Psychoanalysis,thermodynamics,and the matter of scarcity: A genealogy of Freud’s death drive hypothesis

Abstract

In his 1920 essay, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” Freud (1920/1955a) introduced the death drive hypothesis, according to which “the aim of all life is death” (p. 38). I shall not discuss the truth value of this hypothesis here; instead, I trace its genealogy in order to understand it as a moment in the history of modern Western societies. First, I present Freud’s metapsychology, and in particular its economic dimension, the death drive being central to this dimension. Second, I retrace the history of the concept of energy and of the formulation of the laws of thermodynamics in the 19th century. Energetics and thermodynamics are shown to have been important to the Freudian economic dimension. Further, I show that for 19th-century scientists, the concern for energy reflected a socioeconomic preoccupation with the matter of scarcity. Lastly, I argue that Freud’s relationship to energy, as expressed in the death drive hypothesis, also reflected a certain relationship of Western countries to scarcity in the era of the second industrial revolution.

Keywords

energetics Freud history of psychoanalysis metapsychology scarcity

In his 1920 essay “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” Freud (1920/1955a) capped a sinuous argument with the following statement:

If we are to take it as a truth . . . that everything living dies for internal reasons—becomes inorganic once again—then we shall be compelled to say that “the aim of all life is death” and, looking backwards, that “inanimate things existed before living ones.” (p. 38)

This statement is the prototypical formulation of the concept of death drive, a concept that would spark many debates and attract criticisms for its pessimism and its speculative aspect by many psychoanalysts after Freud. The objective of this article is not to discuss the veracity of this hypothesis, but rather to trace its genealogy, in order to understand it as a particular moment in the history of modern Western societies. Beyond the concept of death drive itself, I will probe the epistemological roots of the economic dimension of Freudian metapsychology. This will entail highlighting the debts of this metapsychology to (a) the energetic theories formulated within the framework of 19th-century thermodynamics and, less directly, (b) the industrial–capitalist ideology of modern Western societies.

The method adopted here is that of historical epistemology, which consists in seeking the historical prerequisites that serve as conditions of possibility for a new scientific theory to emerge (Daston, 1994, pp. 282–283; Foucault, 1969/2002a, pp. 142–148, 1966/2002b, pp. xxiii–xxiv). This means putting aside the question of metapsychology’s truth value to focus on the scientific, social, and economic context that made its existence possible at that precise moment. I will also rely on a widely accepted postulate in the field of science and technology studies, according to which, in modern capitalist societies, the economic sphere (including, in a broad sense, the relations of production, the productive forces, and the economic doctrines) may affect the scientific realm.

The argument will proceed in three parts. I start by presenting what Freud called metapsychology, and in particular its economic dimension. The death drive hypothesis is a central part of this dimension. Then, I retrace the energetic conceptions developed in the 19th-century natural sciences, in direct relation to thermodynamics. The importance of those theories in Freud’s conceptions of the death drive and the economic dimension has been amply documented (Assoun, 1981; Tran The et al., 2018, 2020). I highlight the stakes related to the industrial revolution and the economic matter of scarcity that determined the formulation of the thermodynamic principles and, in particular, that of entropy. The significance of this industrial context for the genesis of the concept of energy has also already been underlined (Blay, 2017; Kuhn, 1959/1977; Rabinbach, 1992). If the links between metapsychology and thermodynamics on one hand, and between thermodynamics and the industrial context on the other hand, are both well-documented, less has been written on the indirect relationship between Freud’s metapsychology and the industrial ideology, although Raitt (2002) provided valuable insights on this issue. In a third step, I therefore explore the consequences of Freud’s borrowing of the concept of energy. While there are parallels between the two laws of thermodynamics and the two principles of Freudian economics, the death drive hypothesis reflects a relationship to energy that is different from that found in the work of mid-19th-century scientists. I argue that this difference is rooted in the mutation of industrial societies between the mid-19th century (when the two principles of thermodynamics were formulated) and 1920 (when “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” was published).

The economic dimension of metapsychology

The Freudian metapsychology

Energetic theories were introduced into psychoanalysis via Freud’s metapsychology, and especially its economic dimension. Metapsychology can be understood as an attempt to formalize the theoretical axioms of psychoanalysis (Assoun, 1981, p. 73, 2013, pp. 13, 24). For Freud (1915/1957, p. 181), this approach consists in appreciating psychical processes according to three dimensions: the topographical, the dynamic, and the economic.

1) The topographical dimension understands the mental apparatus as being composed of different interconnected locations, each with its own mode of functioning (Freud, 1926/1959, p. 266). On this point, Freud’s formulation owes much to neuroanatomy and, more precisely, to the theories of specialized brain areas developed in the second half of the 19th century (Assoun, 1981, pp. 124–130).

2) The dynamic dimension perceives psychic processes as the interplay of mutually opposed or reinforcing forces (Freud, 1926/1959, p. 265). This formulation borrows from the vocabulary of Newton’s classical mechanics (Tran The et al., 2020, pp. 3–4).

3) The economic dimension understands psychic processes to be invested with variable quantities of energy that flow within the mental apparatus (Freud, 1926/1959, pp. 265–266). This latter dimension was particularly instrumental to the importation of energetic theories into psychoanalysis.

The second section of this paper will retrace the genealogy of these theories. For now, let us focus on what Freud says about the economic dimension of his metapsychology in particular.

The pleasure principle and the principle of constancy

The influence of the energetic doctrine on Freud can be first spotted in the “Project for a Scientific Psychology” (1895/1966), a manuscript he wrote in 1895 but never published during his lifetime. The explicit project of this essay was “to furnish a psychology that shall be a natural science: that is, to represent psychical processes as quantitatively determinate states” (Freud, 1895/1966, p. 295). This idea of quantifiable psychical processes is the first presentation of what Freud (1915/1957, p. 181) would later call the economic dimension of his metapsychology. The concept of quantity stems, he writes in the “Project,” from “pathological clinical observation” and can be understood through the “principle of neuronal inertia,” according to which “neurons tend to divest themselves of Q [quantity of energy]” (Freud, 1895/1966, pp. 295–296). This tendency allows for avoiding “unpleasure,” which “would have to be regarded as coinciding with a raising of the level of Qή [endogenous quantity of energy] or an increasing quantitative pressure,” as opposed to pleasure, which “would be the sensation of discharge” (Freud, 1895/1966, p. 312).

This pleasure principle is central to the economic dimension. Freud did not actually invent this concept, but borrowed it from Fechner, now known as the founder of psychophysics (Assoun, 1981, pp. 150–153; Laplanche & Pontalis, 1988, p. 342; Sulloway, 1979/1992, pp. 66–67). In 1848, Fechner described a supposedly universal Lustprinzip, according to which the quantity of energy in the mental apparatus remained overall constant. However, Fechner himself did not create this concept out of thin air: he extrapolated it from the principle of energy conservation formulated by von Helmholtz in the 1840s (Raitt, 2002, p. 64; M. Wegener, 2005, pp. 272–273). This principle, also known as the first law of thermodynamics, states that the overall quantity of energy contained in the universe stays globally constant. What Fechner did is apply this principle to the mind:

Building on Hermann von Helmholtz’s 1847 formulation of the first law of thermodynamics, . . . Fechner argued that the overall level of energy in the mind also remained constant: “As far as its course is bound to the course of psychophysical processes and these in turn are bound by the law of the conservation of energy, the mind will itself be bound by that law.” (Raitt, 2002, p. 64)

We can therefore draw a genealogical line from von Helmholtz’s principle of energy conservation to Freud’s pleasure principle via Fechner. I will later come back to the significance of this genealogy; let us return for the moment to the Freudian principle of pleasure.

Twenty-five years after the unpublished “Project,” Freud came back to this principle in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” He defines it as follows:

the course taken by mental events is automatically regulated by the pleasure principle. . . . the course of those events is invariably set in motion by an unpleasurable tension, and . . . its final outcome coincides with a lowering of that tension—that is, with an avoidance of unpleasurable or a production of pleasure. (Freud, 1920/1955a, p. 7)

The pleasure principle is still defined as a tendency of the mental apparatus to discharge its psychic energy. On other occasions, Freud (1920/1955a) instead uses the phrase “principle of constancy,” but indicates that he holds the two concepts as equivalent: “the mental apparatus endeavours to keep the quantity of excitation present in it as low as possible or at least to keep it constant. This latter hypothesis is only another way of stating the pleasure principle” (p. 9). This explication is actually far from obvious: the idea of “constancy” (or “stability”) rather suggests that of an average homeostatic equilibrium, while the pleasure principle is defined by Freud as a continuous (ideally total) tendency to spend energy (Assoun, 1981, p. 153; David-Ménard, 2017, pp. 247–249; Laplanche & Pontalis, 1988, pp. 342–344; Tran The et al., 2020, p. 2). To resolve this tension, one must allow a gap between (a) the “original tendency to total discharge” and (b) “constancy” as “a state stabilized at zero plus” that would be opposed, in a second step, to the first tendency (Assoun, 1981, p. 153). This is the solution adopted by Freud (1920/1955a) when he writes that “there exists in the mind a strong tendency towards the pleasure principle, but . . . that tendency is opposed by certain other forces or circumstances, so that the final outcome cannot always be in harmony with the tendency towards pleasure” (pp. 9–10). In the first place, it is the “reality principle” that, “under the influence of the ego’s instincts of self-preservation” (p. 10), tends to divert pleasure from its tendency to direct and total discharge.¹ Therefore, if pleasure and stability are first supposed to be identical (and de facto noncontradictory), there is an actual difference between a “theoretical” (or “ideal”) principle and an “applied” (or “concrete”) one (the various terms used by Freud and their respective functions are summarized in Table 1). To recap:

Table 1.

Overview of the economic model presented in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”.

Principle type:	Pleasure principle	Reality principle = principle of constancy
Provoked by:	The death drive	The ego’s instincts of self-preservation
Function (purpose):	To reduce the quantity to zero	To keep the quantity at a constant level

Considerations of conceptual clarity . . . urge that a distinction be preserved between a tendency to reduce the quantity of excitation to zero on the one hand, and a tendency to keep this quantity at a constant level on the other; to meet this demand, the pleasure principle must be seen as correlative with the former trend, and the maintenance of constancy treated as a corollary of the action of the reality principle. (Laplanche & Pontalis, 1988, p. 345)

As shown above, Freud gives primacy to the pleasure principle (i.e., the tendency to discharge) over the principle of constancy (and consequently over the reality principle too). To support this idea, he commits to a “speculation, often far-fetched speculation, which the reader will consider or dismiss according to [their] individual predilection” (Freud, 1920/1955a, p. 24). This speculation is in equal parts a biological and philosophical reflection on the nonorganic origin of living organisms. Freud (1920/1955a) assumes that one can deduce, from this origin, “a universal attribute of instincts and perhaps of organic life”: “an instinct is an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things which the living entity has been obliged to abandon under the pressure of external disturbing forces” (p. 36). From there, only one step was left to formulate the concept of death drive, according to which “the aim of all life is death” (p. 38).

To summarize, there is, according to Freud, a tension between a tendency of the organism to totally discharge its energy and a tendency to keep it constant. He gives primacy to the tendency to discharge (pleasure principle), and therefore to death over life. Freud’s energetic conceptions presented above raise two questions. First, how did the concept of energy come to travel from thermodynamics into a field like psychoanalysis? Second, what brought Freud to such a pessimistic conclusion, that is, that life is an accident while death is an essence?

The economic–energetic ideology

The “physicalist oath”

Between 1830 and 1847, often independently, more than a dozen scholars² developed a series of theories that led to the formulation of the principle of energy conservation (or first law of thermodynamics) at the end of this period (Kuhn, 1959/1977). Correlative to the principle of conservation, the idea that all “forces” (whether physical, electrical, magnetic, chemical, physiological, etc.), being of the same nature, are interconvertible, became established.³ The principle of conservation of energy was thus at the center of a new physicalist current from the 1840s onwards (Assoun, 1981, pp. 59–65). Physicalist physiology was represented by a generation of scientists that included Virchow, Du Bois-Reymond, von Helmholtz, Brücke, and Ludwig; the latter four founded the Physikalische Gesellschaft zu Berlin in 1845. In 1842, Du Bois-Reymond pronounced the now famous “physicalist oath,” which was to clarify the epistemological foundations of this Society: “Brücke and I pledged a solemn oath to put into effect this truth: No other forces than the common physical-chemical ones are active within the organism” (as cited by Jones, 1953–57/1964, pp. 62–63).

After Mayer, von Helmholtz explicitly sought to bridge the gap between physiology and physics, precisely by putting forth the idea that the “forces” described by these two disciplines are substantially identical (Assoun, 1981, p. 158; Tran The et al., 2018, pp. 3–5). While discussing the two conceptions of Mayer and von Helmholtz, Ostwald asserted the existence of psychical phenomena that can be conceived like every other phenomenon—energetic phenomena (Assoun, 1981, p. 172; Tran The et al., 2018, p. 8). Therefore, physicalism first brought physics closer to chemistry (Duhem, 1886, applied the laws of thermodynamics to chemical phenomena), then to biology, physiology, and medicine (as evidenced by Fechner, 1860/1966; Lotze, 1842; or von Helmholtz, 1847/2003), and eventually to psychology and psychoanalysis at the end of the century (with Wundt, 1862/1910, 1897, in Germany; Ribot, 1883/2014, in France; and Freud in Austria). Freud’s incorporation of the principle of energy conservation within his metapsychology must be understood in regard to this epistemological context of physicalism. During his medical studies, having spent several years in Brücke’s laboratory, Freud was constantly exposed to energetic conceptions such as von Helmholtz’s or Fechner’s (Assoun, 1981, pp. 145–187; Rabinbach, 1992, p. 170; Tran The et al., 2018, p. 5, 2020, pp. 2–3).

The energetic ontology

At that time, many scientists sought to close the scientific field by marking their distance from philosophy. In the German-speaking countries, Du Bois-Reymond, von Helmholtz, Liebig, and Mayer thus explicitly rejected Naturphilosophie by faulting its mystical, speculative, and nonquantitative dimensions (Prigogine & Stengers, 1979, pp. 101–103, 124). It is no less clear that these scholars conveyed a cosmological vision whose origins can be traced back to 19th-century Romanticism and Naturphilosophie. The notion of energy conservation appears indeed as a metaphysical principle of harmonic unification of nature as a whole (Blay, 2017, pp. 266–267; Ellenberger, 1970/1979, p. 540; Kuhn, 1959/1977, pp. 94–100; Prigogine & Stengers, 1984, p. 109; Rabinbach, 1992, pp. 54–56). Von Helmholtz (1856), for instance, described his principle of energy conservation (here still named “force”⁴) as follows:

Nature as a whole possesses a store of force which cannot in any way be either increased or diminished, and . . . therefore the quantity of force in nature is just as eternal and unalterable as the quantity of matter. Expressed in this form, I have named the general law “The Principle of the Conservation of Force.” (p. 501)

However, as shown by Rabinbach (1992, pp. 45–68) or Blay (2017), this principle of energy conservation is not only ontology laden, it is also ideology laden. We are now going to see how economic concerns permeated the energetic conception of 19th-century scholars, in the context of the industrial revolution in Western countries.

The industrial revolution and the division of labor

The 18th century witnessed the correlative development of science as technique (with, for example, the creation of the first engineering schools in France) and the empowerment of the economic and productivity spheres (with an accumulation of capital due to the considerable increase in trade). By the end of that century, the economic theories of the classical liberal school were born. In England, the first industrial revolution played a major role in the birth of this school, marked by the publication of Adam Smith’s An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations in 1776. Smith (1776/1981) defended the thesis that “the greatest improvement in the productive powers of labour . . . seem to have been the effects of the division of labour” (p. 13). After an initial accumulation of capital in the late 17th century, the second half of the 18th century saw the development of industrial machinery and the generalization of the division of labor.

Although Smith was not the first economist to theorize the notion of labor, he nevertheless gave it a new role: it was no longer the value of the marketable object itself that determined its price, but the labor necessary to produce it (Blay, 2017, pp. 233–234; Foucault, 1966/2002b, pp. 241–242). The worker was no longer paid directly because they produced an object, but because they “spent” their “energy” in the process of providing work (Blay, 2017, p. 235). In Western societies, the vision of the human being therefore changed dramatically. “With Adam Smith,” Foucault (1966/2002b) wrote, “reflection upon wealth begins to overflow the space assigned to it in the Classical age,” particularly because:

it is already pointing in the direction of an anthropology that will call into question [a person’s] very essence ([their] finitude, [their] relation with time, the imminence of death) and the object in which [they invest their] days of time and toil without being able to recognize in it the object of [their] immediate need. (p. 244)

With the rationalization of production methods, the development of industrial machines went hand in hand with a reification of the worker themself. As a result, in the 19th century, a vision of nature conceived as a machine and the new figure of the human machine flourished (Blay, 2017, pp. 235–260; Rabinbach, 1992, pp. 45–68).⁵

Nature and humans as machines

The formulation of the principle of energy conservation was the direct result of the development of industrial machines (in particular the steam engine) from the very early 19th century (Kuhn, 1959/1977, pp. 83–94; Mirowski, 1989/1995, p. 24; Rabinbach, 1992, pp. 45–46). The engineering arts played an important role in the diffusion of the ideological vision of nature and humans as machines in the scientific field (Blay, 2017, pp. 215–225; Kuhn, 1959/1977, pp. 90–94).⁶

In 1824, Carnot compared nature to an enormous machine with a huge reservoir of driving forces (Blay, 2017, pp. 236–237). A few years later, Coriolis (1829, pp. 2–3, 17) proposed for the first time to replace the term “force” with “work” in dynamics, so that the former would be used only to refer to static phenomena. He then committed to “an approach . . . that enabled him to transpose the notion of work from the economic domain, or even from the common language, into the field of physics” (Blay, 2017, p. 242).⁷ Coriolis’s writings (e.g., 1829, p. 27) were explicitly geared towards the industrial and economic applications of his concept of work. They likened not only animals and human beings, but also all of nature, to machines and sources of driving forces (Blay, 2017, pp. 245–260; Kuhn, 1959/1977, p. 91). This theme of nature as a gigantic machine and a reservoir of resources also comes up in the work of scholars such as von Helmholtz, Du Bois-Reymond, Haeckel, and Ostwald (Rabinbach, 1992, p. 49). Von Helmholtz (1856), for example, stated: “We cannot create mechanical force, but we may help ourselves from the general storehouse of Nature” (p. 501).⁸ Thus, from the point of view of these scientists, to consider a human as a machine was to recognize that they can produce work as long as they are given some energy, which comes from the reservoir of nature.

The entropy principle

In 1852, Thomson formulated, after Carnot, the principle of entropy,⁹ the second “law” of thermodynamics. The conservation principle “was based on the model of an idealized machine, whose utopian output would not be subject to any loss” (Tran The et al., 2020, p. 5). On the contrary, Thomson started from a context that was no longer ideal, taking concrete mechanical energy losses into account. By emphasizing the irreversibility of these energy losses, this principle dismissed the possibility of perpetual motion (Merleau-Ponty, 1983, p. 9). Accordingly, perpetual motion was only defined negatively, as the radical impossibility for an engine to indefinitely provide “work” without an external source capable of supplying it with energy (Blay, 2017, pp. 263–265; Merleau-Ponty, 1983, pp. 8–9).

One might wonder how the two laws of thermodynamics could be compatible, that is, how can energy be “lost” if everything in nature is conserved (Guedj, 2010, p. 116; Mirowski, 1989/1995, p. 60; Rabinbach, 1992, pp. 47–49, 63)? Thomson (1852) answers this:

there is an absolute waste of mechanical energy available to [humans] when heat is allowed to pass from one body to another at a lower temperature, by any means not fulfilling [their] criterion of a “perfect thermo-dynamic engine,” established, on a new foundation, in the dynamical theory of heat. As it is most certain that Creative Power alone can either call into existence or annihilate mechanical energy, the “waste” referred to cannot be annihilation, but must be some transformation of energy. (p. 304)

Here, we are led to understand that energy is “wasted” to humans even though it is preserved in nature—which makes it apparently possible for the two principles of thermodynamics to remain compatible (Guedj, 2010, pp. 116–123; Harman, 1982, p. 52; Merleau-Ponty, 1983, p. 14; Raitt, 2002, p. 67). The research on a perpetual motion machine (which kept many a scientist busy in the 18th and early 19th centuries) actually reflected a concern for the importance of the resources available to humans, as well as the fantasy of a world with inexhaustible resources (Blay, 2017, pp. 262–264; Rabinbach, 1992, p. 58; Raitt, 2002, pp. 64, 67). As we are about to see, the tension that exists between the two laws of thermodynamics (conservation and entropy) can be understood in light of the industrial–capitalist ideology of the 19th century.

The nineteenth century matter of scarcity

After the industrial revolution, and with the naturalization of the capitalist system of production, the idea of scarcity appeared to be more problematic than it was at the beginning of the 19th century:

In Classical thought, scarcity comes about because [people] represent to themselves objects that they do not have; but there is wealth because the land produces, in some abundance, objects that are not immediately consumed . . . . Ricardo inverts the terms of this analysis: the apparent generosity of the land is due, in fact, to its growing avarice; what is primary is not need and the representation of need in [people’s] minds, it is merely a fundamental insufficiency. (Foucault, 1966/2002b, p. 279)

The naturalization of the problem of scarcity was justified by classical liberals according to a scenario that combined the classical theme of natural right with the newer political–economic problem of population¹⁰ to make work a necessity for humans: contrary to the “state of nature,” and because of the growing demography, they must work to ensure their subsistence. Malthus inherited from Linnaeus the theme of the regulation of plant and animal populations through the “balance of nature” and applied it to human society, insisting on the natural character of the phenomenon of population growth (Canguilhem, 1977/2009, pp. 117–118). Ricardo pointed out that the more the human population grows, the more humans must work: this growth forces them to farm less and less fertile land, as work becomes more and more difficult and less and less profitable.

Those economic considerations have played an important role in the problematization of the concept of entropy by scientists. In the vision of the machinist ideology, the worker is a machine that produces goods, but it is an imperfect machine that constantly requires resources (wages) to “function” and is exhausted by its task (Rabinbach, 1992, p. 68). Nature’s reservoir of raw materials poses, on another scale, a comparable problem:¹¹ its resources, which are necessary for production, are seen as subject to an increasing scarcity (Prigogine & Stengers, 1984, pp. 114–116). Having renounced the possibility of perpetual motion, the new objective of 19th-century scientists was to find technical solutions to the problem of the scarcity of the resources required for humans and machines to work.¹² Thus, the thermodynamic cycle modeled by Carnot can be conceived as “a set of tricks to avoid irreversible conduction. Thermodynamics was thus built up about irreversibility but also against it, seeking not to know it but to save it” (Prigogine & Stengers, 1979, p. 270).¹³ The tension between the two laws of thermodynamics and the nearly paradoxical description of a world in which energy is never destroyed and yet dissipates reflects the concerns of “pessimistic” economists, who feared an incompatibility between a virtually infinite desire for consumption and the finiteness of the Earth’s exploitable resources.¹⁴ Returning now to Freud, we will see that this quasiparadox is also to be found in his economic theory.

The second industrial revolution and the death drive

From thermodynamics to metapsychology

We have seen previously that Freudian metapsychology exhibits a tension between the pleasure principle (i.e., the tendency towards discharge) and the reality principle (or constancy, i.e., the tendency towards stability). This tension in metapsychology is reminiscent of the tension in thermodynamics between the principle of conservation (as an ideal of inexhaustible cosmic energy) and that of entropy (as the concrete impossibility of perpetual motion; Rabinbach, 1992, pp. 63–64; Tran The et al., 2020, p. 5). In Thomson’s case, the consideration of energy losses implied the “passage” from the first to the second law of thermodynamics (Tran The et al., 2020, p. 5). In the same way, the acknowledgment of a discharge involved, for Freud, the “passage” from constancy to pleasure:

as far as the psyche was concerned, the first law of thermodynamics as it was expressed in the principle of constancy implied the apocalyptic pessimism of the second. If, in order to keep the level of psychic excitation constant, the mind was continually discharging energy, like the universe it would surely eventually run out of steam. (Raitt, 2002, p. 67)

This analogy should not be surprising when considering that Freud’s economics is rooted in energetic ontology and its figure of the human machine (Lacan, 1954–55/1991, pp. 60–62). Machines, according to the engineers of his day, functioned thanks to the energy they tended to disperse (entropy); if we replace machines with humans, their death is conceivable as the outcome of an entropic process (total loss of energy; Tran The et al., 2020, p. 6).

However, there is a slight yet significant difference between thermodynamic theories and Freudian metapsychology. In the former, the principle of conservation is akin to an “ideal” to strive for, by opposing the tendency of mechanical systems to disperse their energy. Thus, having given up the possibility of a perpetuum mobile, 19th-century engineers designed technical devices that optimized efficiency by limiting energy losses. In contrast, in Freud’s “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920/1955a), death (i.e., the result of “organism entropy”) is conceived as a purpose, whereas the tendency to maintain tension at a nonzero level (i.e., alive) is perceived as an accident. In other words, Freud’s model implied that expending energy is an aim, an idea that contrasts with the fear of scarcity that haunted the 19th century (see Table 2).

Table 2.

Overview of the differences between the principles of thermodynamics and metapsychology.

	Principles of thermodynamics	Principles of metapsychology
“Purpose” ←	Conservation (1st law)	Reality (constancy)	→ “Actuality”
“Actuality” ←	Entropy (2nd law)	Pleasure (discharge)	→ “Purpose”

While previous developments on the genesis of the energetic ideology and the human machine metaphor have helped us to understand how Freudian economic principles (reality–constancy and pleasure–discharge) can be understood as transpositions of the two thermodynamic principles (conservation and entropy) in psychoanalysis, we must now try to figure out why, despite this borrowing, Freudian and thermodynamics theories differ. I will argue that the divergence between the “ideals” of thermodynamic engineering and of Freudian metapsychology is to be found in the evolution of Western societies between the mid-19th century (when the law of entropy was formulated) and 1920 (when “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” was published; Freud, 1920/1955a).

Scarcity after the second industrial revolution

In the late 19th century, European countries experienced a series of economic and political crises. The spread of discourses (such as Nietzsche’s) on the “end of history” at the time was a manifestation of the fear of waste as well as of the social mutations that characterized the period (Foucault, 1966/2002b, pp. 282–286; Prigogine & Stengers, 1984, p. 116). Likewise, the Great War, both an expression and an outcome of the disintegration of the old empires, would be perceived by many as the ultimate symptom of the decline of the West (Ellenberger, 1970/1979, p. 548). At the dawn of the 20th century, Vienna was the setting for a cultural and political crisis of liberalism, a crisis that constituted the premise of a second modernity (Schorske, 1980, pp. xxvi–xxvii, 184–185). After the war, the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire created a situation of social anomie, which was anxiety-inducing for the dominant classes and influenced Freud (1921/1955b) in the writing of Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (Ellenberger, 1970/1979, p. 528). The influence of conflict and of the postwar period on Freud’s elaboration of the concept of death drive, particularly on the pessimism of this concept, has already been widely noted (e.g., Koteska, 2019). About this concept and its context of formulation, Clair (2018) wrote: “What stronger image could be proposed of the Viennese sensibility and the rift it went through, a modernity both desired and rejected – ‘Secession’ but not Revolution?” (p. 23).¹⁵

Indeed, the postwar period also marked the advent of the second modernity in Europe. At that time, mass consumer society, a by-product of the second industrial revolution that had begun in the late 19th century, experienced a boom. This industrial boom and the massification of production sparked a wave of “economic optimism” in Western countries (Zaretsky, 2004, p. 134). In the United States and then in Europe, Fordism increased the control of workers (via a rationalized production chain), but also enabled them (thanks to higher wages) to achieve consumer “status” (Rabinbach, 1992, p. 282; Zaretsky, 2004, pp. 138–139). At the turn of the 20th century, electric and combustion engines, which were much more energy efficient, replaced steam engines. With the expansion of domestic electrical networks, the democratization of the automobile, the development of the chemical industry, and the rationalization of the work chain, scarcity now seemed to be much less of a looming prospect. In a sense, the new methods for producing and harnessing energy appeared to have actually made the dream of 19th-century engineers, that of a society with inexhaustible resources, come true (Zaretsky, 2004, p. 140).¹⁶ As noted by Zaretsky (2004), “Fordism thus gave rise to a paradox: beginning as an attempt to regiment both work and family, it generated the utopian idea that human life need no longer be subordinated to the imperatives of production” (p. 140).

Ultimately, however, while mass production addressed (through technical innovation) the problem of access to and exploitation of raw materials, it could not conclusively solve the problem of their progressive exhaustion. The utopia of second modernity precisely consisted in highlighting the desire to consume and an apparent abundance to conceal the insoluble problem of the finiteness of Earth’s resources.¹⁷ Although latent, the death drive hypothesis can be understood as the result of this tension between the desire to consume and the fear of scarcity.

Death drive and the contradiction of the second modernity

Jameson (1981/2002) proposes to analyze the text “as the imaginary resolution of a real contradiction” (p. 62). More specifically, he argued that the subtext of the narrative expressed a social collision resulting from the encounter of two antagonistic modes of production coexisting in the writer’s society (pp. 66–68, 81–84).¹⁸ In light of this, we can assume that the thesis of “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (Freud, 1920/1955a) reflects not simply its “epoch,” but a socioeconomic contradiction provoked by the rise of the second modernity. In this case, the antagonism in question is not between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, which was particularly important to the history of 19th-century Europe. It is, however, between the 19th-century large-scale industry mode of production, spurred by consumption ideology yet restrained by the fear of resource exhaustion, and the 20th-century Fordist mode of production, characterized by the “democratization” of consumerism and the repression of the scarcity problem. How is this opposition expressed in Freud’s metapsychology?

Freud was able to consider energy expenditure (“human entropy”) as an “aim” because the early 20th-century massification of production truly turned consumption (which requires energy expenditure) into an end in itself. Indeed, as soon as resources ceased to appear as a “problem” (of scarcity) and demand preceded supply within industrialized societies, consumption was presented (particularly to the hitherto deprived working classes) as a genuinely new way of life. In Freud’s economic model, this relationship to consumption is reflected by the idea that energy is not something to be accumulated or saved (a measure that could have seemed wise in the 19th century), but to be spent. On the other hand, as we have seen, this hypothesis leads Freud to the oddly pessimistic claim that the organism actively seeks death (i.e., the total discharge of body energy). Crucially, this pessimistic assertion is reminiscent not only of the 19th-century fear of scarcity, but also of the latent persistence of the resource depletion problem in the beginning of the 20th century. The recent “democratization” of consumption did not solve the old matter of scarcity, that is, the fact that producing more and more consumer goods requires more and more energy from a finite world. This paradox (in the new ideology of consumerism) is to be found in Freudian metapsychology: the body aims to discharge its energy (we must spend energy to produce goods) though this leads it to a certain death (even if this results in the complete depletion of Earth’s resources).

Thus, the death drive hypothesis condenses two themes, symbolizing the encounter of two modes of production from two distinct eras: the large-scale industry model of the 19th century, in which the production of resources could not match consumerist dreams, and 20th-century Fordism, which found in new techniques and technologies the means to realize those dreams (see Table 3 for a schematic presentation of these equivalencies). The uncanny conclusion of “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (although a total discharge of energy is equivalent to death, death is in fact sought by the organism; Freud, 1920/1955a) is the involuntary expression of the meeting and superimposition of these two modes of production, a phenomenon that characterized the advent of the second modernity in the postwar period.

Table 3.

Expression in metapsychology of the two modes of production coexisting in the second modernity.

Mode of production:	19th-century large-scale industry	20th-century Fordism (mass production)
Expression in the death drive hypothesis:	A total expenditure of energy is equivalent to death	Energy expenditure is an end in itself

Conclusion

This article has demonstrated the economic dimension of Freudian metapsychology is rooted in mid-19th-century thermodynamic theories. The thermodynamic principle of energy conservation finds its counterpart in Freud’s principle of constancy (or reality), while the idea of entropy finds an equivalent in the pleasure principle (discharge). Freud’s way of dealing with death (i.e., the “organism entropy”) nonetheless expresses an approach to energy that differs from that of 19th-century scientists, who were concerned with the problem of scarcity. This difference in perspective results from the advent of the second modernity in the early 20th century, and in particular of the new relationship to energy triggered by the second industrial revolution: energy consumption was now thought as an end in itself.

In focusing on the genealogy of energetics, my objective was not to highlight all the historical determinants that contributed to Freud’s formulation of the death drive in 1920.¹⁹ While I used the methodology of historical epistemology, my aim was also not to propose an extensive commentary on Freudian concepts or texts, but rather to frame them within the long term. As noted by Davidson (1987, pp. 256–257), this kind of method may be of particular interest in the case of the history of psychoanalysis, where two historiographical approaches tend to conflict: one focusing on the person of Freud as a creator (Freud as a “genius”), the other denying any originality to his theories by showing how much they owe to the science of its time (Freud as “usurper”). Here, the method of historical epistemology suggests going beyond the individual-centered level of analysis. It is indeed the history of the scientific field and of its concepts that determines the possibility, for a scientist embedded with this field and its history, of becoming the author of a given theory.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I want to thank Stéphanie Dupouy and Rémy Guichardaz for proofreading and feedback on the manuscript of this paper. I would also like to congratulate Jean-Yves Bart and the editing and translation department of the MISHA for the corrections and modifications made to the text.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Arthur Massot

Notes

Author biography

Arthur Massot is a doctoral student in history and philosophy of science at the Archives Henri-Poincaré – Philosophie et Recherches sur les Sciences et les Technologies, Strasbourg (France). Holder of a Master’s degree in clinical psychology and a Master’s degree in history and philosophy of science, his thesis focuses on the links between science and psychoanalysis of Freud and Lacan. He most recently published “Quand Freud (dis)simulait les origines épistémiques de la psychanalyse” in Dialogues Mulhousiens (2021).

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