Concept
Libido
The energy of the sexual drive, which Freud treated as a quantity that can be invested in objects or in the ego, displaced, dammed up, fixated and transformed. In Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie (1905) it passes through a series of organisations from early childhood on; in Zur Einführung des Narzißmus (1914) Freud distinguished ego-libido from object-libido; after 1920 he placed it within Eros, the life drives. Jung widened the term to mean psychic energy in general, a step Freud rejected.
- Broader concept
- Drive
- Introduced by
- Sigmund Freud
- Key works
- 2
introduced by
- Sigmund Freud 1905 The word was in use among sexologists, and Freud had used it in his papers on anxiety neurosis in the 1890s; the Three Essays make it the psychoanalytic name for the energy of the sexual drive, which the 1915 section on the libido theory and the 1914 paper on narcissism divide into ego-libido and object-libido.