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In his paper on the “Unconscious,” Sigmund Freud explicitly delineated the three meta-psychological hypotheses underpinning psychoanalysis; the topographic (which posited the existence of separate psychic “spaces” for the conscious, preconscious, and unconscious), the dynamic (which outlined the mechanism of repression), and the economic. While there are numerous works dealing with the first two principles, the third has been comparatively neglected. In part the very ubiquitousness of the “economic” hypothesis has made it almost too obvious to be discussed.1 Moreover, the idea of a “psychic economy” may appear too much a remnant of Freud's earlier neurological work to interest scholars committed to keeping psychoanalysis separate from its medical origins. Nevertheless, the centrality of the “economic hypothesis” in Freud's work should make it of interest to historians. What, they may well ask, did Freud actually mean by the term “economic,” and how was his use of the term related to economics as economists knew it? The central thesis of this paper is that Freud's use of the term “economic” implied that his new psychology was somehow analogous to the earlier science of political economy, precisely because he had extended to the private the quantitative approach already employed to analyze the public sphere.
On May 25, 1895, Sigmund Freud wrote to his friend Wilhelm Fliess that his intention was to view psychology from a “quantitative” perspective, thus creating “a sort of economics of nerve force” (Freud 1985, 129). This quantitative conception