Psychical Inertia
Origins and Transformations
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21717640 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Molly Macdonald (London, UK, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2024 |
| Volume | 26 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 29-54 |
| Publication date | 2024-04-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Psychoanalysis and History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1460-8235 • E-ISSN: 1755-201X |
| Publisher | Edinburgh University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.3366/pah.2024.0494 |
| OpenAlex | W4394725161 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 20 |
In this article I map a set of points that could begin to tell the story of inertia’s trajectory from physics and physiology to figurations of psychic life in Freudian psychoanalytic theory. Both preceding and contemporaneous with Freud’s use of the concept of inertia to describe an element of psychic life, work was taking place in other intellectual and geographical contexts to translate this law of physics and physiology to a property of mental life. As a particular illustration of this, I examine a lecture given by British scientist Michael Faraday in 1818, wherein he makes the leap from the inertia of matter to ‘mental inertia’ and is arguably the first recorded thinker to do so in the English language. I then explore the use of the phrase ‘psychic inertia’ in 1900 by Scottish physiologist D.F. Harris and argue that Harris’s work is not only emerging at the same time as Freud’s discoveries, but that he prefigures Freud’s ideas about the relationship between inertia and the death drive in interesting ways. The final part of the paper returns to sketch out Freud’s engagement with the concept in several of his papers
Classical mechanics · Cognitive science · Inertia · Physics · Psychoanalysis · Philosophy · Philosophy and Social Theory · Psychoanalysis and Psychopathology Research · Psychology · Psychology and Mental Health
An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding
Immanuel Kant
The language of psychoanalysis
The Human Condition
Inertia, the Communication of Motion, and Kant's Third Law of Mechanics
The Law of Inertia
Freud’s Earliest Theories and the School of Helmholtz
The Physiology of Mind, the Unity of Nature, and the Moral Order in Victorian Thought
British Responses to Psycho-Physiology, 1860-1900
The Affect Theory Reader
The Brain and the Unconscious Soul in Eighteenth-Century Nervous Physiology
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |