From the author: This article is an attempt to comprehend and supplement psychoenergetic concepts in psychoanalysis. Energy of the psyche. Psychoanalytic teaching identifies three basic dimensions, planes in which all the most important characteristics of the psyche are located didactically: the topical plane (the well-known division of the mental apparatus into the unconscious, preconscious and conscious), the structural plane (the no less well-known division of the psyche into the Id (It) , Ego (I) and Super-ego (Super-I)) and energy. If modern psychoanalysts, and psychotherapists in general, have become accustomed to and understand the first two, then the energy aspect, in a purely Freudian understanding, raises significant and reasonable doubts among many .Freudian energetic ideas about the psyche are based on the concept of the presence of two basic drives - the drive to life (Eros) and the drive to death (Thanatos). Those. The energy of the psyche has a dichotomous, bipolar nature and, accordingly, is characterized by the need to maintain the energetic parity of these two forces, avoiding dangerous imbalances in the dominance of one over the other. It is worth noting that initially the energetic component of the psyche in the works of the founding father of psychoanalysis was reduced to one single drive - Eros , which has an energy called libido. The idea of ​​the existence of the death drive in his metapsychological concept appeared later in the work “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” Freud justifies the existence and importance of the death drive through the analysis of extensive material related to traumatic neuroses. He draws attention to the impossibility of explaining the rather wide range of symptoms observed in this case by the manifestation of the pleasure principle, which is guided by Eros. Namely, recurring and often intrusive memories, fantasies, thoughts, affects, dreams, which return consciousness to a situation associated with a fatal situation presented in experience, to the content of a dangerous, threatening, in some way, fatal nature. In these manifestations, Freud saw desire to take possession of, to appropriate such content, that is, to take possession of what can be called fatal, deadly, dangerous. And this desire was designated by Freud as the Death Attraction. On the other hand, proof of the presence of this basic drive can be seen in the very fact of the inevitable biological death of the organism, which can reasonably be considered not so much inevitable as useful in the aspect of the evolutionary process, which constantly renews biological species populations, increases their adaptive capabilities, which would be it is impossible without death as a biological phenomenon. According to Freudian theoretical concepts, the death drive was opposed to the life drive, which included sexual instincts and self-preservation instincts. “If we accept as a fact that does not admit of exception,” Freud wrote, “that everything living due to internal causes dies and returns to the inorganic, then we can say: the goal of all life is death, and vice versa - the inanimate was earlier than the living... Once upon a time, what “The properties of the living were awakened in inanimate matter by completely unknown forces... The tension that arose then in the previously inanimate matter sought to be balanced: this was the first desire to return to the inanimate.” Such a dualistic interpretation of the energy basis of mental activity was not recognized by the majority of psychoanalysts during Freud’s lifetime and not received sufficient development in the works of psychoanalytic theorists after Freud's death. The theory of opposition between the life drive and the death drive is shared by only two modern psychoanalytic schools: the orthodox Freudians and the followers of M. Klein, who used the idea of ​​the death drive while exploring the mental dynamics of childhood. According to Klein, the feeling of anxiety is caused by the emergence of danger, whichexposes the body to the death drive. M. Klein also discovered the action of the death drive in a variety of childhood conflicts. While fully aligned with the biological justification of the death drive, many authors do not accept that aspect of it, which should be the mental representation of this drive. The status of basic or fundamental would have to determine the fact that the Death Attraction would be experienced by each individual as a personal need, which, in accordance with its undeniable importance, should be presented in the form of goals and motives of an appropriate nature. And the satisfaction of which should bring pleasure. In contrast to this, we can say that when faced with a clear and open desire of our own or the desire of someone to die, we with our whole being resist it as something alien to human nature. Such desire is experienced in the form of suffering. Moreover, the analytical process with such a disposition always reveals in suicidal intentions not so much a true desire to die, or rather, does not reveal one at all, but rather a desire to preserve the developing destruction of a significant area of ​​psychic reality, as a rule, associated with an acute narcissistic deficit. So, having with On the one hand, a fairly well-founded point of view regarding the evolutionary benefits of death, and on the other hand, the obvious fact that this biological focus on death, which exists in each individual, does not find needful expression at the mental level, I propose to solve this problem by designating Death as the need is exclusively evolutionary-biological, but not mental. Death is represented in the psyche as part of the intropsychic model of reality, but not as a fundamental attraction. While not agreeing with the possibility of the existence of a true attraction to our own death, we cannot deny the fact that very often we are faced with varying levels of awareness and intensity of desires aimed at causing harm or death to others. This phenomenon is common and not surprising for psychoanalysts and all those who have had experience of encountering the psyche at moments of its openness to knowledge. We call all this aggression. It is also not surprising to us that aggressive motives do not always find expression in their pure form. Often they undergo a certain number of changes - they are masked, transformed, or simply exist beyond the reach of consciousness, manifesting themselves in the latter case in the form of various kinds of painful affective symptoms. Thus. the manifestation of most expansive-aggressive impulses turns out to be difficult as a result of the compensatory activity of some other force, the goal of which is similar to the principle of self-preservation, but obviously is not limited to self-preservation, and is sometimes clearly in opposition to it. Any psychoanalyst will designate this situation as a structural conflict between the Super-Ego and one of the other two functional mental authorities (Id or Ego), in which the Super-Ego will play a blocking role. Those. The super-ego in such a situation acts as a stronger (energy-intensive) part of the psyche. Indeed, in essence, in such a description we are talking about some activity - an energy process, which owes the very fact of its existence to certain algorithms (drives) that have come into conflict. In order for a conflict of drives to occur, according to logic, there must be more than one. And each of these drives must have its own strength (energy) - otherwise the conflict could not have happened either. It seems to me that the answer to the question of what kind of basic drives organize mental activity should be sought on the border of human fantasies and an objective assessment of the fruits of it (human) activity. From my point of view, Freud's attraction to life and attraction to death manifest themselves in the form of changing activity, a kind of transformative influence. And if you do not evaluate from the perspective of the morality of the observer.