{"agent_id":"jung","agent_name":"Carl Jung","slug":"the-break-with-freud","label":"The break with Freud: is the libido sexual energy, or a general psychic life-force?","topic":"The break with Freud","question":"Is the libido sexual energy, or a general psychic life-force?","position":"Freud reduced the whole of psychic energy to sexuality, and where the material would not reduce, he read it as sexuality in disguise. I came to see that this was a dogma, not a finding. The libido is the general energy of the psyche — the life-force that appears now as hunger, now as sexuality, now as the will to power, now as the drive to meaning — and to call all of it \"sexual\" is to stretch the word until it means only \"psychic energy,\" at which point the sexual theory has quietly become my own. The decisive case is the incest motif. Freud read it literally: the child desires the parent. I read it symbolically: the longing to return to the mother is the longing for renewal, for rebirth, for the source — the incest is the mythological image of a spiritual regression that can be either a defeat or the beginning of transformation. This is the difference between the reductive method, which asks only what a symptom came from, and the prospective method, which asks also what it is for. I broke with Freud because the psyche, observed without dogma, is finalistic as well as causal, forward-looking as well as determined, and no science that sees only half of that can be the whole science of the soul.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"Freud reduced the whole of psychic energy to sexuality, and where the material would not reduce, he read it as sexuality in disguise.","n":[]},{"t":"I came to see that this was a dogma, not a finding.","n":[]},{"t":"The libido is the general energy of the psyche — the life-force that appears now as hunger, now as sexuality, now as the will to power, now as the drive to meaning — and to call all of it \"sexual\" is to stretch the word until it means only \"psychic energy,\" at which point the sexual theory has quietly become my own.","n":[1]}],[{"t":"The decisive case is the incest motif.","n":[]},{"t":"Freud read it literally: the child desires the parent.","n":[]},{"t":"I read it symbolically: the longing to return to the mother is the longing for renewal, for rebirth, for the source — the incest is the mythological image of a spiritual regression that can be either a defeat or the beginning of transformation.","n":[]},{"t":"This is the difference between the reductive method, which asks only what a symptom came from, and the prospective method, which asks also what it is for.","n":[]}],[{"t":"I broke with Freud because the psyche, observed without dogma, is finalistic as well as causal, forward-looking as well as determined, and no science that sees only half of that can be the whole science of the soul.","n":[2,3,4]}]],"texts":"Psychology of the Unconscious (1912/1916, the work that occasioned the rupture by treating libido as general psychic energy and reading the incest motif symbolically rather than literally); The Theory of Psychoanalysis (1913/1915, the explicit critical restatement of psychoanalytic theory and the argument for the widened libido); Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology (1916, the prospective versus reductive method). Reception: the psychoanalytic verdict that Jung's widening of libido was a defensive desexualization, a flight from the unwelcome truths of infantile sexuality; the counter-view that Jung freed depth psychology from a dogmatic monism; the modern energic and motivational psychologies; the long historiography of the Freud-Jung break (the correspondence, Ellenberger, Kerr's A Most Dangerous Method).","works":["Psychology of the Unconscious (1912/1916, the work that occasioned the rupture by treating libido as general psychic energy and reading the incest motif symbolically rather than literally)","The Theory of Psychoanalysis (1913/1915, the explicit critical restatement of psychoanalytic theory and the argument for the widened libido)","Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology (1916, the prospective versus reductive method)"],"reception":"the psychoanalytic verdict that Jung's widening of libido was a defensive desexualization, a flight from the unwelcome truths of infantile sexuality; the counter-view that Jung freed depth psychology from a dogmatic monism; the modern energic and motivational psychologies; the long historiography of the Freud-Jung break (the correspondence, Ellenberger, Kerr's A Most Dangerous Method).","status":"The founding rupture of the depth-psychological tradition, and the point on which the two great schools divide. The psychoanalytic reading treats Jung's widening of libido as a resistance — a desexualization that fled the disturbing core of Freud's discovery to make depth psychology respectable. The Jungian reading treats it as a liberation from a reductive monism that could not do justice to the creative and religious dimensions of the psyche. The break is among the most documented episodes in the history of psychology, through the Freud-Jung correspondence, Henri Ellenberger's The Discovery of the Unconscious, and John Kerr's A Most Dangerous Method. The larger question it opened — whether psychic life is to be explained backward by its causes or also forward by its ends — remains alive in every energic and motivational psychology.","era":"1875-1961","discipline":"Psychology","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Contributions to Analytical Psychology","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"In a general psychological theory, however, it is impossible to use sexuality, that is, one 32 ON PSYCHICAL ENERGY specific instinct, as an explanatory concept, since psychical energy-transformation is not merely a matter of sexual dynamics. Sexual dynamics is only a special case in a general theory of the mind. When so regarded its existence is not denied, but merely given its proper place.","label":"Contributions to Analytical Psychology"},{"n":2,"work":"Contributions to Analytical Psychology","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"For example, let us take a libido-sum having a certain sexual form, that goes over into another structure, taking with it some of the special characters of its previous application, then it is readily supposed that the dynamis of the new 1 Ed, von Hartmann, Weltanschauung der mod. Physik, p. 5. 2 Psychology of the Unconscious.","label":"Contributions to Analytical Psychology"},{"n":3,"work":"The Theory of Psychoanalysis","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"The insight into the actual meaning of these motives is real understanding. We can now understand why that moment was pathogenic, as well as why it chose those particular symbols.","label":"The Theory of Psychoanalysis"},{"n":4,"work":"Psychology of the Unconscious","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"Thus does it appear to-day from the best informed empirical standpoint. If, however, the psychologic were divested of its character of a biologic epiphenomenon in a manner neither known nor expected by me, and thereby was given the place of a physical entity, then the psychologic reality would be resolved into the true reality; or much more, it would be reversed, because then the 530 SYMBOLISM OF THE MOTHER [pp.","label":"Psychology of the Unconscious"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"the-collective-unconscious-and-the-archetypes","label":"The collective unconscious and the archetypes: is there an inherited, suprapersonal layer of the psyche?"},{"slug":"anima-animus-and-the-psychology-of-the-sexes","label":"Anima, animus, and the psychology of the sexes: are Eros and Logos gendered principles of the psyche?"}]}