Aug 13

Life Energy

energyFreud came up with the term libido to describe the sum of all the human instincts related to love.

In his view, there was a limited amount of this libidinal energy and it was important to use it wisely. Invest it in the wrong activities and you could end up with nothing to show for it. This notion of limits and scarcity seems to suffuse Freud’s thinking and could perhaps reflect a somewhat depressive aspect of his personal character.

Later, Carl Jung expanded the meaning of the term to encompass not just love and sex, he felt that libidinal energy was really life energy.

I have been thinking about life energy for a while. Noticing how there are some people who seem to overflow with it, how it crests when people are manic and falls when people are depressed, but also how illness and aging affect it.

I met with an older attorney this afternoon. He’s a delightful widower who recently returned to world of dating. One of the challenges that he has had to face is the reduction in his capacity for sex. This is a very important issue, pleasure and libido has always been important to him.



Another interesting relationship is between exercise and life energy.

Recently, the New York Times ran an article highlighting new research that shows how exercise radically affects how our genes are transcribed. This provides a biological explanation for the long noticed fact that continued exercise, or physical activity, is one of the most important predictors of healthy aging. Physical exercise is, in fact, a better way of preventing brain atrophy than doing puzzles or challenging the brain in other ways.




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