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The ego as a self-organising system: A systems theory perspective on Freud's energic metapsychology
Author(s)
Date Issued
2016
Citation
Connolly, J. P. (7-10 Jul 2016). The ego as a self-organising system: A systems theory perspective on Freud's energic metapsychology. The 17th International Neuropsychoanalysis Congress, Michigan Avenue, Chicago.
Type
Conference Paper
Abstract
The body of Psychoanalytic theory is faced with a core difficulty which is the lack of a coherent metapsychology which is adequately compatible with current knowledge in neuroscience and other fields, and within which findings from neuroscience can be integrated with both the key propositions of psychoanalytic theory as well as with the central observations found in the analytic setting. Traditionally, Freud's theory of psychic energy was meant to play the role of such a metapsychological foundation: such notions as the tendency to discharge or maintain excitement at a constant, the pleasure principle, libidinal cathexis and anti-cathexis were founded as the central organizing principles of the ego and the defenses. However, despite the fundamental importance of the role that the energic theory was supposed to play in explaining behavior and affect, and in integrating vast amounts of data from the analytic situation, it was the subject of several decades of active debate which clarified a number of problems with the energic theory that have remained effectively unsolved until the present. This included a central problem of no neurophysiological correlate being found for the energic mechanisms Freud described, nor for the tendency of maintaining activation at a constant. Grobbelaar (1989) suggested that the central assumptions and propositions of systems theory may successfully reformulate some of the key difficulties of psychoanalytic metapsychology. This paper describes how Freud's energic theory can be reconsidered from within a systems theory epistemology that makes use of Maturana and Varelas (1980) notions of autopoiesis and structural coupling, as well as Wieners (1948) cybernetic principles of information and feedback. From this perspective it is argued that the ego is not regulated by a principle of maintaining excitement at a constant, but by a principle of maintaining its organization, and that energy in this context can be understood on an informational level, as change and disorder. Such a formulation has the benefit of greater compatibility with a growing field of systems neuroscience and such contemporary notions as Karl Triston's (2010) notion of the minimization of free energy, as well as with developments in the field of computer-based thinking which also model the self-organization of systems.
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