The Hidden Principle Behind Psychotherapy…
The Hidden Principle Behind Psychotherapy: The Physics of Affect
In 1904, a psychiatrist in Zurich read a list of words out loud to his patients, one at a time. Most words got no reaction. Every so often, though, a single word triggered a long pause and a visible spike on a machine reading the electrical activity of the patient's skin. That psychiatrist was Carl Jung, and what he was picking up on was more than a curiosity of early psychiatry. It pointed to something that contemporary psychotherapy talks about far less than it should: psychic energy.
My latest video, The Hidden Principle Behind Psychotherapy: The Physics of Affect, traces this idea from Jung's word-association experiments through Freud's own scientific training in thermodynamics, and into a single, clinically useful principle that runs underneath repression, suppression, symptom formation, and a lot of what actually happens in a therapy room.
Freud's Physics of the Mind
Freud trained under the physiologist Ernst Brücke, part of a group of Berlin scientists committed to a hard line: only physical and chemical forces operate inside living organisms. That's the world Freud came up through, and it shows directly in the vocabulary he built psychoanalysis on. Drive. Cathexis. Discharge. Repression. These aren't loose metaphors borrowed from physics. They're the literal language of thermodynamics, applied to the mind, because that was the best available model of force and energy at the time.
Repression, Suppression, and the Complex
A defense, broadly, is something that operates to manage a threatening impulse, sometimes by keeping it out of consciousness entirely, sometimes by changing how it gets expressed while a person remains aware of it. Repression works through the first path. Suppression, the more volitional, willful version, works through the second.
In either case, the underlying principle is the conservation of energy. Suppressing or repressing a thought, a belief, or a feeling doesn't make it disappear. The energy has to go somewhere. When it can't be consciously felt and integrated, it often shows up instead as a complex: a cluster of emotion and belief with enough gravitational pull to start operating outside conscious control, eventually breaking through as a symptom.
Why This Matters Clinically
This isn't an abstract theory exercise. Understanding psychic energy as something with real force and motion, whether taken literally or metaphorically, changes how a person relates to their own experience. Without that scaffolding, anything that doesn't resolve through positive thinking or a cognitive reframe starts to look like a malfunction, something to correct rather than something to feel and let move. That's exactly the condition under which more suppression happens, often without anyone intending it, including well-meaning use of cognitive tools that quietly get co-opted by the same defensive process.
Beyond Freud
This principle isn't unique to Western psychoanalysis, and it isn't confined to one school of therapy. Somatic psychology, trauma-informed work, and Jungian analysis all engage with some version of the same idea, that unprocessed energy gets held in the body and needs a path to move. It also echoes far older frameworks, including qi in Chinese medicine and prana in yogic traditions, systems with their own histories and their own internal logic, not equivalent to Freud's model but part of a much longer human recognition that felt experience behaves like something with force.
Watch the Full Video
The full video covers this in more depth, including where positive thinking and narrow cognitive approaches can unintentionally reinforce suppression rather than resolve it. Watch it here.
Referenced paper: Tran The, J., Magistretti, P., & Ansermet, F. (2018). "The Epistemological Foundations of Freud's Energetics Model." Frontiers in Psychology, 9:1861.
Related listening: My conversation with Leslie Ellis, PhD, on nightmares and embodied dream work, which touches on how stuck psychic energy shows up in trauma-related nightmares.