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PART I
Ecstasy and the psychological
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1
THE STREAM OF DESIRE AND JUNG’S CONCEPT OF PSYCHIC ENERGY
Raya A. Jones
(C.G. Jung)1
It is a remarkable quality of Jung’s legacy that it appeals across diverse disciplines, but I put the above statement upfront as a reminder that as a therapist Jung was concerned first and foremost with explaining the kind of phenomena that clinicians confront in their patients. If a concept of energy or libido does the job, so to speak, that’s more important than whether the concept is metaphysically sound or not. Nevertheless, Jung did attempt to articulate a cogent theory of what precisely psychic energy might be. His theorising about psychic energy took off in the 1912 monograph, Psychology of the Unconscious, which four decades later was lightly revised as Symbols of Transformation.2 Seeking the appropriate psychological explanation for patients’ symptoms, he argued that the Freudian notion of libido as sexual energy is inapplicable to dementia praecox since the illness is associated with the generation of a fantasy world rather than with heightened sexuality. This argument set him on a line of theorising that has culminated in the theory of the archetypes. The assumption of psychic energy runs throughout Jung’s psychology in general. His differentiation between introverts and extroverts is based on it, and it is central for his theory of the autonomous complexes and how complexes form around archetypal nuclei (summarised in Jung’s 1928 essay On Psychic Energy).3
Jung’s attempt to clarify a concept of psychic energy was one of several theories of mental energy that were bandied about in the first half of the last century, not only in depth psychology but also in general psychology. Elsewhere I have compared Jung’s revision of libido with the concept of energy underpinning the field theory that the gestalt psychologist Kurt Lewin articulated in the 1930s.4 In The Energies of Men, first published in 1932, William McDougall regarded a concept of energy as indispensable: ‘In view of the purposive nature of human activity, [we] must postulate some energy which conforms to laws not wholly identical with the laws of energy stated by the physical sciences.’5 Contesting the terminology of ‘psychic’ energy, he proposed a concept of ‘hormic’ energy (defined as an urge or impulse towards a goal) as a means to forging connections between processes of the body and processes of the mind within a unified science of psychology—a science that in McDougall’s view had no room for psychoanalytical doctrines. And then, as if suddenly in mid-century, the whole discourse of energies vanished. Concepts of mental energy have become obsolete in the wake of the cognitive revolution.
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A roughly parallel trajectory can be tracked in the history of the idea within analytical psychology. By the 1980s, Samuels queried whether analytical psychology needs a concept of energy, though he conceded that ‘the notion of energy, even if taken nowadays purely as a metaphor, helps to explain differences in perception’.6 However, in contradistinction to the academic debates about mental energy early on, Jung’s concept of psychic energy has seldom been examined or debated in Jungian circles despite its original centrality. First published in 1948, Esther Harding’s book, Psychic Energy—with a preface by Jung—is a tour-de-force of symbolism and symbols’ signification;7 but it does not contain any definition of psychic energy. A similar observation could be made about John Beebe’s recent book, Energies and Patterns in Psychological Type.8 Beebe uses the word ‘energy’ liberally but in a common-sense way, as an everyday concept that requires no explanation. His theoretical investment is in the concept of psychological types. ‘Psychic energy’ continues to be acknowledged in textbooks as something that Jung said,9 and is the topic of scholarly publications that attempt to clarify what Jung meant and to locate his idea historically,10 but at best we can offer fresh insights into what he was saying and why he was saying it. As a scientific or quasi-scientific explanation, this construct has lost its vitality.
This chapter revisits Jung’s concept from another direction. Instead of examining its place in the intellectual history of modern psychology, I want to tease out an ancient image—the stream of desire—that Jung both inherits and resists when he strives to improve upon the Freudian concept: ‘By libido I mean psychic energy. Psychic energy is the intensity of a psychic process, its psychological value [. . .] Neither do I understand libido as a psychic force, a misconception that has led many critics astray,’ says Jung.11 We should not be misled by the linearity of terminological succession. Jung’s psychological value is not a synonym for Freud’s libido but its antonym, as will be seen.
The ancient stream
There is an obvious association, a kind of continuity, between the Freudian libido and the stream-of-desire image. Dictionaries tell us that the word libido originates in the Latin for desire or lust; and there is an etymological connection to the English word ‘love’. The imaginative association between a stream and desire is explicit in the Dhammapada, where it carries a moral message: ‘When the thirty-six streams of desire that run towards pleasure are strong, their powerful waves carry away that man’; ‘Go beyond the stream [. . .] go with all your soul: leave desires behind.’12 In historical parallel, in Republic, Plato deploys an almost identical image: ‘anyone whose predilection tends strongly in a single direction has correspondingly less desire for other things, like a stream whose flow has been diverted into another channel.’13 The same imagery flows on into psychoanalytical theory. Freud speaks of ‘a collateral filling of subsidiary channels when the main current of the instinctual stream has been blocked by “repression”’.14 Likewise in Jung’s works we find assertions such as:
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In the 1928 essay on psychic energy and elsewhere, Jung devoted considerable space to libidinal flow—he talks of regression, progression, and canalisation and transformation—which he offers as an explanation for a variety of response patterns, including fantasies.
Neither Freud nor Jung mentioned Plato’s stream analogy apropos of libido (to my knowledge). Instead, in the 1920 Preface to the fourth edition of Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud cites a 1915 article that compared his own theory with Plato’s Eros, and reflects ‘how closely the enlarged sexuality of psycho-analysis coincides with the Eros of the divine Plato’.16 Ever since, some scholars seem inclined to fuse Plato’s hydraulic metaphor with Eros and to discuss both the Republic and the Symposium as postulating a primordial energy source. According to Jon Moline:
Similarly, Henry Teloh took the stream analogy in the Republic as pivotal for understanding Plato’s conception of the soul as psychic energy.18 Commenting on Teloh’s paper, M.L. Osborne contends that such interpretation is not borne out by Plato’s argument in the same context.19 I concur with Osborne.
Arguably, it is Freud who has made it possible to link Pl...
