Theory of Libido: Freud vs. Jung, according to Lacan
The infamous rivalry between Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung has witnessed incredible hype throughout the history of ideas, as well as through the internet world of theory content. The imagery of this rivalry has been reproduced in the most elitist of academic circles and in the most mainstream channels, where the average internet consumer can get a bite size snicker’s understanding of psychology. One can say their rivalry set the groundwork for the famous Biggy and Tupac dichotomy (corny joke). Many of us are aware of Freud “the charlatan”, the quack doctor whose theories are old and outdated, and a sexual fanatic who wishes to turn everything into an incest dynamic. On the other hand, we have Jung, the man who speaks of the shadow, the archetypes, and a mythology that is hidden in the collective unconscious, and in the soul of each individual.
To elucidate on what has been written above, I do not take any of these accounts to be what these two leading figures of psychoanalysis to have said. To be honest to the reader, it was a parody of the modern discourse between these two figures, which does a disservice to both men in my opinion. Now I can go on about the rivalry between the two and the letters they wrote to each other, however this is not what this is about. My intention is to layout the theoretical split between the two figures of psychoanalysis, and that is the concept of libido. We will see not only the theoretical implications of libido on both sides, but through the reading of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and his final words on the matter.
In Lacan, Jacques (1953–1954) Seminar I: Freud’s Papers on Technique, Lacan lays the framework of the theory of libido in relation to Freud’s essay entitled, On Narcissism. Without diverging too far from what has been referenced, the reader should be aware of Lacan’s buildup of what he calls the optical schema, which consists of an experiment of an inverted bouquet with a concave mirror and a plane mirror. I do not wish to go into further detail at the moment, because I plan on making a separate article on the inverted bouquet. What the reader should be aware of is that Lacan sets this up to display a metaphorical way of understanding his three registers: the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real. These three registers are what make up his notion of subjectivity and the ego’s relation to the world. It is right here that we shall enter into a huge deadlock that Freud himself was struggling with, and that is the ambiguous relationship between the subject’s inner world (Innwelt) and the outer world (Umwelt). What does this have to do with libido? Well first off what is libido? For Freud, Libido is sexual energy that aims at satisfaction. To use a more detailed definition by Laplanche, J & Pontalis, J.B. (2018) The Language of Psychoanalysis; Routledge Edition, libido is, “Energy postulated by Freud as underlying the transformation of the sexual instinct with respect to its object (displacement of cathexes), with respect to its aim (e.g. sublimation), and with respect to the source of its sexual excitation (diversity of the erotogenic zones).”
Now to break this down simply and to paraphrase the words of my collogue The Dangerous Maybe, Sexual libido is not reducible to sex in so far as it is an act of intercourse. Rather it is the enjoyment and satisfaction of a sexual aim in relation to one’s body. What Freud emphasizes are enjoyments of a sexual nature from the act of mapping one’s body in parts, i.e. the erotogenic zones. It is not only the genitals that have sexual excitation, but any body part that becomes mapped by the subject. Now that I have given my attempt in such a tedious task of defining libido, I wish to return to the previous section On Narcissism, analyzed by Lacan and his interlocutors. The main problem with Freud and his development of libido and of narcissism was that he was confined to the analysis of the clinical structures of Neurosis and obsessional hysteria. Besides the examination of the memoirs of Judge Schreber, he never treated a patient who suffered from what is termed Dementia Praecox.
It is here that I would like to begin our analysis of Carl Jung and the theoretical split from Freud. Unlike Freud, Jung treated many patients who were diagnosed with Psychosis and Schizophrenia. This led him into an insight of what he would later coin Introversion. According to Jung, “introversion is the detachment of libido from its external objects and a withdrawal into the subject’s inner world. For Jung and Lacan’s commentary on Jungian theory, there is a psychic investment that libido aims at, something that is diametrically opposed to sexuality. In Jung, C.G. (1968) Analytical Psychology: Its Theory and Practice, he describes the process of introversion as a form of Nekyia, the descent into the underworld and or the cave. Jung sees this due to the archaic unconscious imprints, in which he further references St. Augustine’s Typos to lay the theoretical influence for his motif of the archetypes. To end on a final note, the archetypes are these unconscious imprints or typos that the libido inverts towards for its psychic investment. The key distinction between Freud and Jung is that Freud sees libido sublimating sexual satisfaction, while Jung sees libido aiming towards its own metamorphosis from instinctual to psychical.
What Does Lacan have to say about these two opposing theories? Well to bring it in full circle, Lacan is in defense of the theory of the sexual nature of libido. First off, one can see in the school of Lacanian psychoanalysis a sort of fantasy or libidinal investment from this introversion as not something teleological, but as something of a sense of false mastery which further plays into the ego’s meconnaisance or misrecognition as Lacan puts it. It seems as though these myths and motifs in Jung’s concept of the subject can affirm the Freudian notion of the narcissist, in which there are grandiose idealizations of one’s being and a sort of confusion of oneself as an object of sexual investment. Now I do not want to appear as though I am giving a strawman account of Jung after laying out his theoretical notions, but according to a Lacanian theory, this notion of introversion can lend itself into the narcissistic tendencies based on these imaginary identifications. Lacan later notes that with Jung, he lends his notion of psychic libido to a universal status, a sort of pantheistic substance. Now the key distinction that Lacan’s states to defend Freud’s sexual libido, is what he terms as the Lure. In seminar I, we have a play of early essays that Lacan himself was working with, one of them being the iconic Mirror Stage essay. His elucidation of it in this seminar is the Lure, a specular image that both “captates” and captivates us. In the animal kingdom, the male of a given species is lured by an image displayed by the female. according to Lacan, this lure is for the initiation of mating, and yet we humans are caught into a similar lure. However, the lure is not of a mate, but of our own bodily image. Here is the primordial sexual investment into what Lacan describes as primary narcissism.
What I really want to drive home is that there is another initiation or admission after the lure, and that is castration (alienation) into the symbolic register of language. Why do I bring this up? I bring this up because Lacan states that Jung confuses the symbolic with the imaginary. Jung himself does not have theory of alienation nor does he have a theory of language via structuralism. Jung rests his unconscious on imagos or archetypes which to repeat myself, lead to a telos of integration and individuation. If I may foreshadow another Lacanian reference, this sense of individuation can be no more than the propulsion of desire via the famous objet petit a. However, we do not get this yet in Seminar 1, but something referred to as “The Real Image.” With the use of structural linguistics, Lacan situates sexual drive into a domesticated form of Desire, a Desire of the Other, based on the symbolic structure of the Other by the Signifiers.
To conclude this, I would like to state that in this formation of the mirror stage, there is a condition in the specular lure that allows for a sadomasochistic tendency to undermine this “development”. Lacan will reference a little girl whom in act of captivation, hits a little boy in the head as if she were trying to destroy herself in him. This will build up to what is known as the death instinct (death drive). It is this crucial notion that in my opinion and I think Lacan would think the same, undermines any harmonious wholeness of psychic metamorphosis in Jung. With that being said, are you team Freud or Jung? Or do you believe that Jacques Lacan ended the theoretical rivalry once and for all?
