Psychiatric symptoms associated with neurological disorders affecting the limbic system include disinhibition of the emotions, changes in sexual behavior, and personality changes. From a psychoanalytic perspective, the limbic system in part can be seen to serve as an anatomical substrate for sexual instincts and emotion. In Freudian psychoanalysis the unconscious mind largely contained the mental representations and derivatives of the sexual instincts. Jungian analytical psychiatry expands on the Freudian unconscious with the collective unconscious. The collective unconscious contains the mental representations of both the instincts and the archetypes.
Archetypes are like primordial ideas which are charged with emotion.
It then follows that the anatomical substrate for spirituality is also within the limbic system. It would follow that addictive craving, sexual instinct, and spiritual urges share the same anatomical substrate and thereby use the same type of psychic energy. Psychoanalytic theory tells us that frustration and disappointments in adults may revive infantile longings. The addict in search of filling the spiritual void, out of frustration may try to reduce such interpsychic tension by oral gratification. In psychoanalysis when a person accepts a substitute for his original goal object he is using what is known as compensation.