ABSTRACT
The ‘economic’ viewpoint entails hypothetical nervous energies which can increase, decrease, accumulate, etc., and so can loosely be termed ‘quantitative’, and are products of the drives. Drives (‘instincts’) and their mental representatives (which are prototypically ‘wishes’) accumulate energy and operate within a mental
apparatus that functions according to laws similar to the theory of thermodynamics (see Laplanche & Pontalis, 1973). The mental apparatus, according to this line of thinking, is set up in such a way that allows (when functioning eciently) mental energies to ‘ow’, as well as keeping the amount of energy as low as possible (the so-called Nirvana principle-Freud, 1920g). Freud (1926f) writes:
From the economic standpoint psycho-analysis supposes that the mental representatives of the instincts have a charge (cathexis) of denite quantities of energy, and that it is the purpose of the mental apparatus to hinder any damming-up of these mental energies and to keep as low as possible the total amount of the excitations with which it is loaded.
