*Rediscovering the Psychoanalytic Revolution: Contemporary Crisis as the Result of Resisted… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.110157*

that then more or less disappears—returning briefly in Freud's 1920 discussion of the 'lifefulness' and 'deathfulness' of the movements of *Trieb* [24].

By and large, hard scientists have rejected the notion of psychic energy as unprovable and therefore illusory or delusional—in short, esoteric. However, in recent years, it is remarkable to what extent there has been an acknowledgement of the complexity of the general idea of 'energy.' It is being recognized that perhaps the most salient feature of all the prevailing conceptualizations is the difficulty in providing a unified and tenable definition of what it is [25]. In this context, the notion of psychic energy becomes a degree more plausible, perhaps even to a skeptic—the possibility of forces within (and even around) us that the individual might become aware of, but the activities of which cannot be captured in the maneuvers of representational reflection.

Additionally, even within the canon 'western' philosophy, greater respect is now being accorded a 'lineage' of thinking that runs counter to the assumptions of the mainstream rational-realism. It is perhaps unwarranted to call this a lineage, but the thread that is of interest here are viewpoints that do not require epistemology to be 'first philosophy' [26]. One aspect of this is that for changes to occur and to be *aware* of changes does not require that what is changing can be represented or translatable into representation. Accordingly, *conscious* activities, in the reflectively representational sense of this term—are not 'at the helm' (which corresponds to Freud's warning that the ego can never be 'master' in its own house). In the 'western' tradition, this 'lineage' of thinking extends from the pre-Socratic (Anaximander, Heraclitus, Empedocles) and the Stoics, via underappreciated philosophers such as Baruch Spinoza and Gottfried Leibniz, to 19th and 20th century writers such as Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri-Louis Bergson, Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze [5, 8].

Freud's discoveries must be comprehended as falling within this lineage. The free-associative praxis of psychoanalysis comprises a movement of change within an erotic field of subtle energies. Such processes cannot be grasped within our capacity for reflective representationality. They are not epistemologically driven. Rather, they comprise a lived-experience that is ontological or, more precisely, ontoethical. In short, if this 'spiritual-existential' way of reading Freud's revolutionary discoveries is given credence, and then, the processes of psychoanalytic praxis must be understood an ontoethical prioritization of lived-experience, free-associative discourse, and helpful notions such as those of psychic energy, repression, and the fundamentality of our erotic embodiment.
