Narcissism

In the Psychology of the Unconscious, a book which was to be momentous in its influence upon the relationships between Freud and Jung, the latter extended the idea of the libido far beyond the domain of the sexual. When he did so, Jung believed that Freud himself, in a work published in 1911, ¹ had amplified the concept of libido that had been expounded some years earlier in the Drei Abhandlungen. Through the instrumentality of Ferenczi, Freud definitely repudiated this allegation. Freud followed up the statement in person a year later. The vehemence of Ferenczi's repudiation is all the more remarkable, seeing that the Hungarian analyst pauses in the midst of his animadversions upon Jung to remark that he himself, before Jung, had wanted to expand the concept of the libido. Freud, he said, had been opposed to the notion, and he (Ferenczi), as a good disciple, had complied. In my own book, Alles um Liebe, I deduced the origin of civilisation from a concept of the libido which, for my then purposes, it was not necessary to desexualise. I treated of the libido as sexual, although to outward appearance it might assume other forms. I am, in fact, of opinion that the monism which both Jung and I have introduced into the conception of human impulses is plainly manifest in Freud's first formulation of 1905. Inasmuch as Freud substantially admits this to-day, we must interpret his opposition to Ferenczi and Jung in their attempts to enlarge the concept of the libido as meaning nothing more than this: “Let me alone. I shall myself expand the concept of the libido when the time is ripe!”