You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Analogies between some psycho-analytical theories and some of the laws of physics must have struck many people. Such analogies can be made to appear more or less close according to the form in which the physical law is expressed. If the form chosen is that of a mathematical equation, no analogy will appear to exist. But let it be in words that may appear to personify nature, and analogies will be readily found. If the law of entropy is rather loosely expressed as the law of de-gradation of energy, one need only ignore the hyphen to perceive a resemblance to the history of the human race. If one expresses the same law in terms of the tendency of a self-contained system to reach equilibrium, a different analogy leaps to the mind: that of life longing for death. These provide occasions when people whose training has been more literary than scientific think that they are beginning to 'understand' science at last.
The authors of the paper under discussion do not pursue analogies in this naïve way. They make it quite clear that they are discussing identities, not analogies. Their argument is that certain psychological instincts, namely, the death instincts, obey the second law of thermodynamics, known as the law of entropy.
Entropy is a number occurring in thermodynamic calculations to which it is convenient to give a name. It is usual to express this number in terms of a quantity of heat divided by a temperature. The law of entropy says that in a self-contained system this number increases with time. If the law is to apply to psychology, there must be a concept there which can be represented as heat divided by temperature. To believe that the law of entropy holds in psychology is to believe that numerical values have a meaning in that science.
This law deals with transformations of energy. The word 'energy' was used in a psychological sense, as in the expression 'he is full of energy', before it became a technical term in physics. In consequence people unacqu