as a whole is not satisfied in any of its present objects, because the self already knows 'subconsciously' what it wants.
(e) Further suggestions for its description are found in the work of Jung and of Putnam. The concept of a "necessary wish or desire" defined.
Whatever may be needed to complete the psychological concept of a selective principle, it is an important step in advance to have recognized, as Royce has done, the existence of such a thing as a general instinct, and to have proposed for it an elemental organic basis. What is required is a native tendency which is determined, not by the specific disposition of this or that nervous path, but by the form of metabolism of the nervous processes everywhere. It would be such a tendency that we could say, "To be alive is to wish thus and thus." Such a desire could be regarded as a necessary desire.
I have already mentioned that in the school of Freud, and especially in the work of C. G. Jung, there has been a tendency to recognize genetic relations among instincts, and finally to set up the hypothesis of an Ur-instinct from which all others are derived by differentiation. This is a result of the simple consider- ation that 'sublimation' implies a constant which undergoes transformation; and how far back one pursues the constant depends on how far one recognizes the scope of sublimation. For Freud the notion of 'libido' represents the constant of a group of allotropic sex-tendencies and their sublimations. For Jung, 'libido' loses its sexual character altogether and becomes as nearly as possible craving in general. "From the descriptive standpoint, psychoanalysis accepts the multiplicity of instincts. From the genetic standpoint it is otherwise. It regards the multiplicity of instincts as issuing out of relative unity, the primitive libido. It recognizes that definite quantities of the primitive libido are split off, associated with the recently created functions, and finally merged with them."[1] Jung himself draws the parallel between the introduction of this generalized concept of 'libido' and R. Mayer's introduction into dynamics of the modern concept of energy. "We term libido that energy which manifests itself
- ↑ Theory of Psychoanalysis, p. 42.
