Destruction as the Cause of Coming Into Being

Throughout my involvement with sexual problems, one question has especially interested me: Why does this most powerful drive, the reproductive instinct, harbour negative feelings in addition to the inherently anticipated positive feelings? These negative feelings, such as anxiety and disgust, must be overcome in order to use the drive appropriately. Naturally, an individual's negative attitude towards sexual activity strikes especially to the core of the neurotic. Several investigators have sought to explain this opposition as a result of our manner of child-rearing: We attempt to keep the drive within bounds and teach each child to consider the fulfilment of sexual wishes as something dirty and forbidden. The frequency with which sexual wishes are associated with images of death is noteworthy because death is a symbol of moral failure (Stekel).1 Gross relates the feeling of disgust in the presence of sexual products to their anatomical proximity to lifeless excreta. Freud traces the opposition back to anxiety and repression of the initial positively feeling-toned wish. Bleuler considers the inevitable negativity present in the positively feeling-toned idea to be a defence. In Jung, I found the following passage:

Passionate longing, i.e., the libido, has two aspects: it is the power that beautifies everything and, in certain cases, destroys everything. Often, one cannot recognize the source of this creative power's destructive quality. A woman who, in today's society, abandons herself to passion soon leads herself to ruin. One need only contemplate the current bourgeois state of affairs to understand how a feeling of unbounded insecurity occurs in those who unconditionally surrender to Fate. To be fruitful provokes one's downfall; at the rise of the next generation, the previous one has exceeded its peak. Our descendants become our most dangerous enemies for whom we are unprepared. They will survive and take power from our enfeebled hands. Anxiety in the presence of