Libido

The term libido comes from the Latin word libere, meaning "to please." Libido refers generally to desire or lust, or as a psychoanalytic term, to the drive or force that directs sexual instincts toward an object. Contemporary slang terms for libido would include such words and phrases as "horny" or "hot for."

The concept of a libido came from the ideas of nineteenth-century dynamic psychotherapy, which asserted that mental diseases were the effects of a balanced mental economy gone wrong. These doctors were interested in female hysteria, used hypnosis and rapport with the patient as modes of treatment, thought that individuals were comprised of conscious and unconscious minds as well as clusters of sub-personalities, and believed that nervous disorders were partly caused by the activities of a fluid force that existed within us all. This "fluid force" is the basis for the concept of the libido as a sexual desire and instinct that develops and differentiates through human development. Neurologist Moritz Benedikt (1835–1920) used the term libido to characterize one of the causes of female hysteria, a nervous disorder in which women displayed nervous ticks and general discontent and malaise. Others, including Richard von Krafft-Ebing, used the term to refer to desire, though biologist Albert Moll endowed the term with the broader meaning of a sexual instinct as that has developed through evolution.

Sigmund Freud, who incorporated the idea of libido into his understanding of the psychical system, adapted the concept of the libido from Moll's broader, more evolutionary version. Moll's concept itself came from a long line of thinkers beginning with Plato, who believed that humans had a sexual instinct that compelled them towards sexual activity. Like Plato, Freud believed that individuals were originally bisexual and that often the sexual instinct, or libido, was sublimated or ignored in favor of a higher purpose. Freud thought the libido was masculine in character. Freud also adopted Moll's idea that the libido went through stages of development, beginning as the asexual impulses of infancy in the form of an undifferentiated force in which anything can be an object, working through a bisexual stage, and evolving finally into a differentiated force which takes the other gender as its object. After Freud, Carl Gustav Jung extended the meaning of libido to include all life forces.

Freud developed his ideas about the relation between libido and psychosexual development in his 1905 study, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. The first essay of this collection treats sexual deviations, seeing all sexual behavior as arising from the basic bisexual disposition of all human beings. For Freud there was not a large distinction between a "normal" or heterosexual aim and such "perverse" aims as homosexuality or fetishistic behaviors, since they all derive from the same sexual predisposition. In all varieties of sexuality, libido is at least partially repressed and redirected, and also persists throughout life in its undifferentiated, infantile form.

In Freud's second essay, he explores the phenomenon of infantile sexuality, in which various "zones" become the object of the libido. In the autoerotic phase, any body part can be an erogenous zone, although attention tends to focus on the mouth. This constitutes what Freud calls the oral phase. During the second phase, the anus becomes the primary zone for libidinal attention (the anal phase), and in the third phase, the genitals become the focus (the genital phase). During all of these phases the libido fixes only on what Freud calls "partial" objects.

In the third essay, Freud traces what he believes are transformations in the object of the libido that occur at puberty. Individuals move from the autoeroticism and partial objects of infantile sexuality to sexual objects of the opposite sex with reproduction as the end result. This development joins libido with the sexual instinct to reproduce seen as a biological force. Freud thought that the libido was masculine for both men and women and throughout the psychic and sexual development of both. In addition, males can accomplish the transition to mature reproductive heterosexuality more easily than females, since for both males and females, the mother is the first libidinal object outside of themselves. Males, thus, can simply transfer sexual instincts to another woman, while females must alter the gender of their objects of desire. For Freud, this partly accounts for why women are more likely to become hysterics, as their libidos can more easily become misdirected or repressed.

In Freud's later work, the concept of the libido developed into a larger instinct Freud called "the sexual instinct," or "eros": In his 1922 work Beyond the Pleasure Principle, he describes this instinct as the desire to come back together with a long lost other half. This sexual instinct works in relation to both the desire to stop and be quiescent (the pleasure principle) and the instinct to die, which Freud called the Death Instinct, seeking the pleasure of the release of sexual tensions and perpetuating the libido. In this context, libido constitutes the "first instance of force of sexual instincts directed towards an object" ("A Short Account of Psychoanalysis," 1924). The force towards an object was then joined by another libidinal urge towards one's own ego. The combination of forces produces a complex interaction that accounts for many processes of mental life.

Although libido is primarily a psychoanalytic term derived from a long tradition of explanations about life forces, it is also understood as the effect of hormones in the body. Libido understood as sexual desire is the effect of a combination of testosterone and dopamine. Both males and females produce testosterone and dopamine, although males produce far more testosterone than females. Libido may also be stimulated or depressed emotionally. Libido may be inhibited by certain medical conditions such as heart conditions and diabetes or by such drugs as antidepressants or barbiturates.

There is an entire industry of remedies for stimulating the libido, particularly the libidos of women. A range of herbal formulations promise to increase libido and enhance women's sex lives. The only accepted medical pharmaceutical treatment is estrogen replacement therapy. For males, stimulating the libido seems to be less of a problem than sustaining an erection, for which there are also a number of pharmaceutical cures, including Viagra.

see also Foreplay.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ellenberger, Henri F. 1970. The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry. New York: Basic Books.

Freud, Sigmund. 1905. "Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality." Vol. 7 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 125-246. London: Hogarth.

Freud, Sigmund. 1920. "Beyond the Pleasure Principle." In Vol. 18 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 7-64. London: Hogarth.

                                                      Judith Roof