Libido and the Desire of Life
(03 This article is one of a series on Ayurvedic Psychology)
Freud’s references to libido have made the word part of the common language though its actual meaning is not very clear as most see it only as sex drive. Libido means ‘desire or lust’ in Latin. It comes from the Latin root LIB which means ‘pleasure, desire, longing, inclination’. In Latin, libīdō is connected to desire, passion, pleasure, sensuality, lust and wilfulness. It is often used to denote sexual urges/drives, but in psychology it represents mental energies and drives based on sexual instinct but not necessarily sexual themselves. It is the energy associated with the desires that come from the id (instinctual self).
The Sanskrit equivalent would be kāma which comes from the root KAM meaning to wish, desire, long for. Kāma means to wish, desire or long for, and can indicate love, affection, pleasure, enjoyment, sensuality, and sexuality. In the form of kāmāt, it means to do as one desires, or to do according to one’s own will, wilfully, and intentionally which relates to the Latin use of the term libido as wilful. This is similar to how Jung mentions that some early psychologists intended libido to mean ‘will’ or ‘tendency’. [i]
Both terms (libido and kāma), have come to primarily mean sexual desire in a general cultural use, which says something about that which the words point to and the general capacity to understand it. The personification of kāma is called the God of Desire or literally Desire-God (Kāmadeva) who is the equivalent to the Roman Cupid and Greek Eros. The fact that Cupid/Kāmadeva could shoot their arrows of love at you and you lose your mind to desire is indicative to how the individual may not feel in control of their own desire. Both terms have a deeper meaning that we can see by their association with an individual’s will being the acting out of one’s own desire. The Greek Eros was one of the primordial deities; Hesiod had him as the fourth to manifest and the pre-Socratic Parmenides had Eros as the first to come into existence.[ii]
In the Ṛgveda, the creation hymn (nāsadīya sūkta) says that in the beginning, desire (kāma) came upon the One, and that this desire was the first seed of mind (manas-reta).[iii] Retas refers to seed or semen, the discharge of seed/semen; so it can also be seen as desire (kāma) being the first divine seminal discharge/divine creative energy discharged to create the mind. The next verse goes on to say that sages looking in their hearts with wisdom are able to see the bond between beingness (sat) and the creation (asat). They are inferring that this primal desire is what is manifesting and bonding us to the world and that this desire which brought forth mind is available to be perceived by those who look within. The philosophy around this root desire is more deeply developed in later Vedic material, Āgamas and Tantras.
Desire (kāma) is associated with the quality of rajas, or constant movement. The mind by its own nature is created from rajas and is therefore in constant movement. This rajas moves the world forward. Desire/rajas generated the universe to manifest from the One, and in the same way, desire within the human being is the cause of our ātman/soul’s birth. This same desire moves the individual life forward, gives them goals and aspirations. Freud called this desire (kāma) as sexual instinct and saw it “in existence from the very beginning of the individual’s life, though at first it is assimilated to the other vital functions…” It seems he is referring to desire (kāma), and the sexual instinct doesn’t fit perfectly, so he rightly uses the correct Latin meaning of the term libido.
Freud clarifies that his concept of sexuality is not just physical sex but the energy of desire that moves life forward. Freud explained his theory of ‘sexuality’ on two levels. “In the first place sexuality is divorced from its too close connection with the genitals and is regarded as a more comprehensive bodily function, having pleasure as its goal and only secondarily coming to serve the ends of reproduction. In the second place the sexual impulses are regarded as including all those merely affectionate and friendly impulses to which usage applies the exceedingly ambiguous word ‘love’.” [iv] I believe the term ‘sexual instinct’ or ‘sexuality’ is too limited for what he is defining it as.
Freud was living in the time period where Darwinian evolution was the new discovery, and his thinking went along those lines to be scientific. He saw the need to reproduce generating the sexual instinct which he saw as the root desire from which other desires were socialized. He stated that “The manner in which the sexual instincts can thus be influenced and diverted enables them to be employed for cultural activities of every kind.” [v] Freud saw the sexual instincts as the root of desire that were diverted or transformed into the desire for other things. In the Vedic perspective, kāma is the root of the sexual instinct and it is often described using sexual analogies (as seen in the Vedic verse above), but it is qualitatively ‘desire’; a ‘wanting’ or ‘longing for’ that exists in all created beings, only one of which is the sexual instinct.
Important though, were Freud’s observations that issues with libido created issues in mental health. Freud stated that “…it further became clear that the localization of the point of fixation [in the course of development] is what determines the choice of neurosis, that is, the form in which the subsequent illness makes its appearance.” Freud had many theories about how the libido became pathological at different stages, many of which I do not agree with. But we can see that different types of pathology are created in the different stages of development, with either a lack of fulfilled desire or a wrong desire or trauma to the proper desire. The force of kāma is so strong within us, that the disturbance of its flow creates psychopathology.
[i] Carl Jung. 1989. Analytic Psychology: Notes of the Seminar given in 1925. Ed. William McQuire. Prinction: Princeton University Press. Quoted from http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/libido?s=t
[ii] Eros is understood in three phases: the ancient cosmologies as the fourth deity to manifest (after Chaos, Gaia, and Abyss), the Eros of the philosophers and mystery schools is the original principle who is associated with the Orphic Phanes/Protogonos, and then the later poets who indicate Eros as an erotic love deity similar to Cupid and describe him as the son of Aphrodite. In Plato’s Symposium, Eros is called the oldest of the gods. Greek details sourced primarily from http://www.theoi.com/Protogenos/Eros.html.
[iii] Ṛgveda X.129.4
[iv] Sigmund Freud, An Autobiographical Study, 64.
[v] Sigmund Freud. An Autobiographical Study, 66.
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