Page:Psychology of the Unconscious (1916).djvu/207

 *cation for the libido. The last sphere of application, and surpassing all the others in its functional significance, is sexuality, which seems at first almost bound up with the function of nutrition. (Compare with this the influence on procreation of the conditions of nutrition in lower animals and plants.) In the territory of sexuality, the libido wins that formation, the enormous importance of which has justified us in the use of the term libido in general. Here the libido appears very properly as an impulse of procreation, and almost in the form of an undifferentiated sexual primal libido, as an energy of growth, which clearly forces the individual towards division, budding, etc. (The clearest distinction between the two forms of libido is to be found among those animals in whom the stage of nutrition is separated from the sexual stage by a chrysalis stage.)

From that sexual primal libido which produced millions of eggs and seeds from one small creature derivatives have been developed with the great limitation of the fecundity; derivatives in which the functions are maintained by a special differentiated libido. This differentiated libido is henceforth desexualized because it is dissociated from its original function of egg and sperma production; nor is there any possibility of restoring it to its original function. Thus, in general, the process of development consists in an increasing transformation of the primal libido which only produced products of generation to the secondary functions of allurement and protection of the young. This now presupposes a very different and very complicated relation to reality, a true