The Demand for Work: Why the Economic Point of View Never Found Its Reservoir

Freud's economic point of view has been under the same fire for sixty years: since Ricoeur's diagnosis of 1965, psychoanalysis is said to juxtapose an energetics and a hermeneutics that never integrate. This paper argues that the diagnosis is correct but the conclusion drawn from it is not. The quantity metapsychology sought — a stored energy, a "great reservoir" of libido, located in the ego in 1914 and moved to the id in 1923 — is excluded by the doctrine itself: a reservoir is a state function, a state function makes every closed path free of charge, and the compulsion to repeat asserts precisely that returning to the same point is not free. The reservoir did not keep changing address because Freud wavered; there is no address. What the economic point of view should follow instead is located in Freud's own words of 1915 and 1895: the pressure of a drive is a demand for work — an expenditure along a path, not a stock — and what speech accomplishes in the clinic is a discharge, rereads here not as the drainage of a quantity but as the closure of paths. Two refutable predictions follow, and one commitment about the surface on which such circuits are traced is declared as such. This record contains the same paper in two versions: English (primary) and French (original). — Ce dépôt contient le même texte en deux versions : anglaise (principale) et française (originale).