Here is a little thing I wrote about two years ago, as I was first getting into the problems of Freud. It's a bit on the right track, but it puts a lot of things the wrong way. I hope to revise what it says eventually in another post, one that will more clearly explain the shuttling between the dynamic (or "economic") and structural (or "topographical") accounts of the mind in Freud. My ultimate goal was a bit more expansive than it should have been, which confused me: I was trying to relate how the unconscious related to the Id, and what displacement was effected there in the terms with which Freud was dealing with the mind. However, following Derrida, I got hung up on how these problems were already emerging in the Project for a Scientific Psychology and resurfacing in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, as well as, especially, "The Economic Problem in Masochism:"In understanding the relationship between the Ego, Id, Unconsciousness and Consciousness, it is helpful to investigate what exactly underlies a comment Freud makes nearing the end of The Interpretation of Dreams. Recalling his discussion of the “primary” and “secondary” processes—what will be termed, descriptively, the unconscious and preconscious processes or, structurally (that is, in terms of how this process relates to the other processes of the mind when describing the dynamic operations of the whole apparatus), the Ucs. and Pcs.—Freud reminds us that what we are invited to assume by the postulation of these two different parts of the mind “is not the existence of two systems near the motor end of the apparatus, but the existence of two kinds of processes of excitation or modes of its discharge” (the first sentence of "Unconsciousness and Consciousness--Reality," the last section of the book). What Freud attempts to point out here is that these two processes can be made more distinguishable as results or effects of the dynamic movements of a basic psychical energy rather than as two static psychical territories that govern this movement. In other words, Freud reminds us that, when dealing with the two psychical processes he elaborates here, we should remain attentive not to the location of the psychical energy within the mind but to the two basic tendencies of movement of this psychical energy.
We may bring forth what underlies this comment if we see what happens when we heed his advice. Paying attention to psychical energy and its movements—that is, to its investments, its Besetzungen (translated in English as “cathexes”)—we find that Freud feels compelled to distinguish between two processes because he believes he has observed two basic tendencies of energetic movement or investment. As Freud explains here and throughout his writings, it becomes evident that the first (primary and Ucs.) process should be regarded as the process constituted by the tendency of energy to move or be invested such that it can be described as “free” energy, and the second (secondary and Pcs.) process constituted by the tendency of energy to move such that it may be described as “bound” energy. What do these descriptions mean? The aim, goal, or purpose of any accumulation of energy within the psychic apparatus being discharge (a fundamental point of Freud’s that we will discuss more in depth momentarily), energy is deemed “free” because it tends to move directly towards discharge along the path of least resistance—or at least along a path where there is as little deferral of the event of discharge as possible—and because when it discharges, it usually does so completely. On the other hand, the energy that makes up the Pcs. system is called “bound” because it is seen as “inhibited,” or more willing to defer its discharge and possess the tendency to discharge only partially (cf. “The Unconscious,” 135-6, “The Economic Problem in Masochism” 194). We may note in passing that these tendencies of movement amount as a whole into huge threads of energetic behavior that Freud calls “instincts” or, more accurately translated, “drives.”
Now that we more clearly understand this distinction between “free” and “bound” investment, we must turn to how Freud regards investment itself as existing only as differences of the quantity of energy. That is, at any specific moment in the history of the psyche, there exist no qualitative distinctions between units or even tendencies of psychic energy, and especially not between the “free” and the “bound.” The “free” and the “bound” are thus only different quantities of investment, despite their tendencies or mode of investment that we have just noted. The psyche is, indeed, like a portfolio: we may invest more or less rapidly, but at any particular point, if we ask exactly what we have invested, there will only be amounts of cash. However, throughout his work, Freud proceeds, after making this point, to keep these two distinctions of “free” and “bound” energy anyway, as if they were accumulations of investment so different in quantity as to be regarded for all intents and purposes as qualitatively different elements of the mind—so long as we remember these elemental qualities arise only from quantities.
We may ask, then, whether Freud should make this distinction in this way at all when he is attempting to set up two dynamic processes governed by the movement of psychic energy and not two static systems that, as it were, handle the energy with their own independent agency. Perhaps a simple criticism is adequate here: perhaps Freud could have explained this in different language so as to draw even more attention to the lack of a qualitative distinction between different movements of psychic energy, and thereby buttress his larger point about the radical difference of the dynamic and structural conception. For what the notion that we have merely one psychic substance made up of differences only in terms of quantity—what this notion helps to reaffirm is that we have two tendencies of psychic energy that simply operate in different ways, rather than two (or more) different types of energy within the mind warring against each other with no common battleground. That is, this quantitative conception eludes a horrific mistake of the systematic view: though this latter view is able to describe quite clearly the various parts of the mind and how they interact with each other, because it affirms a qualitative distinction between these parts in terms of the energy within them it actually forecloses an accurate analysis of the dynamics of these qualities’ intermixings. Each region of the mind gets divorced from the other based on the quality of its energetic unit, and we get only a reshuffling of the order of the qualities and their arrangement--Lacanians love this aspect of Freud the most, and generally all they do is this reshuffling (which of course has its own merits). So, would not referring to the two tendencies of energy within Freud’s structural and dynamic view in terms of their differing quantities then drive this point home? We quickly find, however, that our position is in the wrong: our hesitation to agree with this phrasing is precisely what Freud would have wanted to engender, but he only could engender it by keeping these two distinctions present in this way. That is, Freud’s decision to leave us with two types of energy, and thereby to seemingly contradict his own point by slipping back again into language that regards as qualitative what he claimed should be rigorously held as only quantitative, is not only to keep things simple for the reader so as to more fluently present the structural and dynamic conception of the mind. This contradictory phrasing remains because it also has the effect of actually reflecting and elucidating something else about the dynamic nature of the cathexes or investments that will eventually explain why a systematic view of the mind is essentially inadequate at an even more fundamental level: it is inadequate because to describe two manifestations of psychic energy in any terms other than qualitative ones (while appending disclaimers that this is, despite the language, not a qualitative distinction) is not possible if we are going to say that the psyche actually has a particular status, exists in a particular way at a particular time.
Let us elaborate: we find that this contradictory phrasing is in fact necessary for Freud because not only is he encountering a fundamental problem within the nature of the most basic element of his structural and dynamic theory of the mind, but he is also running up against a problem many thinkers--chiefly Nietzsche--have encountered. Essentially, the contradictory language opens up to larger, metaphysical levels because Freud here is tapping into a primordial contradiction: he attempts to describe something (psychical energy) that he wishes to assert ontologically exists as becoming while using language and logic that can only assert that something ontologically exists (and can only possess the quality of becoming). Thus he flips back and forth between quality and quantity. And because he is able to describe the psyche dynamically with quantities, he nevertheless must backtrack and describe it again in terms of quantity in order to say that, at a particular moment, it exists. If he were to forego the quantitative, he could only say that the psyche functions as organized, or looks as if it exists, in a particular way. This is the larger tension at play between the dynamic and structural accounts, and why both tend to feed off of each other's inadequacies.
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