Meetings of the New York Psychoanalytic Society

September 22, 1965. BEYOND VITALISM AND MECHANISM: FREUD'S CONCEPT OF PSYCHIC ENERGY. Robert R. Holt, Ph.D.

Dr. Holt reviews the historical development of the concepts of vitalism and mechanism as a necessary introduction to the primary purpose of his paper, in which he challenges the validity of Freud's concept of psychic energy. He considers the opposed concepts of 'being' and 'becoming'; from Heraclitus' 'all is flux' to Democritus who admitted no reality to process and taught that only the atoms and the void are real; from Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, Galileo, Santorio, Harvey, and Descartes to Newton, who ushered in the age of scientific determinism; from Kant and Kelvin to Darwin, who focused attention on structure as distinct from function; and finally Bergson's and Driesche's 'inert matter and vital force'.

The author states that Freud's concept of psychic energy developed inevitably from his earlier neurologic training, and relates it to the history of vitalism and mechanism. He postulates that the concept of psychic energy, along with most, if not all, psychoanalytic metapsychology, must be discarded, and presents what he considers to be inherent contradictions in current understanding of psychic energy. He contends that analysts since Freud have not kept abreast of progress in neurophysiology which is showing the way toward a purely electro-physio-chemical explanation of instinctual drives. Nagel has demonstrated that it is possible to construct causal nonteleological explanations without the use of an energy concept. Holt believes that psychoanalysis should and will have a 'new face': 'It will no longer be its present mixture of mechanism and vitalism; it will have transcended this old dichotomy… In psychoanalysis as we move beyond vitalism and mechanism, our concepts need only be reduced in principle and ultimately to neurophysiology … not incompatible with its findings.'