
infantile and, therefore, merely a one-sided wish, which maintains a
childish attitude. _The reverse is anxiety._ Much is said of pious
people who remain unshaken in their trust in God and wander unswervingly
safe and blessed through the world. I have never seen this Chidher yet.
It is probably a wish figure. The rule is great uncertainty among
believers, which they drown with fanatical cries among themselves or
among others; moreover, they have religious doubts, moral uncertainty,
doubts of their own personality, feelings of guilt and, deepest of all,
great fear of the opposite aspect of reality, against which the most
highly intelligent people struggle with all their force. This other side
is the devil, the adversary or, expressed in modern terms, the
corrective of reality, of the infantile world picture, which has been
made acceptable through the predominating pleasure principle.[465] But
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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