Page:Under a Starry Vault. Warburg, Jung and the Renaissance of Ancient Paganisms at the Beginning of the 20th Century.pdf/6

Manuela Pallotto Strickland, Under a Starry Vault and language and the libido, as Jung described it, is so deep that they basically sustain each other. From this point of view, each symbol, regardless its specific descriptive and occasional content, can be considered as a symbol of libido, in the same way that each myth is a libido myth, and before anything else they are both bound to tell the eternal story of such unquenchable, conflicting, ‘heroic’ longing and desiring.

Libido’s primal sexual energy is sublimated when its purpose is rejected, its movement impeded, its flow obstructed and consequently side-tracked onto surrogate non-sexual representations which, fashioned by means of analogies, metaphors, symbolisms, are effectively able to take over the role played by the original object of desire. At this level, the symbolical and mythical imagination that realizes the libidinal sublimations is mainly directed by libido itself, and according to Jung should not be understood as an individual, conscious activity. Rather, it heavily relies on those unconscious imaginative structures that he called archetypes or «primordial images» (Urbilde), functioning as fundamental symbolic frames, exclusively within which the sublimation of libido and any symbolic creation at all can occur. Jung considered the archetypes as ancestral forms carrying the memories of life itself. They are the «precipitate of the psychic functioning of the whole ancestral line; the accumulated experiences of organic life in general, a million times repeated and condensed into types». Such primordial images «can be conceived as a mnemic deposit, an imprint or engram (Semon), which has arisen through the condensation of countless processes of a similar kind». They are immemorially buried in what Jung called the «collective unconscious», from which man's eternal past, where the dead and their shadows have been piling up against each other in the darkness for millennia, still speaks to him through the language of dreams.

When not symbolically sublimated, libidinal energy flows back into the unconscious, and there accumulates dangerously. With similar words, Jung described the psychological condition that secularization introduced into the modern world by ridding the languages of the divine of any meaning, without then finding alternative symbolic and mythical forms for libidinal sublimination and transference. Modern rationalism, rid pag. 46 © Firenze University Press • Aisthesis • 2/2015 • www.fupress.com/aisthesis • ISSN 2035-8466