Instinct for the Other

This instinctual longing for an Other is there from the start. The infants instinctual
hunger is one and the same as desire for the mother. Just out of the womb the
infant mouth beings to suckle, calling for the Other. The mothers breast, an
archetypal image in the infants mind: of fulfillment, of union, of love: Hunger is
the alpha and omega-existence itself.
Later this instinct for the Other makes its first transformation. It takes a new
object of desire: the lover. Sexual longing emerges, as a longing for union.. The
sexual instinct, the desire for union, is the foundation of psychic life, deeply
entwined with our feelings, emotions, affects, with spiritual and material
interests. Instincts fundamentally lead us toward union with an Other. This is our
libidinal nature; We are libidinal beings.
(CW8, para. 238) This instinct to love, this desire for union, Eros, is so powerful
that the attempt has even been made to trace the whole of culture to these
combinations. Freud called it the life drive, seeing its psychic currents running
through the whole of humanity.
None can escape this longing, except insofar as the longing is transformed.
Sexuality, like hunger, undergoes a radical psychization. which makes it possible
for the originally purely instinctive energy to be diverted from its biological
application and turned into other channels.
Instincts, psychic in nature, "lead to the formation of structures or patterns which
may be regarded as determinants of human behavior." (CW8) each of us will be
transformed, shaped by the ways in which we respond to instinctual demands.
Instincts are the chief motivating forces of psychic events." (CW8) And this
transformation always take place in relationship to a drive from union. For the soul
seeks union, and if this deep teleological urge is met then the soul will continue its
course toward greater capacity to perceive dialectal tensions in places where
others perceive only opposition. With this the instincts may transform in ways that
are life-affirming, unity-forming permutations of the erotic drive (Santner,
2012). Such life-affirming permutations of the primal instincts can be seen in the
urge toward self-reflection, creativity, and spirituality, so much so that Carl Jung
speaks of as instinctive in psychic life. The sublation of such instincts requires a
healthy flow of instinctual energy, of the inner life force, of libido. Unfortunately,
our life-affirming, unity-forming instincts often become denatured,
fundamentally changing the flow of energy, often in dark ways.
Not only can the reactions to ordinary hunger vary widely, but the hunger itself
can be "denatured," and can even appear as something metaphorical. It is not
only that we use the word hunger in different senses, but in combination with
other factors hunger can assume the most varied forms. The originally simple and
unequivocal determinant can appear transformed into pure greed, or into many

aspects of boundless desire or insatiability, as for instance the lust for gain or
inordinate ambition. (CW8, para. 236)
Our desires are all to naturally to denatured. And in many ways they must
denature, for we simply cannot continue to suckle at our mothers breast. We
must learn to bite and chew, we must take substitutes. And it is not too rarely that
such desires become unwieldy, shifting form into greed, lust, ambition, and
insatiability. This denatured aspect of psychic life forms a primal opposition to
the natural flow of psychic energy (libido). Jung says it points to something far
deeper and more archaic, namely a primitive instinct. On this topic Jung referrers
to Goethes Faust (CW 18 para 759):
Image of Opposition- throng
Invoke not thus the well-known throng,
Which through the firmament diffused is faring,
And danger thousand-fold, our race to wrong.
In every quarter is preparing.
Image of Opposition- God and Devil
On an archetypal level we see this image in the opposition between God and the
Devil. The devil may "represent the sexual instinct in its denatured form:
Consequently at the Witches' Sabbath he appears in the form of a goat or horse."
The devil is an image of repressed animal instincts as represented
theriomorphically. Jung says:
"When the unconscious is resisted for too long, a wedge is violently driven
between instinct and the conscious mind." (CW8)
Repression of our innate drive toward love and union warps the instinct. They
becomes denatured. Jung calls such warps in psychic life a complex: "An instinct
which has undergone too much transformation, may take revenge in the form of
an autonomous complex" (CW8, here, Jung speaks of psychization)
Express in fantasy/ symptoms
Such warps express themselves in symptoms, fantasies. Split off from the
relational demands of instinctual life, the mind becomes plagued with fantasies.
We, as human being are fundamentally bound by our innate drives toward union,
toward relationally, and when this drive is thwarted, it threatens not only
destruction of the individual but destruction of the species.
..instinct is purposive. It works properly only under certain conditions, and as
soon as it gets out of tune with these conditions it threatens the destruction of the
species. (p. 86)
The Importance of the Mother Archetype.
Split off from the spiritual aims of our instinctual life (CW 8), the individual is

confronted with an emptiness, with inner sense of lack or even a void. Such
feeling of lack are represented in archetypal terms by the danger of being
devoured by the monster of the maternal abyss." (CW7) So much of our psychic
life is bound up with the Mother archetype. She is the womb we develop in. She
offers the breast we suckle from. Our most primal instincts is fundamentally
bound with the mother. All living souls, in some form or another seek union with
the mother. If this desire for union with the mother is too strong then we regress,
never coming into life. On the other hand if we repress this desire too much then
we loose touch with the depths, with out deepest desires for divine union.
Unfortunately, many will never feel this wondrous desire for divine union with the
Mother of All. It is too overwhelming, to all encompassing, creating a deadly fear.
Jung speaks of "the deadly fear of the instinctive, unconscious. One who fears
the deep waters of life, the wellsprings, will be continually cut off from life by the
continual shrinking back from reality. () Such an ability to hold a complex and
dialectal relation to the mother archetype forms the first threshold of spiritual
development. The capacity to fully integrate this spiritual task allows the soul the
capacity to sit in the emptiness, to touch upon the void. If this capacity to be in a
dialectal relationship with the archetypal mother is denatures or desouled then
the soul may be taken over by envy for the good, the plentiful, the all giving
breast of life. With this loss of soul the individual will lack a cavity for true unitive
creation. One can not unite with that which one is attacking. One cannot be
creative within a vessel which one has destroyed.
triadic integration
The second phase in the life of the soul is triadic integration. It is here that we
come into relationship with the archetypal God image. If the soul moves through
this phase correctly then the psychic will be capable of triadic internal relations:
the God image bringing forth light and energy and the mother form offering a
negative capability and ability to be present to the boundless, formers, deep
from which all creation arises.
Psychoanalysts note that this triadic capacity arisies in relationship to the early
parental couple. As we for the ability to feel both positive and negative feeling for
our parents. This process includes an ability to love both of our parents despite
the archetypal triadic conflicts represented, as commonly by the Oedipal myth. In
the Oedipus myth Oedipus marries his mother and kills his father. The desire to
regress back to infantile pleasures and take partake in a regressive incestuous
union with one of our parents representing an undeniable, an most often
unresolved, inner conflict in some individuals. This prohibition to regressive union
forms one of the fundamental moral mandates of psychic life.

Third phase- self refectiopn

Forth-creativve

Fifth- spiritual
These internal oppositions take place at the level of fantasy. They are internal
dramas, mythical fantasies. Presenting themselves as images or chains of ideas.
(CW8)

Jung says:

"Mythical fantasies... often have the character of connected episodes resembling

mythical dramas." (CW8)
Such mythic narritives attempt to address such internla conflicts and drams in
allegorical way. Myths offer causal explanations" as to our internal conflicts, fears, and
fantasies. Cultural myths and ideologies arise to placate such anxieties. Jung says:

We substitute reliable rules and modes of behavior for instinct & intuition; We split
from our instinctual foundations. (CW5)
. However, the growth of culture having brought with it so many restrictions of a
moral and a social nature, sexuality has been lent, temporarily at least, an excess
value comparable to that of water in a desert. (CW8)
... but [he could not stand] the arbitrary prohibitions of morality, which would curb the
creative spirit rising up from the depths." (CW8)

Jung was not the onluy

Zizek address this transformation of instinct as addressed in the work of Lacan:
It is the intervention of the Symbolic that derails, throws out of joint, the natural organism in its
balanced circuit, transforming natural instincts into a monstrous drive that can never be fully satisfied,
since it is condemned to the eternal undead returning to its path, insisting forever in an obscene
immortality. At other times, in a more speculative-mythical modes, he is searching for some kind of
natural excess or imbalance, a malfunctioning, monstrous derailment, and then he conceives the
symbolic Order as a secondary in(ter)vention destined to gentrify this monstrous excess, to resolve its
deadlock. Slavoj Zizek, The Fragile Absolute or Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For
(London: Verso, 2000), 91-92.

Culture rises up to quell such internal

Culture arises to placate such insatiable demands. In 1776, Adam Smith wrote: It
is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we can
expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. It is in the interest
of baker to make food to feed your hunger. It is in the interest of cooperations to
titillate the desires of consumers, to stoke demand. It is in the interest of the

federal reserve to assure that consumer spending is growing, that demand is

increasing. There will always be a plethora of objects to temporally meet our inner
hunger. But the problem with such a denatured hunger is that it arises again and
again.

Without instincts we would be too weak to wrench ourselves free from the past
and venture into a strange world of unforeseen possibilities. Jan 10, 2014

Soul and Instinct:

"The mother who [is fantasied to give] life and then takes it away again is the
terrible or devouring mother." #CG Jung. CW 5, para.396 Jan 09, 2014
"The father is the representative of the spirit, whose function it is to oppose pure
instinctuality." #CGJung CW5, para. 396 Jan 09, 2014
Hero:
The hero... "In him, instinct wars with instinct." #CGJung CW5, 447 Jan 10, 2014
"Anyone ... lets himself be devoured by the monster [abyss] and vanishes in it,
attains the treasure that the dragon guards." #CarlJung Jan 16, 2014
"Victory over the collective psyche alone yields the true value- the capture of the
hoard, the invincible weapon, the magic talisman,..." CJ Jan 16, 2014
"If a man is a hero, he is a hero because... he did not let the monster [abyss]
devour him, but subdued it, not once but many times." #Jung Jan 16, 2014
"The heroes.. expose themselves to the danger of being devoured by the monster
of the maternal abyss." #CarlJung CW7 Jan 16, 2014
But if the insticts are to reamin true, then it is always as seeking of union.

References:

Eric L. Santner, Toward a Science of the Flesh in The Royal Remains: The People's Two Bodies and
the Endgames of Sovereignty 2012