Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche

This way of looking at things has long been familiar.

Everyone speaks of the “storms of youth” which yield to the “tranquillity of age.”

We speak, too, of a “confirmed belief” after “battling with doubts,” of “relief from inner tension,” and so this is the involuntary energic standpoint shared by everyone.

For the scientific psychologist, of course, it remains valueless so long as he feels no need to estimate psychological values, while for physiological psychology this problem does not arise at all.

Psychiatry, as opposed to psychology, is purely descriptive, and until recently it has not concerned itself at all about psychological causality, has in fact even denied it.

Analytical psychology, however, was obliged to take the energic standpoint into account, since the causal-mechanistic standpoint of Freudian psychoanalysis was not sufficient to do justice to psychological values.

Value requires for its explanation a quantitative concept, and a qualitative concept like sexuality can never serve as a substitute.

A qualitative concept is always the description of a thing, a substance; whereas a quantitative concept deals with relations of intensity and never with a substance or a thing.

A qualitative concept that does not designate a substance, a thing, or a fact is a more or less arbitrary exception, and as such I must count a qualitative, hypostatized concept of energy.

A scientific causal explanation now and then needs assumptions of this kind, yet they must not be taken over merely for the purpose of making an energic standpoint superfluous.

The same is true of the theory of energy, which at times shows a tendency to deny substance in order to become purely teleological or finalistic.

To substitute a qualitative concept for energy is inadmissible, for that would be a specification of energy, which is in fact a force.

This would be in biology vitalism, in psychology sexualism (Freud), or some other “ism,” in so far as it could be shown that the investigators reduced the energy of the total psyche to one definite force or drive.

But drives, as we have shown, are specific forms of energy.

Energy includes these in a higher concept of relation, and it cannot express anything else than the relations between psychological values.  ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 51