What in the Hell is Psychodynamic Anyways
The Psychologist uses the word psychodynamic as a euphemism for those treatment modalities that remain unprovable by the empirical sciences. Whatever cognitive behavioral therapy or a prescription drug can’t fix is psychodynamic. It’s dynamic because you literally can’t think about it. And yet this unthinkable dynamism, superimposed inside conscious thought, bends our behavior into all kinds of rainbows, a whole panoply of rainbows that Psychology deems abnormal. If you were normal you wouldn’t do it. But who, pray tell, is normal?
Oddly enough, wikipedia states that Freud used the word psychodynamic because he liked the study of thermodynamics. While Freud never used the term psychodynamic even once, it is true that, following Gustav Fechner’s theory of psychophysics, Doctor Freud applied the laws of heat to nervous energy with the hope that it would make the stuff of the psyche quantifiable. Precise quantities of libido never materialized, but the word dynamic, as it appears in the literature today, still retains its thermodynamic aura.
What remains compelling about this aura, to me, is that this fundamental law of physics, the law of conservation, by which energy is never destroyed, becomes, when applied to the mind, the de facto inference of an unconscious. So that while your very early childhood expereince remains opaque to you—like a black hole, beyond the reach of word, thought and memory—it nevertheless remains a source of energy that, continually circulating, exerts a great deal of force upon your psyche—as if it were the biggest acid trip of all time; an acid trip that you spend the rest of your life integrating—whether you know it or not. Which is as much to say that not one moment of your life is ever lost, especially those early moments you can’t remember.
Were spacewhy to offer a public service announcement to hapless parents, it would be this: whatever happens to your child lasts forever. But while this “forever” can often times feel as if it were doom or a cursed destiny, the psychodynamic perspective is that it is a boundless source of potential energy.
