ABSTRACT
When Freud began in the 1890s to create a psychoanalytic psychology, he was influenced from three main directions: neurophysiology, his clinical experience and literature. The first of these, neurophysiology, was influenced in turn by and modelled on physics – the touchstone of all the sciences. So he incorporated into his thinking the physics of his day. The other psychoanalytic innovative theorist similarly influenced by physics was Wilfred Bion, but by that time, over half a century later, physics had radically changed. Freud based his original concept of the pleasure principle on the axiom of the conservation of energy, from Newtonian physics. Was Bion similarly influenced by Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, the paradigm of quantum mechanics? I will start with Freud and the pleasure principle.
