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For psychoanalysts there are three ways of formulating a psychological event: the dynamic, the economic (quantitative), and the topographic. The dynamic point of view, which considers motives, is the one most familiar. Psychoanalysis is called a 'dynamic psychology', and semantically tempered and slightly vitiated psychoanalysis is sometimes called dynamic psychology. Yet, even simple courses in dynamic psychology do not stick to a purely dynamic point of view, for they introduce ideas of intensity and cathexis, that is, energy and quantity. Topography usually comes rather short in such treatment. Topography, etymology shows, is a matter of place and whereabouts. The word comes from the Greek topos, which means place, which itself is compounded of two words to pos, 'the where'. In psychoanalytic explanations at different stages of development of the science, the 'places' that came into consideration were 1, in older theory, the systems conscious, preconscious, and unconscious; later 2, the id, the ego, and the superego. If then in a so-called dynamic psychology we introduce the idea of cathexis and of systems graded according to accessibility to consciousness, and if we use the id-ego-superego terminology, the 'dynamic' psychology actually becomes economic and topographic psychology too.
By topographic consideration, we mean that we are answering the question, Where?. Is an idea 'in' the conscious system or in the unconscious? Does an impulse 'arise' in the id, the ego, or the superego? And so on. If something is 'in' something else we are thinking spatially and can draw a diagram. Two familiar diagrams exist: the id-ego one, and the 'psychic apparatus' diagram in Chapter VII of The Interpretation of Dreams. Despite