Libido: Jung v Freud

Haven't read this stuff since forever, but just found a footnote where Jung differentiates his own take vs. Freud's on this very critical -- and I think cosmos defining -- concept. I find that it's been so internalized that it's only within this broad understanding that things make sense. To me, anyway. How very much it's shaped my life, and certainly my take on Eros.  

Here's the footnote, which begins just below pars. 77, page 52, in CW7, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology:  

From the foregoing it will become clear to the reader that the term "libido" coined by Freud and very suitable for practical usage, is used by me in a much wider sense. Libido for me means psychic energy, which is equivalent to the intensity with which psychic contents are charged. Freud, in accordance with his theoretical assumptions, identifies libido with Eros and tries to distinguish it from psychic energy in general. Thus he says ("Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality" [orig. 1908], p. 217): "We have defined the concept of libido as a quantitatively variable force which could serve as a measure of processes and transformations occurring in the field of sexual excitation. We distinguish this libido in respect of its special origin from the energy which must be supposed to underlie mental processes in general." Elsewhere Freud remarks that in respect of the destructive instinct he lacks "a term analogous to libido." Since the so-called destructive instinct is a also a phenomenon of energy, it seems to me simpler to define libido as an inclusive term of psychic intensities, and consequently as sheer psychic energy. Cf. my Symbols of Transformation, pars. 190ff; also "On Psychic Energy," pars. 4ff.

Below, a post I'd written from a few years ago on Negative Capability / Moon's Favors: 

  

left: Rossetti's St. Cecilia (go read; he got it)

I don't mean to be invidious--but Purgation: Is that not a centerpiece of Freudian theory? A closed system of forces/energies playing off one another. It always seemed so mechanical, venting and repressing. What is its relationship to eternity, to our experience and intuition of the mystery we came out of -- and go back into? I don't feel it. Jung seems a living system, the unconscious a creative matrix, not a receptacle of repressed content. It is that from which we develop. Libido as something akin to an expanded and historical (if you go to the source) Eros is a reading readily compatible with Jung. Jung writes:

"...the term "libido," introduced by Freud, is not without a sexual connotation, an exclusively sexual definition of this concept is one sided and must therefore be rejected. Appetite and compulsion are the specific features of all impulses and automatisms. No more than sexual metaphors of common speech can the corresponding analogies in instinctual processes, and the symptoms and dreams to which they give rise, be taken literally. *The sexual theory of psychic automatisms is an untenable prejudice.* [that's their beef, yes?] The very fact that it is impossible to derive the whole mass from a single instinct forbids a one-sided definition of libido. I use this term in the general sense in which it was understood by the classical authors. [...] We can say, then, that the concept of libido in psychology has functionally the same significance as the concept of energy in physics since the time of Robert Mayer. (See my "On Psychic Energy,"** CW5, SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION [** in cgj CW8]

And with energy, we're back to ambivalence (in the literal sense; energy gradients, as in physics and biology), back to Eros: the force that moves the sun and all the stars. Fascination (and look at that word, the meaning it carries: [Latin; fascinum, an evil spell, a phallic-shaped amulet.] It's what I was saying in the intro to Alice's book: words carry meaning beyond memory, hypostasis rather than mere understanding) is a psychopomp, mediator between mortal and immortal, the conscious and the unconscious. Is its movement not libido? It says that to me. I never felt Freud going all the way with this meaning. The Full Monty that encompasses all things. Freud pulled back from that. Fell off his chair. Jung wrote of Freud, and to a great extent it's applicable to the present:

The historical conditions which preceded Freud were such that they made a phenomenon like himself necessary, and it is precisely the fundamental tenet of his teaching-namely, the repression of sexuality-that is most clearly conditioned in this historical sense. Like his greater contemporary Nietzsche, Freud stands at the end of the Victorian era, which was never given such an appropriate name on the Continent despite the fact that it was just as characteristic of the Germanic and Protestant countries as of the Anglo-Saxon. The Victorian era was an age of repression, of a convulsive attempt to keep anaemic ideals artificially alive in a framework of bourgeois respectability by con­stant moralizings. These ideals were the last offshoots of the col­lective religious ideas of the Middle Ages, and shortly before had been severely shaken by the French Enlightenment and the ensuing revolution. Hand in hand with this, ancient truths in the political field had become hollow and threatened to collapse. It was still too soon for the final overthrow, and consequently all through the nineteenth century frantic efforts were made to prevent the Christian Middle Ages from disappearing altogether. Political revolutions were stamped out, experiments in moral freedom were thwarted by middle-class public opinion, and the critical philosophy of the late eighteenth century reached its end in a renewed, systematic attempt to capture the world in a unified network of thought on the medieval model. But in the course of the nineteenth century enlightenment slowly broke through, particularly in the form of scientific materialism and rationalism. This is the matrix out of which Freud grew, and its mental characteristics have shaped him along foreordained lines. He has a passion for explaining everything rationally, exactly as in the eighteenth century; one of his favourite maxims is Voltaire's "Ecrasez l'infame." With a certain satisfaction he invariably points out the flaw in the crystal; all complex psychic phenom­ena like art, philosophy, and religion fall under his suspicion and appear as "nothing but" repressions of the sexual instinct. Sigmund Freud in his Historical SettingCGJUNG CW 15

Libido: Jung v Freud

Haven't read this stuff since forever, but just found a footnote where Jung differentiates his own take vs. Freud's on this very critical -- and I think cosmos defining -- concept. I find that it's been so internalized that it's only within this broad understanding that things make sense. To me, anyway. How very much it's shaped my life, and certainly my take on Eros.  

Here's the footnote, which begins just below pars. 77, page 52, in CW7, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology:  

From the foregoing it will become clear to the reader that the term "libido" coined by Freud and very suitable for practical usage, is used by me in a much wider sense. Libido for me means psychic energy, which is equivalent to the intensity with which psychic contents are charged. Freud, in accordance with his theoretical assumptions, identifies libido with Eros and tries to distinguish it from psychic energy in general. Thus he says ("Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality" [orig. 1908], p. 217): "We have defined the concept of libido as a quantitatively variable force which could serve as a measure of processes and transformations occurring in the field of sexual excitation. We distinguish this libido in respect of its special origin from the energy which must be supposed to underlie mental processes in general." Elsewhere Freud remarks that in respect of the destructive instinct he lacks "a term analogous to libido." Since the so-called destructive instinct is a also a phenomenon of energy, it seems to me simpler to define libido as an inclusive term of psychic intensities, and consequently as sheer psychic energy. Cf. my Symbols of Transformation, pars. 190ff; also "On Psychic Energy," pars. 4ff.

Below, a post I'd written from a few years ago on Negative Capability / Moon's Favors: 

  

left: Rossetti's St. Cecilia (go read; he got it)

I don't mean to be invidious--but Purgation: Is that not a centerpiece of Freudian theory? A closed system of forces/energies playing off one another. It always seemed so mechanical, venting and repressing. What is its relationship to eternity, to our experience and intuition of the mystery we came out of -- and go back into? I don't feel it. Jung seems a living system, the unconscious a creative matrix, not a receptacle of repressed content. It is that from which we develop. Libido as something akin to an expanded and historical (if you go to the source) Eros is a reading readily compatible with Jung. Jung writes:

"...the term "libido," introduced by Freud, is not without a sexual connotation, an exclusively sexual definition of this concept is one sided and must therefore be rejected. Appetite and compulsion are the specific features of all impulses and automatisms. No more than sexual metaphors of common speech can the corresponding analogies in instinctual processes, and the symptoms and dreams to which they give rise, be taken literally. *The sexual theory of psychic automatisms is an untenable prejudice.* [that's their beef, yes?] The very fact that it is impossible to derive the whole mass from a single instinct forbids a one-sided definition of libido. I use this term in the general sense in which it was understood by the classical authors. [...] We can say, then, that the concept of libido in psychology has functionally the same significance as the concept of energy in physics since the time of Robert Mayer. (See my "On Psychic Energy,"** CW5, SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION [** in cgj CW8]

And with energy, we're back to ambivalence (in the literal sense; energy gradients, as in physics and biology), back to Eros: the force that steers the sun and all the stars. Fascination (and look at that word, the meaning it carries: [Latin; fascinum, an evil spell, a phallic-shaped amulet.] It's what I was saying in the intro to Alice's book: words carry meaning beyond memory, hypostasis rather than mere understanding) is a psychopomp, mediator between mortal and immortal, the conscious and the unconscious. Is its movement not libido? It says that to me. I never felt Freud going all the way with this meaning. The Full Monty that encompasses all things. Freud pulled back from that. Fell off his chair. Jung wrote of Freud, and to a great extent it's applicable to the present:

The historical conditions which preceded Freud were such that they made a phenomenon like himself necessary, and it is precisely the fundamental tenet of his teaching-namely, the repression of sexuality-that is most clearly conditioned in this historical sense. Like his greater contemporary Nietzsche, Freud stands at the end of the Victorian era, which was never given such an appropriate name on the Continent despite the fact that it was just as characteristic of the Germanic and Protestant countries as of the Anglo-Saxon. The Victorian era was an age of repression, of a convulsive attempt to keep anaemic ideals artificially alive in a framework of bourgeois respectability by con­stant moralizings. These ideals were the last offshoots of the col­lective religious ideas of the Middle Ages, and shortly before had been severely shaken by the French Enlightenment and the ensuing revolution. Hand in hand with this, ancient truths in the political field had become hollow and threatened to collapse. It was still too soon for the final overthrow, and consequently all through the nineteenth century frantic efforts were made to prevent the Christian Middle Ages from disappearing altogether. Political revolutions were stamped out, experiments in moral freedom were thwarted by middle-class public opinion, and the critical philosophy of the late eighteenth century reached its end in a renewed, systematic attempt to capture the world in a unified network of thought on the medieval model. But in the course of the nineteenth century enlightenment slowly broke through, particularly in the form of scientific materialism and rationalism. This is the matrix out of which Freud grew, and its mental characteristics have shaped him along foreordained lines. He has a passion for explaining everything rationally, exactly as in the eighteenth century; one of his favourite maxims is Voltaire's "Ecrasez l'infame." With a certain satisfaction he invariably points out the flaw in the crystal; all complex psychic phenom­ena like art, philosophy, and religion fall under his suspicion and appear as "nothing but" repressions of the sexual instinct. Sigmund Freud in his Historical Setting CGJUNG CW 15

Desire Is Holy

New book out about Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Review here.

Publisher's blurb, via Amazon:

Dante Gabriel Rossetti is the most intriguing and flamboyant figure in nineteenth-century British art. He inspired the first Pre-Raphaelite generation of 1849 and the second generation ten years later and both brought about significant changes in British art. His poetry, too, acted as a stimulus to many writers at the end of the century, who saw in his subtle manipulation of the sonnet and the ballad forms ways of giving expression to issues that were peculiar to the that century.
Dominant among those issues was that of sexual desire, for Rossetti, more than any other artist in this period, struggled with the contradictions of sexuality. When he died in 1882 people knew of him as the painter of alluring women with exotic names - Lilith, Monna Vanna, Fiammetta - and the writer of subtly erotic verse. He projected onto women his anxieties, his pleasures and his needs. He also mythologized them, so that Elizabeth Siddal, Fanny Cornforth, Jane Morris and others became for him Beatrice, Guenevere, and Isolde. In doing so he shaped them, he changed the direction of their lives, and in some cases he both made and destroyed them.
This richly illustrated book, by tracing the development of Rossetti's painting and poetry in the context of the drama of his life, follows this powerful thread. Sometimes sensual, at others spiritual, Rossetti's mission was to transcend the Manichean division that separated body and soul and, through the visionary power of art, reconcile what he saw as elements fundamental to human experience.

"Dominant among those issues was that of sexual desire, for Rossetti, more than any other artist in this period, struggled with the contradictions of sexuality." Have to read the book. But I do know Mr. Rossetti rather well--and for him, sexual desire doesn't begin to contain him. When he says Hand painted the Soul, he's speaking of serving big L libido -- life force itself, Beauty as harbinger, emanation of the Good. Religion of Art? Sure. And I tend to fancy him (a whole book's worth, to what green altar) as Corbin-style Sufi by way of an occult Dante, magician philosopher in the old style roots of Western tradition -- saying in Heart's Hope

For lo ! in some poor rhythmic period, Lady, I fain would tell how evermore Thy soul I know not from thy body, nor Thee from myself, neither our love from God.

And then there's Ken Russell's take.

That odd, punishing nature. Rossetti had no understanding of it.

As far as longing can reach.  -- reminding us that longing is thumos, the energy of life itself.
Betwixt the sun and moon a mystery

Desire Is Holy

New book out about Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Review here.

Publisher's blurb, via Amazon:

Dante Gabriel Rossetti is the most intriguing and flamboyant figure in nineteenth-century British art. He inspired the first Pre-Raphaelite generation of 1849 and the second generation ten years later and both brought about significant changes in British art. His poetry, too, acted as a stimulus to many writers at the end of the century, who saw in his subtle manipulation of the sonnet and the ballad forms ways of giving expression to issues that were peculiar to the that century.
Dominant among those issues was that of sexual desire, for Rossetti, more than any other artist in this period, struggled with the contradictions of sexuality. When he died in 1882 people knew of him as the painter of alluring women with exotic names - Lilith, Monna Vanna, Fiammetta - and the writer of subtly erotic verse. He projected onto women his anxieties, his pleasures and his needs. He also mythologized them, so that Elizabeth Siddal, Fanny Cornforth, Jane Morris and others became for him Beatrice, Guenevere, and Isolde. In doing so he shaped them, he changed the direction of their lives, and in some cases he both made and destroyed them.
This richly illustrated book, by tracing the development of Rossetti's painting and poetry in the context of the drama of his life, follows this powerful thread. Sometimes sensual, at others spiritual, Rossetti's mission was to transcend the Manichean division that separated body and soul and, through the visionary power of art, reconcile what he saw as elements fundamental to human experience.

"Dominant among those issues was that of sexual desire, for Rossetti, more than any other artist in this period, struggled with the contradictions of sexuality." Have to read the book. But I do know Mr. Rossetti rather well--and for him, sexual desire doesn't begin to contain him. When he says Hand painted the Soul, he's speaking of serving big L libido -- life force itself, Beauty as harbinger, emanation of the Good. Religion of Art? Sure. And I tend to fancy him (a whole book's worth, to what green altar) Corbin-style by way of an occult Dante, magician philosopher in the old style roots of Western tradition -- saying in Heart's Hope

For lo ! in some poor rhythmic period, Lady, I fain would tell how evermore Thy soul I know not from thy body, nor Thee from myself, neither our love from God.

And then there's Ken Russell's take.

That odd, punishing nature. Rossetti had no understanding of it.

As far as longing can reach.  -- reminding us that longing is thumos, the energy of life itself.
Betwixt the sun and moon a mystery

it is by now not absurd to see Burne-Jones and William Blake as the two ends of the same resistance to the Satanic Mills of Albion

Rage against the machine 
review by BRIAN LYNCH 
IRISH TIMES 


BIOGRAPHY: The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination, By Fiona MacCarthy, Faber, 656pp. £25 excerpt:

Ned liked to represent himself, in MacCarthy’s phrase, as a pitiable object. But he had what Turgenev said the poet Belinsky possessed, “the timid sternness peculiar to nervous people”, and in his soul there was, in the words of his nephew, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, “iron and granite”. The man to whom Burne-Jones deferred all his life, William Morris, was undoubtedly a greater genius as a personality, and yet, perhaps because of his superiority as a draughtsman (in itself a gift that, for proper use, requires moral strength), Burne-Jones did not succumb to Morris’s socialism – when he was offered a knighthood he took it, but only, he said apologetically, for his son’s sake. The hereditary part of a peerage, he hardly needed to say, is pretty much its whole point.

Another way of getting away from the red revolutions of politics and sex was humour, an avoidance technique Burne-Jones used from an early age. Any time his nanny – he was wary of her “potentially overwhelming fondness” – asked what he was thinking he always had the same answer: “Camels”. This constant jokiness is very English: Ned, after all, is a character in The Goon Show, and an avatar of Prince Charles. But Irish humour, in the portly person of Oscar Wilde, also appealed to Burne-Jones. At the artist’s first and only one-man show, the playwright wore a bronze-red coat, the back of which was cut in the shape of a cello. As Wilde’s commerce with prostitutes was revealed, Burne-Jones referred to him as “that horrible creature” and lamented that “he hadn’t had the common courage to shoot himself”. But, as MacCarthy intelligently points out, what upset the sexually tolerant artist was “his perception that Wilde had betrayed the cause of beauty . . . a heinous crime”. In any event Ned relented: before Oscar was released from prison he said, “I should shake hands or bow to him if I saw him.”

it is by now not absurd to see Burne-Jones and William Blake as the two ends of the same resistance to the Satanic Mills of Albion

Rage against the machine 
review by BRIAN LYNCH 
IRISH TIMES 


BIOGRAPHY: The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination, By Fiona MacCarthy, Faber, 656pp. £25 excerpt:

Ned liked to represent himself, in MacCarthy’s phrase, as a pitiable object. But he had what Turgenev said the poet Belinsky possessed, “the timid sternness peculiar to nervous people”, and in his soul there was, in the words of his nephew, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, “iron and granite”. The man to whom Burne-Jones deferred all his life, William Morris, was undoubtedly a greater genius as a personality, and yet, perhaps because of his superiority as a draughtsman (in itself a gift that, for proper use, requires moral strength), Burne-Jones did not succumb to Morris’s socialism – when he was offered a knighthood he took it, but only, he said apologetically, for his son’s sake. The hereditary part of a peerage, he hardly needed to say, is pretty much its whole point.

Another way of getting away from the red revolutions of politics and sex was humour, an avoidance technique Burne-Jones used from an early age. Any time his nanny – he was wary of her “potentially overwhelming fondness” – asked what he was thinking he always had the same answer: “Camels”. This constant jokiness is very English: Ned, after all, is a character in The Goon Show, and an avatar of Prince Charles. But Irish humour, in the portly person of Oscar Wilde, also appealed to Burne-Jones. At the artist’s first and only one-man show, the playwright wore a bronze-red coat, the back of which was cut in the shape of a cello. As Wilde’s commerce with prostitutes was revealed, Burne-Jones referred to him as “that horrible creature” and lamented that “he hadn’t had the common courage to shoot himself”. But, as MacCarthy intelligently points out, what upset the sexually tolerant artist was “his perception that Wilde had betrayed the cause of beauty . . . a heinous crime”. In any event Ned relented: before Oscar was released from prison he said, “I should shake hands or bow to him if I saw him.”

Libido: Jung vs Freud

left: Rossetti's St. Cecilia

I don't mean to be invidious--but Purgation: Is that not a centerpiece of Freudian theory? A closed system of forces/energies playing off one another. It always seemed so mechanical, venting and repressing. What is its relationship to eternity, to our experience and intuition of the mystery we came out of -- and go back into? I don't feel it. Jung seems a living system, the unconscious a creative matrix, not a receptacle of repressed content. It is that from which we develop. Libido as something akin to Eros is a reading readily compatible with Jung. Jung writes:

"...the term "libido," introduced by Freud, is not without a sexual connotation, an exclusively sexual definition of this concept is one sided and must therefore be rejected. Appetite and compulsion are the specific features of all impulses and automatisms. No more than sexual metaphors of common speech can the corresponding analogies in instinctual processes, and the symptoms and dreams to which they give rise, be taken literally. *The sexual theory of psychic automatisms is an untenable prejudice.* [that's their beef, yes?] The very fact that it is impossible to derive the whole mass from a single instinct forbids a one-sided definition of libido. I use this term in the general sense in which it was understood by the classical authors. [...] We can say, then, that the concept of libido in psychology has functionally the same significance as the concept of energy in physics since the time of Robert Mayer. (See my "On Psychic Energy,"** CW5, SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION [** in cgj CW8]

And with energy, we're back to ambivalence, back to Eros: the force that moves the sun and all the stars. Fascination is a psychopomp, mediator between mortal and immortal, the conscious and the unconscious. Is its movement not libido? It says that to me. I never felt Freud going all the way with this meaning. The Full Monty that encompasses all things. Freud pulled back from that. Fell off his chair. Jung wrote of Freud, and to a great extent it's applicable to the present:

The historical conditions which preceded Freud were such that they made a phenomenon like himself necessary, and it is precisely the fundamental tenet of his teaching-namely, the repression of sexuality-that is most clearly conditioned in this historical sense. Like his greater contemporary Nietzsche, Freud stands at the end of the Victorian era, which was never given such an appropriate name on the Continent despite the fact that it was just as characteristic of the Germanic and Protestant countries as of the Anglo-Saxon. The Victorian era was an age of repression, of a convulsive attempt to keep anaemic ideals artificially alive in a framework of bourgeois respectability by con­stant moralizings. These ideals were the last offshoots of the col­lective religious ideas of the Middle Ages, and shortly before had been severely shaken by the French Enlightenment and the ensuing revolution. Hand in hand with this, ancient truths in the political field had become hollow and threatened to collapse. It was still too soon for the final overthrow, and consequently all through the nineteenth century frantic efforts were made to prevent the Christian Middle Ages from disappearing altogether. Political revolutions were stamped out, experiments in moral freedom were thwarted by middle-class public opinion, and the critical philosophy of the late eighteenth century reached its end in a renewed, systematic attempt to capture the world in a unified network of thought on the medieval model. But in the course of the nineteenth century enlightenment slowly broke through, particularly in the form of scientific materialism and rationalism. This is the matrix out of which Freud grew, and its mental characteristics have shaped him along foreordained lines. He has a passion for explaining everything rationally, exactly as in the eighteenth century; one of his favourite maxims is Voltaire's "Ecrasez l'infame." With a certain satisfaction he invariably points out the flaw in the crystal; all complex psychic phenom­ena like art, philosophy, and religion fall under his suspicion and appear as "nothing but" repressions of the sexual instinct. Sigmund Freud in his Historical Setting CGJUNG CW 15

Libido: Jung vs Freud

left: Rossetti's St. Cecilia

I don't mean to be invidious--but Purgation: Is that not a centerpiece of Freudian theory? A closed system of forces/energies playing off one another. It always seemed so mechanical, venting and repressing. What is its relationship to eternity, to our experience and intuition of the mystery we came out of -- and go back into? I don't feel it. Jung seems a living system, the unconscious a creative matrix, not a receptacle of repressed content. It is that from which we develop. Libido as something akin to Eros is a reading readily compatible with Jung. Jung writes:

"...the term "libido," introduced by Freud, is not without a sexual connotation, an exclusively sexual definition of this concept is one sided and must therefore be rejected. Appetite and compulsion are the specific features of all impulses and automatisms. No more than sexual metaphors of common speech can the corresponding analogies in instinctual processes, and the symptoms and dreams to which they give rise, be taken literally. *The sexual theory of psychic automatisms is an untenable prejudice.* [that's their beef, yes?] The very fact that it is impossible to derive the whole mass from a single instinct forbids a one-sided definition of libido. I use this term in the general sense in which it was understood by the classical authors. [...] We can say, then, that the concept of libido in psychology has functionally the same significance as the concept of energy in physics since the time of Robert Mayer. (See my "On Psychic Energy,"** CW5, SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION [** in cgj CW8]

And with energy, we're back to ambivalence, back to Eros: the force that moves the sun and all the stars. Fascination is a psychopomp, mediator between mortal and immortal, the conscious and the unconscious. Is its movement not libido? It says that to me. I never felt Freud going all the way with this meaning. The Full Monty that encompasses all things. Freud pulled back from that. Fell off his chair. Jung wrote of Freud, and to a great extent it's applicable to the present:

The historical conditions which preceded Freud were such that they made a phenomenon like himself necessary, and it is precisely the fundamental tenet of his teaching-namely, the repression of sexuality-that is most clearly conditioned in this historical sense. Like his greater contemporary Nietzsche, Freud stands at the end of the Victorian era, which was never given such an appropriate name on the Continent despite the fact that it was just as characteristic of the Germanic and Protestant countries as of the Anglo-Saxon. The Victorian era was an age of repression, of a convulsive attempt to keep anaemic ideals artificially alive in a framework of bourgeois respectability by con­stant moralizings. These ideals were the last offshoots of the col­lective religious ideas of the Middle Ages, and shortly before had been severely shaken by the French Enlightenment and the ensuing revolution. Hand in hand with this, ancient truths in the political field had become hollow and threatened to collapse. It was still too soon for the final overthrow, and consequently all through the nineteenth century frantic efforts were made to prevent the Christian Middle Ages from disappearing altogether. Political revolutions were stamped out, experiments in moral freedom were thwarted by middle-class public opinion, and the critical philosophy of the late eighteenth century reached its end in a renewed, systematic attempt to capture the world in a unified network of thought on the medieval model. But in the course of the nineteenth century enlightenment slowly broke through, particularly in the form of scientific materialism and rationalism. This is the matrix out of which Freud grew, and its mental characteristics have shaped him along foreordained lines. He has a passion for explaining everything rationally, exactly as in the eighteenth century; one of his favourite maxims is Voltaire's "Ecrasez l'infame." With a certain satisfaction he invariably points out the flaw in the crystal; all complex psychic phenom­ena like art, philosophy, and religion fall under his suspicion and appear as "nothing but" repressions of the sexual instinct. Sigmund Freud in his Historical Setting CGJUNG CW 15

none of that cross-breeding, intergalactic sex, thank you!

 'We expect this sort of thing from trashy U.S. imports but not a well-respected series like Doctor Who.' ~via that bastion of moral clarity, the daily mail.

Oh, Dr! The infinite vision and experience, the pain you carry. That miraculous regenerating flesh. And now this out of wedlock, un-church-sanctified threat of carnal passion.

Dr. Who is for kids like Harry Potter is for kids. Dr. Who fills our need to envision, charting a direction large enough to fit what we know (and suspect) about the cosmos. Sci-fi, like the old religions, the old gods, is like the Tardis, a vehicle to project yourself far enough from the mundane to glimpse both your inner and outer states -- the total psyche -- and the binding, unquestioned parameters of your culture's hold on those states.

You think kids don't have sexual feelings? At five, I was totally in love with Robin Hood (the one with the BBC accent: Richard Greene, The Adventures of Robin Hood. Wow -- did you know Lindsay Anderson directed some of those?). I think I also had a thing for the Sheiff of Nottingham. He was just so evil and had that demonic little beard. But I didn't know the facts of life, the old in-out, not growing up on a farm. But still -- the feelings. The passion and attraction.

I remember being very shocked by it all when I learned about sex. It's so preposterous, and, unless you're actually experiencing the moment, seems to have very little to do with the feelings that caught you up into that act in the first place. Which is why porn and even so many sex scenes in adult movies fail to attract or intrigue me. It's like eating, really. I'm not interested in watching it. Some things are simply not spectator sports. (And if sex is -- what? -- 80% visual as they say it is for men, is not watching porn 80% infidelity?) (Oh, lusting in his heart.) (Kidding!) It's more romantic to have Dr. Who un-entangled: I know he's a passionate being, body and mind. A Time Lord! What an aphrodisiac. He doesn't need anything more than what he simply is. It just breaks the spell. Makes him -- human. Mundane.

(Of course I love the scene, what they did, River Song, all of it.)

Yet, I do love the Greek god statues, those Leda and Swan paintings... But you see, we don't identify with the gods. They embody things beyond our reach. They are awe.

And love is also awe.

On Netflix, I read the reactions to "An Education". It's a marvelous film that understands all I'm trying to get at here: grappling with mysteries, the forces that make life and move the sun and all the stars, how easy it is to lose oneself. Thank the gods Jenny doesn't. Thank Jenny, saved by her own wisdom: her ability to learn. She's far too whole to be cut in pieces, which is what we do with sex. Hell, we sell cars with it, cut it away from Being. But reading the Netflix responses, how many write that they were creeped out by a 30 year-old man seducing a 16 year-old girl -- so creeped out that they missed the point of the film. It's symptomatic of our sexual dysfunction, the way we've divorced body and soul. Romance is eros centered, and we've lost reverence for the eros. And Eros is life itself, life as it moves and lives.

Ah, Jenny. How we love you. How we love our Doctors. As for carnality, it was 1885, an eye-blink ago, that the age of consent was raised in England from 12 to 16, and it took a good long jolly fight to get that passed by Parliament.

I trust adults will grow up at some point. Hollywood is looking for actors who have real, non-silicone bodies. Reality centered bodies. A place where we can fully dwell, where we can travel the cosmos, defy time and space, plant our feet, dance, and get -- educated.

Blessed are the arts.

---

extra credit: STEPHEN HAWKING:TIME LORD

none of that cross-breeding, intergalactic sex, thank you!

 'We expect this sort of thing from trashy U.S. imports but not a well-respected series like Doctor Who.' ~via that bastion of moral clarity, the daily mail.

Oh, Dr! The infinite vision and experience, the pain you carry. That miraculous regenerating flesh. And now this out of wedlock, un-church-sanctified threat of carnal passion.

Dr. Who is for kids like Harry Potter is for kids. Dr. Who fills our need to envision, charting a direction large enough to fit what we know (and suspect) about the cosmos. Sci-fi, like the old religions, the old gods, is like the Tardis, a vehicle to project yourself far enough from the mundane to glimpse both your inner and outer states -- the total psyche -- and the binding, unquestioned parameters of your culture's hold on those states.

You think kids don't have sexual feelings? At five, I was totally in love with Robin Hood (the one with the BBC accent: Richard Greene, The Adventures of Robin Hood. Wow -- did you know Lindsay Anderson directed some of those?). I think I also had a thing for the Sheiff of Nottingham. He was just so evil and had that demonic little beard. But I didn't know the facts of life, the old in-out, not growing up on a farm. But still -- the feelings. The passion and attraction.

I remember being very shocked by it all when I learned about sex. It's so preposterous, and, unless you're actually experiencing the moment, seems to have very little to do with the feelings that caught you up into that act in the first place. Which is why porn and even so many sex scenes in adult movies fail to attract or intrigue me. It's like eating, really. I'm not interested in watching it. Some things are simply not spectator sports. (And if sex is -- what? -- 80% visual as they say it is for men, is not watching porn 80% infidelity?) (Oh, lusting in his heart.) (Kidding!) It's more romantic to have Dr. Who un-entangled: I know he's a passionate being, body and mind. A Time Lord! What an aphrodisiac. He doesn't need anything more than what he simply is. It just breaks the spell. Makes him -- human. Mundane.

(Of course I love the scene, what they did, River Song, all of it.)

Yet, I do love the Greek god statues, those Leda and Swan paintings... But you see, we don't identify with the gods. They embody things beyond our reach. They are awe.

And love is also awe.

On Netflix, I read the reactions to "An Education". It's a marvelous film that understands all I'm trying to get at here: grappling with mysteries, the forces that make life and move the sun and all the stars, how easy it is to lose oneself. Thank the gods Jenny doesn't. Thank Jenny, saved by her own wisdom: her ability to learn. She's far too whole to be cut in pieces, which is what we do with sex. Hell, we sell cars with it, cut it away from Being. But reading the Netflix responses, how many write that they were creeped out by a 30 year-old man seducing a 16 year-old girl -- so creeped out that they missed the point of the film. It's symptomatic of our sexual dysfunction, the way we've divorced body and soul. Romance is eros centered, and we've lost reverence for the eros. And Eros is life itself, life as it moves and lives.

Ah, Jenny. How we love you. How we love our Doctors. As for carnality, it was 1885, an eye-blink ago, that the age of consent was raised in England from 12 to 16, and it took a good long jolly fight to get that passed by Parliament.

I trust adults will grow up at some point. Hollywood is looking for actors who have real, non-silicone bodies. Reality centered bodies. A place where we can fully dwell, where we can travel the cosmos, defy time and space, plant our feet, dance, and get -- educated.

Blessed are the arts.

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extra credit: STEPHEN HAWKING:TIME LORD