The Libido

[swimstud]

My psychology teacher was teaching us about a term called the libido. He said it is an internal energy that needs to continuously be released. He said that masturbation is the best way to release this energy and stay mentally healthy. When I told him about the Catholic church not allowing masturbation he said couldn’t understand why such an organization would force it’s members to deny themselves something that is healthy for the body. Does anybody know about the libido and if what my teacher is saying has any truth?

 

[BibleReader]

swimstud:

My psychology teacher was teaching us about a term called the libido. He said it is an internal energy that needs to continuously be released. He said that masturbation is the best way to release this energy and stay mentally healthy. When I told him about the Catholic church not allowing masturbation he said couldn’t understand why such an organization would force it’s members to deny themselves something that is healthy for the body. Does anybody know about the libido and if what my teacher is saying has any truth?

Your teacher is out of his mind.

Tell him to stop looking, and he’ll discover that he doesn’t have to masturbate or have sex to be happy. I used to call this kind of bizarre, self-justifying thinking “the Exploding Testicle Syndrome” – the belief that one’s testicles will explode if they don’t have an outlet.

 

[Strider]

The libido is the sex drive. It is from God and, when used for unity and procreation in a scramental marriage between a man and a woman it is a very good thing.
Masturbation is a perversion of the God-given sex drive. Self-pleasure is sinful not only because it cannot, by definition, procreate, but because it elevates the self, which is counter to Catholic teaching.
CCC # 2352 addresses masturbation. “Both the Magesterium of the Church, in the course of a constant tradition, and the moral sense of the faithful have been in no doubt and have firmly maintained that masturbation is an intrinsically and gravely disordered action.”
You might want to read the whole thing. There’s more.
It sounds like your psychology teacher approaches things from a secular point of view. I would not listen to him in areas of morals or morality.
If you don’t have a Catechism of the Catholic Church, buy one. Then you can check out the Church’s teaching on your own.

 

[masterjedi747]

swimstud:

My psychology teacher was teaching us about a term called the libido. He said it is an internal energy that needs to continuously be released. Does anybody know about the libido and if what my teacher is saying has any truth?

Your psychology teacher is definitely out of his mind.

No, but seriously…No. There’s essentially no truth to that idea whatsoever. It treats human beings as if they were unintelligent irrational animals incapable of self-control, sexual or otherwise. It’s part of this whole big idea that just because we desire it, therefore it must be good. And that’s not true. Original Sin has brought disorder into the original harmony of God’s Creation. Our Intellect has been clouded by Original Sin, and we now have Concupiscience – the unnatural tendancy towards sin. Just because we want the sin doesn’t mean that it’s suddenly OK to do. Let me see if this explanation helps you out at all:

We are human beings, composed of both body and soul. Neither one is meant to be separated from the other – death is an unnatural state of existence for us that was brought into the world by sin. There are three portions of the human soul that we have to consider: the Intellect, the Will, and the Passions. Before the fall of mankind, all three worked together in the perfect harmony that God had originally intended for them: the Intellect recognizes the good, the Will chooses it because it is good, and the Passions rejoice in that good choice. But after the fall, sin (a disordering of goods) entered into the world, and the original harmony of God’s creation was destroyed. We no longer have a pure intellect, because it is clouded by the effects of original sin, and our control over the Passions has been tremendously reduced. Now we see people who do things in the exact opposite order of how they are suppsed to do them: they allow their Passions to decide what they feel is right, use the Will to choose what the Passions desire, and their Intellect just gets dragged along in the process, hopelessly trying to justify the actions which are being imposed upon it. And then when they see that they cannot justify it, when logic tells them that it really was the wrong thing to do, they simply build up a wall around themselves in order to ignore reality and justify what they want to do. This is what is wrong. We have to learn self-control to master our Passions, and then use our Will to choose what our (correctly formed) Intellect tells us is the right thing to do. There is absolutely nothing wrong with sexual urges, but it is wrong to act upon them simply because we feel like we want to.

 

[Fergal]

Well now they always said masturbation caused blindness!

May not cause physical blindness but it certainly causes extreme spiritual blindness.

We have the proof from this psychology teacher!!

 

[Steve_Andersen]

The libido is just another word for the sex drive
There is no mysterious “internal energy” what ever that means

Some people have more than others and it varies with age, health, circumstances, and a host of other factors
And like every other physical need people choose to address it in different ways

Your teacher may have been thinking of the old joke:
There are two types of people who claim that they don’t masturbate
liars & psychopaths

 

[felra]

swimstud:

My psychology teacher was teaching us about a term called the libido. He said it is an internal energy that needs to continuously be released. He said that masturbation is the best way to release this energy and stay mentally healthy. When I told him about the Catholic church not allowing masturbation he said couldn’t understand why such an organization would force it’s members to deny themselves something that is healthy for the body. Does anybody know about the libido and if what my teacher is saying has any truth?

The next lecture, I would tell him that this “internal energy” concept is still unclear and that you are skeptical regarding his prescription for how to “best release this energy and stay mentally healthy”; but, being in academia, you will keep an open mind if he would be willing to live demonstrate for the class this whole mind-body psychic energy release dynamic.

Let us know how it went.

 

[fix]

But perhaps the most penetrating description of the habit of masturbation is in a letter of C.S. Lewis, quoted by Leanne Payne in *The Broken Image: *"For me the real evil of masturbation would be that it takes an appetite which, in lawful use, leads the individual out of himself to complete (and correct) his own personality in that of another (and finally in children and even grandchildren) and turns it back, sends it back into the prison of himself, there to keep a harem of imaginary brides. And this harem, once admitted, works against his ever getting out and really uniting with a real woman. For the harem is always accessible, always subservient, calls for no sacrifices or adjustments, and can be endowed with erotic and psychological attractions which no real woman can rival . "3 This quotation can be applied to women as well as men, expressing the meaning of masturbation as a personal flight from reality into the prison of lust.

couragerc.net/pastoral_problem_of_masturbation.htm

 

[demolitionman65]

Your psych teacher is insane. He needs to consult the DSM-IV about the difference between fantasy and reality.

I teach** psychology, and there is nothing in any training or materials I teach from that suggest anything like this.

 

[K777angel]

As Father John Corapi once said, “Many today have been educated into imbicility!”

Your psychology teacher is one of them.

(And I suspect he likely has a ‘personal’ motivation behind his claims.)

 

[jlw]

This was a discussion in a psychology class??? abs-a-lutely-freakin’-rediculous.

 

[Timidity]

swimstud:

When I told him about the Catholic church not allowing masturbation he said couldn’t understand why such an organization would force it’s members to deny themselves something that is healthy for the body.

Actually, to correct the two of you… The Church doesn’t forbid masturbation; God does.

 

[swimstud]

demolitionman65:

Your psych teacher is insane. He needs to consult the DSM-IV about the difference between fantasy and reality.

I teach** psychology, and there is nothing in any training or materials I teach from that suggest anything like this.

The libido is in our textbook. We use Psychology and you by West Educational Publishing. This is what it had to say: "Freud’s theory emphasizes an interaction between conscious and unconscious forces. Freud developed his theory during a time of great scientific discovery in the fields of chemistry and physics about electricity, magnetism, and energy forces. He absorbed some of these ideas and assumed that the human had *real *(biological, not symbolic) energy inside, which controlled behavior. This energy he called the libido. The libidinal energy constantly seeks some kind of discharge, just as lightning discharges into the ground when it finds a high tree. In the process of seeking discharge, this energy creates tension. If the tension is not released in real life, the desire appears as dreams or fantasies. An attempt at release can also appear as psychological disturbance.

My teacher then talked about how masturbation was the perfect solution to the libido problem. I don’t know if that was in his teacher training or if he thought it up himself.

 

[felra]

swimstud:

The libido is in our textbook. We use Psychology and you by West Educational Publishing. This is what it had to say: "Freud’s theory emphasizes an interaction between conscious and unconscious forces. Freud developed his theory during a time of great scientific discovery in the fields of chemistry and physics about electricity, magnetism, and energy forces. He absorbed some of these ideas and assumed that the human had *real *(biological, not symbolic) energy inside, which controlled behavior. This energy he called the libido. The libidinal energy constantly seeks some kind of discharge, just as lightning discharges into the ground when it finds a high tree. In the process of seeking discharge, this energy creates tension. If the tension is not released in real life, the desire appears as dreams or fantasies. An attempt at release can also appear as psychological disturbance.

My teacher then talked about how masturbation was the perfect solution to the libido problem. I don’t know if that was in his teacher training or if he thought it up himself.

Your woefully inadequate teacher is lacking an appreciation that man is more than a cesspool of basic psychological motives of either sexuality or aggression. This is Freud’s outdated (and today largely dismissed) basis of his psychoanalytic theory that saw man in pathological terms. I would instruct your teacher that God created man as a rationale creature, with the ability to control and manage his lower desires and drives in a way that results in greater self-mastery (exercise of the superego over the id desires) and subsequently greater virtue (versus vice).

If anything, your teacher is prescribing as remedy to lack of self-control (as he revealingly refers to as the “libido problem”) Freud’s term fixation, which refersto the continued use of pleasure-seeking or anxiety reducing behaviors appropriate to an earlier stage of development.

 

[exoflare]

This just came to mind.

(1 Peter 4:4)
They are surprised that you do not plunge into the same swamp of profligacy, and they vilify you.

What a joke these lame excuses are… if you can’t stop a bad habit, just label it “healthy.” If anything, the only evidence points toward masturbation actually contributing toward possible sexual disfunction.

 

[Corinthians]

exoflare:

If anything, the only evidence points toward masturbation actually contributing toward possible sexual disfunction.

Not that I disagree, but if I wanted to do research, where would I find this evidence?

 

[chevalier]

Masturbation if intended to stimulate yourself and have some fun is intrinsically disordered. It’s autoerotic **** that teaches you to treat your very own body as a sex object. A process in which you reduce yourself to a rubber doll.

It screws up the whole idea of sexuality in a person’s mind and teaches the body the wrong kind of responses. Next, it puts a heavy emphasis on the sensation itself, in all actuality a genital sensation without a shred of emotional experience (which is even sometimes present in well-meant but misguided acts of fornicatio), let alone anything close to altruistic self-giving.

In terms of bonding people or prolonging the species, it’s a vain act. Therefore, in the natural order of things, there’s no place for having fun with your hand.

The other kind of masturbation is doing it to release the tension. Some people can’t or don’t want to live with the tension and so they masturbate to release it, which is a process not intended for sexual pleasure per se, and they neither want to nor do experience pleasure during it. It’s difficult to address. I think it’s better to leave it to nature, let nature do away with it in its own course and stay away from doing things which lead to accumulating so much tension.

Again, I’m not a theologist, nor a sexuologist, so I may be wrong on things.