Samberg and Auchincloss Respond to Cavell

We write regarding Marcia Cavell's comments (JAPA 62/5) on Freud's drive concept as referenced in our paper “The Politics of Psychoanalytic Lexicography” (JAPA 62/3). In that paper we quoted the first sentence of the drive definition that appears in our Psychoanalytic Terms and Concepts (Auchincloss and Samberg 2012). Cavell places Freud's drive concept within his “conceptual net” of psychic energy and justly critiques the validity of equating psychic energy with the energies of natural science. She concludes that psychoanalysis can therefore never achieve the status of a natural science. We refer Cavell to our dictionary for a more extensive discussion of both drive (pp. 65-67) and energy (pp. 77-78) and the various controversies that have surrounded these terms over the history of their usage. We caution Cavell against reaching any conclusion about the science of psychoanalysis or physics since the jury is not yet in. Finally, we remind her that “whatever the problems presented by the concept of psychic energy, psychoanalysts find it hard to describe mental life without some language for the experience of intensity or quantity, without which it is impossible to convey aspects of any number of clinical phenomena” (p. 78).