Psychic Energy / Libido (Jungian)

Structurego deeper

Your inner energy: the fuel that powers your attention, your passion, your engagement with life. It goes where your interest goes. When it drains from one area (your career suddenly feels dead) it's often flowing into another (a new creative impulse, a relationship, an inner transformation). Depression is often this energy sinking inward for purposes you don't understand yet.

THE FULL DEPTH

Jung's concept of libido is NOT Freud's. For Jung, libido is the total psychic energy available to the personality: not just sexual energy, but ALL life force. It flows, it gets blocked, it concentrates, it transforms. Where your psychic energy goes determines what develops. Where it's withdrawn from, things die. The flow and distribution of psychic energy is the engine of all psychological change.

IN PRACTICE

You lose interest in your career and suddenly become passionate about painting: that's psychic energy withdrawing from one channel and flowing into another. Depression is often psychic energy sinking into the unconscious, not gone, but redirected inward for purposes the ego doesn't understand yet. Obsession is psychic energy trapped in a complex, circling the same drain. A dream journal traces psychic energy by following what's emotionally charged: what carries intensity is where the energy is concentrated.

HOW TO RECOGNIZE IT

  • · Sudden loss of interest in something previously engaging: energy withdrawing
  • · Inexplicable fascination with something new: energy flowing in
  • · Depression as energy sinking inward rather than disappearing
  • · Obsessive focus on one topic: energy trapped in a complex

IN DREAMS, LOOK FOR

FireWaterriverMoney / Currency

CONNECTED CONCEPTS

  • Compensation: Compensation is the psyche's way of redistributing blocked psychic energy.
  • Complexes: Complexes are concentrations of psychic energy around a central theme: they trap energy.
  • Individuation: Individuation requires the progressive liberation and reallocation of psychic energy.
  • Enantiodromia: Enantiodromia is the violent redistribution of psychic energy when gradual compensation has been refused.

Jung: On Psychic Energy (1928)