Introduction

The reason for the success of psychoanalysis lay not only in its clinical value (the understanding and treatment of syndromes formerly deemed inexplicable and virtually untreatable), and certainly not in its method, which was thought ‘strange’ and unscientific, and was criticized as unprofessional and almost immoral. In the scientific world that straddled the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was successful mainly because its founder endowed it with a theoretical edifice, the energy-and-drive theory, which offered an explanation of psychic functioning and its disturbances that was acceptable in terms of the sciences of the day – for the concepts of libido, drive, psychic energy, discharge, instinct, economy and the like mirrored contemporary scientific principles and discoveries in the fields of neurophysiology and thermodynamics.