Carrying Hell with You: The Truth About Inner Conflict—Libido Builds a Hell in the Mind's Theater

Carrying Hell with You: The Truth About Inner Conflict—How Libido Builds Hell in the Inner Theater

I. What Is Libido?

Libido is emotional and psychic attention and willpower, rather than the brain’s attention and willpower. It is somewhat similar to what people commonly call “mental energy.” A term from Freudian psychoanalysis, it is now referred to as “psychic energy.”

During a low period, where does a person’s inner psychic energy go? It does not disappear; it turns inward.

II. Libido Takes Part in Building Hell

When the mind attacks itself, libido plays the following roles:

1. It engages in role-playing, playing both the attacker and the attacked. The attacked is an internalized bad object (the bad breast), while the attacker, too, is an internalized bad object: a bad relationship (domestic violence directed at oneself), a bad environment (parents arguing fiercely), or a bad mother.
2. The attack, together with the intense anxiety and the shame severe enough to bring fragmentation and dissociation, is the experience that the self truly wants to repeat. This experience is familiar; it confirms one’s existence. Through this role-playing, the person simultaneously experiences the bad object, the bad relationship, the bad environment, and the bad self.
3. Libido helps construct the theater itself. At moments of crisis, when the core self is fragmenting and dissociating, libido takes part in the destruction while also resisting the mind’s collapse. On one side, like an inner demon, it crashes into and shatters the primordial chaos of heaven and earth; on the other, like Pangu and Nüwa, it works in its own ways to keep heaven and earth from breaking apart.
4. In its own instinctive, pathological way, libido tries to save its own vitality. It drinks poison to quench its thirst, while resorting to measures even more desperate, blind, and extreme than a battlefield medic’s emergency use of cauterizing irons, amputations, and opioids. By burning everything and generating lightning, it delivers a final emergency electric shock to the psyche.
5. Thus, behind a simple act of self-attack lies a vast, Dostoevskian drama of purgatory. The mind rehearses an intensely dramatic plot so that it can experience and repeat extreme abuse. This is also why self-attack and inner conflict consume such enormous amounts of energy.

III. This Is Where Angels and Demons Come From

This is why some people in their lowest moments seem bereaved of their parents, like walking corpses, weighed down beyond measure: they are carrying hell with them.

This is also why those who emerge from and transcend their lowest periods and psychological symptoms possess the profound insight of philosophers and the calming presence of angels. As Zhuangzi said, “Benefit others through stillness.” This stillness is a lighthouse at the boundary between hell and the mainland, a dove and an olive branch signaling land.

This is also why some people, like demons, try to drag others into hell. They project the energy of evil outward because they can no longer contain it themselves. They also want others to experience the same suffering, establishing pathological relationships to ease their loneliness. With the weight of their own hell, they ignite the hell within another person. This is hell as a contagious disease.

IV. After Liberation from Hell

Libido returns to the form it was always meant to take. It is no longer used for attack, destruction, self-defense, or the construction of hell.

It leads people to do what they love and to do ordinary things, to spend time with the people, things, animals, plants, and environments they like. Healthy libido joins hands with other healthy libido, uniting and sublimating, feeling the resonance of love.

The world gives it positive feedback and energy. It no longer feels a sense of lack, but the stillness of unity between humanity and nature. It feels itself to be part of the world, rather than a celestial demon from another realm.

It feels that everything is real and vivid; looking back, hell seems only an illusion.

Chan Buddhism: “Who would have expected that our own nature possesses innate wholeness?” Ordinary life, free of troubles, is Chan.

Zhuangzi: Sitting in forgetfulness, fasting the mind, and an empty room filling with light; only then are one’s capacities complete and one’s virtue unmanifest, and only through the equalization of things does life emerge.

Marx, *Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844*: Only by leaving alienation behind can humanity return to its species-being. Engels, *Anti-Dühring*: Human history has always been in motion and developing; only at a new starting point beyond class antagonisms does truly human morality become possible.