A short overview and distinction between Freud and Jung’s theories of Libido

Author: Christopher Chayban

The key distinction between Freud and Jung is with the theory of libido, which takes us further into a distinction between the personal and collective unconscious.

For Freud, the theory of libido is sexual striving. His typology showed how libido would flow over into different sexual stages for the “psychosexual” development of the individual. For Freud, those were the anal, oral, phallic, latent and with the genital being the highest stage of maturation or “individuation” and a person who could have healthy relationships.

For Jung, libido was like neutral water that could be magnetized or flow into certain areas of interest for the individual. He considered this to be a hypothetical concept of energy. His typology says that libido is able to flow into consciousness both inwardly (introversion) and outwardly (extraversion). Whichever way psychic energy decided to flow, there was an equal and opposite tension (ready for compensation) in the unconscious.  Therefore, an of excess conscious introversion would be compensated by an unconscious extraversion and vice versa.

This system of “checks and balances” is where Jung differed from Freud who saw the psyche primarily as something to be reduced to history and the interaction with the parents. The concept of a parental “imago” for Freud stayed in the personal unconscious, while for Jung, the parental imago’s or “archetypes” came from a deeper layer called “the collective unconscious.” This collective unconscious is mythological in its character and contained and expressed itself in symbolic images that are essential to the patient’s healing. This is where Freud could not continue to jive with Jung.

To tie it all back in, libido becomes important again because in Freud’s personal unconscious it is charged with emotional frustrations, and neurosis, whereas Jung would say that’s at the level of the complex. But behind the complex, libido is charged with meaning that is called up per psychic law, from the well of the collective unconscious. The libido carries symbolic images with what Jung called the “Transcendent Function” that unite the opposites for the neurotic, who suffers primarily from the feeling of separation or not being whole.

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