Notes on the Spirit as Conceived by Dynamic Psychology

This paper is based on the assumption that dynamic psychology is the study of the fundamental and non-scientific apperception of man of himself and of what is not himself (fellow-beings, the world, the Gods, demons, the dissociated complexes and energies, etc.), of the ways these apperceptions are interlinked (genetically, functionally, rationally, etc.), and of the ways they change or can be made to change (cf. Abenheimer, 1955). The term “fundamental apperception” was coined by the phenomenologist W. Jerusalem, who described it as a primitive intellectual interpretation of experience (conscious or unconscious) whereby all happenings are apperceived as resulting from an expression of energy (a will) which originates in a centre of energy, the subject. Thus the whole world is experienced as dynamic interaction of animated subjects (Jerusalem in Scheler, 1924, and earlier, Jerusalem, 1895 and 1921). Dynamic psychology as the study of the fundamental apperception deals either with energies (mental forces, urges, instincts, libido, etc.) or active subjects (mental structures, complexes, archetypes, persons, etc.), and it treats the subjects and the energies as inseparable and corollary concepts. (“There are no energies without structures and no structures without energy”—Fairbairn, 1952.) The energies of which we speak here are not energies in the sense of natural science but concepts of an infinitely older and more primitive thinking. The scientific concept of energy is derived from this older one but has been totally changed in the process. The energies we discuss in dynamic psychology are not only immaterial but not physical at all and are often likened to a wind as something spiritual. They have no place in a system of scientific explanation of nature as physis, or of scientific causal thinking. Causal thinking leads into an endless regression of causes and effects, whilst the fundamental apperception looks for primary actors (subjects) w