Freud and Jung Theories of Sexuality and Narcissism

Freud introduced the concept of an unconscious mind, which harbors strong ideas unacceptable to the conscious mind, leading to repression. Many repressed ideas are sexual, suggesting civilization relies on repressing sexual desires at a cost to happiness and mental health.

Normal development requires a child to overcome libidinal (sexual) attachment to the mother. For male children, this leads to antagonism toward the father, seen as a rival (Oedipal complex). Resolution affects the ability to form and maintain adult love relationships.
The Oedipal complex creates a conflict between sensuality and authority, resolved when sensuality yields to authority but associates sexual feelings with dominance and submission.

The task post-puberty is to unite sexual and affectionate feelings, which originate in infantile relationships with parents. Overcoming the Oedipal complex involves dissociating these two currents of feeling.
Adults may impose a dominance model on their love objects unless this association is overcome. Balanced sensuality exchanged between equal partners is Freud's ideal, but he found this uncommon.

Psychical impotence is when men with strong libidinous natures cannot perform sexually despite physical capability due to psychological complexes, such as unresolved incestuous fixations or distressing infantile impressions.
Psychoanalysis links psychical impotence to the failure to unite affectionate and sensual currents. This condition affects men with strong libidinous natures, preventing sexual acts despite physical capability and desire with specific individuals.
Physical impotence is not discussed in the context of these notes.

The affectionate current originates in early childhood, based on self-preservation instincts, directed towards family and caregivers. It includes contributions from sexual instincts, attaching to valuations made by ego-instincts.

At puberty, a "sensual" current emerges, directed toward sexual aims, and follows earlier paths, attaching to objects of the primary infantile choice with stronger libidinous quotas. This encounters the barrier against incest.

The incest barrier prompts efforts to find other, extraneous objects for real sexual life, modeled after infantile ones. It forces libido turned to incestuous objects to remain unconscious.

Psychical debasement of the sexual object serves as a protective measure against the disturbance caused by the incest taboo. Overvaluation is reserved for the incestuous object and its representatives, allowing sensuality to be freely expressed once debasement is achieved.

One must overcome respect for women and come to terms with the idea of incest with his mother or sister. Self-examination reveals the sexual act is seen as something degrading, originating from youth when satisfaction with an object outside the family was almost as prohibited as with an incestuous one.

The condition of forbiddenness in women’s erotic life is comparable to men’s need to debase their sexual object. Both are consequences of the long delay demanded by education between sexual maturity and sexual activity. Civilized women usually do not transgress the prohibition on sexual activity, intimately connecting prohibition and sexuality.

Women are often unable to undo the connection between sensual activity and the prohibition, proving psychically impotent (frigid) when such activity is allowed. This is why women try to keep legitimate relations secret for a while or why they can experience normal sensation only when prohibition is re-established by a secret love affair.