Three principles for a psychoanalytic psychology.

Freud's psychology involves a search for meaning in the apparently meaningless. 3 principles govern the search: the principle of the dynamic unconscious, that the effects of behavior alter only its conscious (and preconscious), not its unconscious sources; the principle of the plasticity of the interpersonal drives, that sex and aggression are psychically elaborated because they can and must be socialized; and the principle of mastery through reversal of voice, that one must do what one has suffered. These principles account for major aspects of normal development, pathology, and therapy according to classical psychoanalytic writings. Freud's cathexis theory is an alternative, less parsimonious account of some of the same phenomena. That an impulse can precipitate its own control can be accounted for without postulating countercathexis or bound cathexis.