We could call sexuality the spokesman of the instincts,
Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche CW 8
The conflict between ethics and sex today is not just a collision between instinctuality and morality, but a struggle to give an instinct its rightful place in our lives, and to recognize in this instinct a power which seeks expression and evidently may not be trifled with, and therefore cannot be made to fit in with our well-meaning moral laws.
Sexuality is not mere instinctuality; it is an indisputably creative power that is not only the basic cause of our individual lives, but a very serious factor in our psychic life as well.
Today we know only too well the grave consequences that sexual disturbances can bring in their train.
We could call sexuality the spokesman of the instincts, which is why from the spiritual standpoint sex is the chief antagonist, not because sexual indulgence is in itself more immoral than excessive eating and drinking, avarice, tyranny, and other extravagances, but because the spirit senses in sexuality a counterpart equal and indeed akin to itself.
For just as the spirit would press sexuality, like every other instinct, into its service, so sexuality has an ancient claim upon the spirit, which it once—in procreation, pregnancy, birth, and childhood—contained within itself, and whose passion the spirit can never dispense with in its creations.
Where would the spirit be if it had no peer among the instincts to oppose it?
It would be nothing but an empty form.
A reasonable regard for the other instincts has become for us a self-evident necessity, but with sex it is different.
For us sex is still problematical, which means that on this point we have not reached a degree of consciousness that would enable us to do full justice to the instinct without appreciable moral injury.
Freud is not only a scientific investigator of sexuality, but also its champion; therefore, having regard to the great importance of the sexual problem, I recognize the moral justification of his concept of sexuality even though I cannot accept it scientifically. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 107
Carl Jung on Sexuality and Spirituality
“Man shall differentiate himself both from spirituality and sexuality.
He shall call spirituality mother, and set her between Heaven and earth.
He shall call sexuality Phallos, and set him between himself and earth.
For the mother and the Phallos are superhuman daimons that reveal the world of the Gods.
They affect us more than the Gods since they are closely akin to our essence.
If you do not differentiate yourselves from sexuality and from spirituality, and do not regard them as an essence both above and beyond you, you are delivered over to them as qualities of the Pleroma.
Spirituality and sexuality are not your qualities, not things you possess and encompass.
Rather, they possess and encompass you, since they are powerful daimons, manifestations of the Gods, and hence reach beyond you, existing in themselves.
No man has a spirituality unto himself or a sexuality unto himself Instead, he stands under the law of spirituality and of sexuality.
Therefore no one escapes these daimons.
You shall look upon them as daimons, and as a common task and danger, a common burden that life has laid upon you. Thus life, too, is for you a common task and danger, as are the Gods, and first and foremost terrible Abraxas.” ~Carl Jung; Red Book
The great problems of life—sexual1ty
Psychological Types (The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 6) (Bollingen Series XX)
“The great problems of life—sexuality, of course, among others—are always related to the primordial images of the collective unconscious.
These images are really balancing or compensating factors which correspond with the problems life presents in actuality.
This is not to be marveled at, since these images are deposits representing the accumulated experience of thousands of years of struggle for adaptation and existence.” ~Carl Jung, Psychological Types, 1923
