Psychic Energy Reconsidered—Introduction

ALTHOUGH THE CONCEPT OF PSYCHIC ENERGY IS one of the oldest concepts in the theory of psychoanalysis, it is still today one of the most obscure, most obfuscated, and most controversial. It was first enunciated by Freud as early as 1894 in his paper "The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence": "I should like, finally, to dwell for a moment on the working hypothesis which I have made use of in this exposition… I refer to the concept that in mental functions something is to be distinguished—a quota of affect or sum of excitation—which possesses all the characteristics of a quantity (though we have no means of measuring it), which is capable of increase, diminution, displacement and discharge, and which is spread over the memory-traces of ideas somewhat as an electric charge is spread over the surface of a body" (p. 60). Here, in this earliest statement, the energy concept, which in the later metapsychological papers became the core of the economic point of view, was linked to affect as its source. Quite soon, however, as Freud reconceptualized the nature of the pathogenic process in neurosis consequent upon his embarrassing and painful discovery that the ubiquitous sexual seductions called for in his original traumatic theory of the neuroses were, in fact, fantasy elaborations, he went on to develop an inner psychology of the vicissitudes of the instincts; with this development Freud made the drives the