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The Columbia Psychoanalytic Clinic in the late 1960s was characterized by the neo-Freudian, “adaptational” theory of Kardiner, Karush, and Ovesey (1959) which included a methodological critique of Freudian theory that centered on the libidinal theory of “instinctual” drives. Avoiding vague hypothesized energetics of libido, these Columbia psychoanalysts emphasized natural adaptations to environmental experience as the determinant of personal development. The new focus was on needs, affects, and learning, on the imprintability of a person by family, society, early education, and later therapy, and the assumption was optimistic, that the individual was a largely blank slate capable of being shaped. Oversimple, perhaps, but it led to many practical advances in a golden age of psychotherapy, especially the progress of empirical research based on child observation, psychoanalytic anthropology, psychosomatic medicine and neuroscience, as well as ego and cognitive psychology, in the years before biological and genetic reductionism.
Still, there are times in the course of life and therapy when the old idea of libidinal energy in its vicissitudes of cathexis can be appealing for its use in clinical hypothesis. The concept of invested energy becomes psychotherapeutically useful. Buried energy, frozen in time, if it can be liberated by therapy or experience, can have an enlivening effect. Returning to the individual what is rightfully his or hers (to steal a line from Mann's Death in Venice, 2004) invigorates the life course, and provides working emotional capital. It creates a ripple effect that propagates through all the fixed complacencies. And the mining of old veins of pleasure may even yield Freud's definition of true happiness: the delayed fulfillment of infantile (childhood) wishes.
From a careful taking of a patient's history of neurotic conditioning, one may glean inhibitions and find phobias that may not be the main focus of psychotherapy, but yet may be more easily a