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I. Psycho-analysis often evokes the ‘economic point of view’. Thus Freud defines * as the synthesis of three standpoints–the *, the * and the economic. The last ‘endeavours to follow out the vicissitudes of amounts of excitation and to arrive at least at some relative estimate of their magnitude’ 1. The economic point of view consists in taking into consideration the cathexes*–their movement, the variations in their intensity, the antagonisms that arise between them (cf. the notion of *), etc. Economic considerations are brought forward by Freud throughout his work; in his view, there can be no complete description of a mental process so long as the economy of cathexes has not been assessed.

This requirement of Freudian thought derives on the one hand from a scientific spirit and a conceptual framework which are shot through with notions of energy, and, on the other hand, from a clinical experience that had immediately provided Freud with a certain number of data which, it seemed to him, could only be accounted for in economic terms. For example: the irrepressible nature of the neurotic symptom (often voiced by the patient in such expressions as ‘There was something in me that was stronger than me’); the triggering-off of troubles of a neurotic kind following disturbances of sexual discharge (actual neuroses*)– and, inversely, the alleviation and elimination of such troubles once the subject is able, during treatment, to free himself (catharsis*) from his ‘strangulated’ affects (*); the separation–observable in the symptom and during the course of treatment–between an * and the * which was originally bound to it (*, *, etc.); the discovery of ch