lust
The term ‘Lust System’ occupies a contested and multivalent position across the depth-psychology corpus. In its most technically precise deployment — Jaak Panksepp’s affective neuroscience — it designates a discrete, evolutionarily conserved neural substrate mediating sociosexual motivation, distinct from attachment or play circuits. Yet the broader library treats ‘lust’ as a phenomenon far exceeding any single system: Augustine’s theology renders it the paradigmatic instance of a will undermined by its own flesh, an unruly impulse that defies rational command and stands as both punishment for the Fall and evidence of original sin. Sorabji’s reconstruction of that Augustinian project reveals how lust became the test case for the entire debate between Stoic apatheia and Christian metriopatheia. Nietzsche revalues ‘lust for power’ as a generative, world-disclosing force. Hillman situates erotic lust within an archetypal economy of image and soul. The Philokalic and ascetic traditions — Climacus, Evagrius, Coniaris — treat lust as the second of the cardinal passions, intimately entangled with gluttony and vainglory. Freud’s German term Lust — designating simultaneously tension-pleasure and the impulse toward discharge — underscores the irreducible ambiguity at the concept’s heart. Across all these frameworks, lust marks the site where embodiment, will, affect, and moral agency most dramatically collide.
We are now on the verge of understanding the powerful feelings that control sexuality, but a great deal of affective neuroscience remains to be done before precise knowledge replaces credible hypotheses.
Panksepp situates the Lust System within evolutionary neuroscience as a discrete affective circuit governing sociosexual behavior, structured by sex-differentiated neuropeptide systems including vasopressin and oxytocin.
, Affective Neuroscience The Foundations of Human and Animal, 1998thesis
Lust 336–7, 353, 380–1, 384, 399, 400–17; Personal experience of lust 401; Lust disobedient to will was not cause of Fall, but a fit punishment for Man 336, 404, 406.
Sorabji’s index entry maps Augustine’s sustained argument that lust is categorically disobedient to the will, constituting a punishment for the Fall rather than its cause, and always exceeding metriopatheia.
, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation, 2000thesis
Augustine uses here and in many other places the word inordinata, to say that lust is something unruly. The power of music over lust is another manifestation of the failure of the will to command it.
Augustine’s characterization of lust as inordinata — structurally beyond the will’s governance — is demonstrated through the involuntary bodily response and the susceptibility of lust to musical manipulation.
, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation, 2000thesis
That lust (carnalis concupiscentia), whose movement attains the final pleasure which delights you so much, never arose in paradise except when it was necessary for procreating upon the approval (nutus) of the will.
Augustine, engaging the Pelagians, entertains the possibility that in paradise lust was wholly subject to the will, using this to anchor his doctrine that post-lapsarian lust represents a disordered condition.
, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation, 2000thesis
‘Lust’ has two meanings, and is used to describe the sensation of sexual tension (‘Ich habe Lust’ = ‘I should like to’, ‘I feel an impulse to’) as well as the feeling of satisfaction.
Freud’s philological note on the German Lust establishes that the term intrinsically conflates drive-tension and pleasure-satisfaction, a duality that grounds his entire account of erotogenic excitation.
, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 1905thesis
the male movements fail to occur when summoned by the will. A fortiori, when they do occur, they are not subject to the will.
Sorabji exposes Augustine’s a fortiori argument that the involuntary character of male sexual physiology is the empirical proof that lust operates independently of rational volition.
, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation, 2000thesis
Augustine notices the involuntary physical reactions in lust, but not in anger. Despite the other powerful reasons for Augustine to misinterpret the Stoics, I think the linguistic misunderstanding will have contributed.
Sorabji argues that Augustine’s selective focus on lust as the privileged example of involuntary emotion partly reflects linguistic misreading of Stoic first-movement theory via Aulus Gellius.
, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation, 2000supporting
Thoughts of lust and thoughts of vanity can be conjured up to defeat each other. The simplest remedy is to conjure up thoughts of lust, which are so humiliating as to defeat those of vanity.
Evagrius developed an anti-passion strategy in which lust and vanity are deployed therapeutically against one another, an innovation in the causal theory of the eight bad thoughts.
, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation, 2000supporting
All living men and women are afflicted with sexual lust as a continuing consequence of this original sin… sexual intercourse draws the mind from contemplation of God to which it should be devoted without interruption.
Alexander reads Augustine’s theological doctrine of universal lust as both a consequence of original sin and the paradigmatic distraction from God, framing it within an addiction-studies lens.
, The Globalisation of Addiction: A Study in Poverty of the Spirit, 2008supporting
The only remaining feature of lust, among those mentioned, which has no parallel in the sphere of eating is the universal desire for privacy.
Sorabji systematically compares Augustine’s phenomenology of lust with involuntary digestive processes, finding lust distinguished primarily by its universal demand for concealment.
, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation, 2000supporting
Augustine acknowledges that he still has sexual dreams, and he implies that in them he sometimes gives consent (adsensus, consentire, consensio).
Through Augustine’s Confessions, Sorabji traces the persistence of lust into dream-life as the final arena where will and consent remain ambiguously operative.
, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation, 2000supporting
lust is the mechanism, disagrees that it would make any difference if the lust could avoid being unruly: Summa Theologiae 1.2, q.82, a.4, ad3.
Sorabji notes Aquinas’s agreement that lust is the mechanism of original sin’s transmission while disagreeing with Augustine that unruliness is the decisive factor.
, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation, 2000supporting
lust, like physical sex, points in only one direction. You cannot go back to a lower level and stay satisfied. Always you want more… Lust does not satisfy; it stirs up.
The Orthodox philokalic tradition presents lust as an escalating, self-defeating passion whose essential character is insatiability, enslaving the person and deforming relational perception.
, Philokalia: The Bible of Orthodox Spirituality, 1998supporting
Lust for power: which, however, rises enticingly even to the pure and the solitary and up to self-sufficient heights, glowing like a love that paints purple delights enticingly on earthly heavens.
Nietzsche revalues lust — especially lust for power — as a generative, ascending force that even spiritual heights cannot escape, contesting ascetic depreciation of erotic energy.
, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1883supporting
the continual back and forth between lust and guilt, guilt and lust. The ecstatic aspect in a man carried by the conjoined archetype of mother-son takes him yet further from the father’s inhibitions of order and limit.
Hillman identifies the oscillation between lust and guilt as the psychological signature of the puer-mother archetype, linking erotic compulsion to a failure of senex limits and paternal order.
, Senex & Puer, 2015supporting
The center of lust is eternally lacerated and consumed. The mythological embodiment of lust’s action on the liver is Tityus.
Padel’s study of Greek tragic psychology locates lust in the liver, describing it not as a seated passion but as an incessant wounding of the organ, exemplified in the punishment of Tityus.
, In and Out of the Mind Greek Images of the Tragic Self, 1994supporting
libido means a ‘want’ or a ‘wish,’ and also, in contradistinction to the ‘will’ of the Stoics, ‘unbridled desire.’ Cicero uses it in this sense when he says: ‘to do something from wilful desire and not from reason.’
Jung traces the Latin genealogy of libido, noting its original meaning as unbridled desire opposed to reason, a usage Augustine explicitly inherits and which grounds depth-psychology’s own terminological inheritance.
, Symbols of Transformation, 1952supporting
Gluttony 353; One of Evagrius’ bad thoughts 358–9, 364–5; Prerequisite to lust 365; But less culpable than other sources of lust according to Gregory the Great 370–1.
Sorabji’s index documents the Evagrian causal schema in which gluttony is the prerequisite of lust, and Gregory the Great’s refinement that gluttony is less culpable than other sources of sexual passion.
, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation, 2000supporting
the libido sentiendi, or lust for intense sensation; and… the libido sciendi, or lust for manipulative knowledge, knowledge that is primarily used to increase our own power, profit, and pleasure.
Pascal’s tripartite taxonomy — libido dominandi, sentiendi, sciendi — extends lust beyond the sexual into a comprehensive psychology of egotistical enslavement, appropriated by spiritual psychology as the structure of attachment.
, The Spirituality of Imperfection Storytelling and the, 1994supporting
there is a close relationship between lust and greed on the one hand and anger on the other — so close, in fact, that I would say you cannot play up lust or greed in any area of life without putting yourself on an express train to a chronically angry mind.
Easwaran, reading the Gita, identifies lust and greed as causally prior to anger, presenting them as interdependent passions that form a unified chain of suffering in the psychospiritual economy.
, The Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living: A Verse-by-Verse Commentary, 1975supporting
concupiscence/concupiscentia, 27, 37, 42, 44, 95, 154, 223; see also desirousness, lust… and lust, 212–214.
Edinger’s index cross-references lust with concupiscentia and the coniunctio, indicating that lust and death are paired as symbolic poles in the alchemical lesser conjunction.
, Anatomy of the Psyche: Alchemical Symbolism in Psychotherapy, 1985aside
frankly lustful images could drive pink madness from the market. Then shoppers might escape the trap of the consumer conundrum as phrased by Eric Hoffer: ‘You never get enough of what you don’t really want.’
Hillman suggests that the diffuse, sublimated lusts of consumer culture suppress directly erotic imagery, arguing that frank lustfulness would paradoxically undercut the compulsive economy of desire-without-object.
, Mythic Figures, 2007aside
The divination title for this line — Love and Lust — will usually make the subject sit up and listen very closely. This line shows the person’s sexual drive and the way these urges work in practice.
Pollack’s Tarot reading places Love and Lust on the restrictive pillar of the Tree of Life, interpreting lust as the sexual drive that dominates consciousness and obstructs the transformation available through disciplined imagination.
, Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom: A Tarot Journey to Self-Awareness, 1980aside