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‘Do you suppose that some day one will read on a marble tablet on this house:
Here, on July 24, 1895,
The Secret of the Dream Revealed
Itself to Dr. Sigm. Freud’
(letter to Fliess, June 12, 1900, 417)
By this stage, Freud had already, under the indirect influence of Herbart, partly arrived at the dynamic point of view (he and Breuer often referred to ‘psychical conflicts’) and, under the direct influence of the Helmholtz school, almost completely arrived at the economic point of view. He had already formulated the theory that psychical life is endowed with its own energy, one which is, to quote Emil Du Bois-Reymond, ‘equal in dignity to the physico-chemical forces inherent in matter’. He called it libido and put forward the hypothesis that it turns into anxiety if not discharged. We have already examined (see Table 1, pp. 79-84) the main concepts worked out by Freud within this economic framework (it should be noted, however, that he did not use the terms ‘dynamic’, ‘economic’ or ‘topographical’ until much later): a psychical ‘trauma’ produces a ‘fright’ which becomes and remains pathogenic unless it is discharged in an ‘abreaction’ (a discharge of the ‘affect’ that has a ‘cathartic’ effect); the organism is governed by the principle of ‘constancy’, which strives to keep constant the ‘sum of excitation’ or ‘quota of affect’; for the organism to function normally, ‘energy’ has to be ‘bound’ in ‘cathexes’.
The influence of Darwin and Haeckel had familiarised Freud with the concepts of phylogeny and ontogeny in the field of biology; but he had not yet perceived their specific relevance to psychology. Only later would he