The dominant condition of the soul child is a soul presence patterned with the child's image, but presence mixed with emotions and impulses. It is fluid and emotionally labile in a passionate way. It is the core of the soul that becomes repressed or split off. It is not the dissociated essence, but a soul structure that still has some ability to experience it. In fact, it is the most developed structure of the soul in which we can still experience the soul as a medium. It is the most developed of the structures that still retain the basic properties of the soul. Nonduality between experiencer and experienced is still present to some degree.

The Libidinal Soul ...... This is the animal soul at the beginning of ego structuring, where the soul’s animal potential is all contained in one structure. This is a much more primitive structure than the soul child, for it is not patterned by the human body image. This structure forms the more primitive ground of the soul child, and hence will generally arise as we make the soul child more transparent. It is a structure of a living entity, shapeless and formless, but has individual boundaries, for it appears as an entity. It feels like a primitive animalistic creature that is completely run by the instinctual drives and appetites. Its aliveness and dynamism are much more total than those of the soul child, appearing frequently as a writhing, wiggling, but powerful organism with no fixed shape or size. Civilized society does not know how to deal with this aspect of the soul, so it relegates it to our subterranean depths, by repressing it in the unconscious or disowning it as a split-off part of us of which we are not normally aware. Because it is usually disowned by society and the individual, it becomes a pure animal soul, devoid of any human concerns or sentiments. In other words, splitting it off into a disowned and rejected part of the soul involves the creation of a soul structure that is separate from and not impacted by the other and more human elements of the soul’s potential. This dissociation from human concerns, which means absence of heart, appears in the experience of the libidinal soul in being irrational, guiltless, ruthless, completely selfish and self-centered.

The primary structure is what we call the "soul child," which is the state of the soul before she was completely structured and became estranged from her primitive animal forms and her essential ground. This is the structure popularly known as the "inner child" -- the child of joy, the emotional child that is still intact with its original qualities of aliveness, curiosity, mischievousness, openness, and so on. It is what is popularly called the emotional child, but slightly different. The emotional child is only the emotional part of the soul child. In reality, as children we were not only emotional; we were living souls, full of life and vigor, adventurous and curious, joyous and playful, but also capable of exploding in rage and frustration, or going into fear and terror.