ABSTRACT
In an unpublished manuscript addressed to his colleague neurologists — which James Strachey titled 'Project for a Scientific Psychology' — Sigmund Freud attempted 'to represent psychical processes as quantitatively determinate states of material particles' in a reflex arc. In recent years the literal understanding of Freud's notion of psychic energy has been subjected to detailed and harsh criticisms by philosophers of science and psychoanalysts alike. Through the cracks of the mechanistic veneer of metapsychology there appears an underlying common-sensical economic logic which guided Freud's use of energy imagery. As frontier creature between body and mind, he described the drive both as representative and mandator, depending from which angle he approached it. In 1910 he started to characterize activities aiming at self-preservation, too, as originating in drives. The language and logic of Freud's libido theory intertwine the causal and the purposive by means of a repertoire of political metaphors which turn drives into energies with a history and social relations.
