This article is about the Freudian concept of mental energy; for other uses see: psychic.
In psychodynamic psychology, psychic energy, or psychological energy, is an energy by which the work of the personality is performed. The concept of mental energies moving or displacing between various adjoined, conscious and unconscious, mental systems was developed predominantly in Sigmund Freud's 1923 The Ego and the Id. In psychoanalytic theory the source of psychic energy is the id.

Overview
Presently, in psychology, the theory of psychic energy is now, in most circles, considered rather incorrect or obsolete. The term, however, is referenced or referred to quite frequently in an associative sort of way. While of course brains obey the laws of thermodynamics in their chemical processes, the modern scientific consensus has ruled against an energetic model of emotion and thought, because the 20th century's views on embodied adaptive behavior is not anymore based on early scientific mechanistic views from the 17th century with the Christiaan Huygens's invention of mechanical clock as the main metaphore, or the 19th century's steam engines (as in Freud's energetic view on psyche), but are mainly based on computers, software agents, and robots as in embodied cognitive science and its corresponding philosophy of embodiment of adaptive situated agents. Anger in current view is not getting "bottled up" like a pressurized gas as in steam engine, but is viewed rather as "pop-up" window computer users are familiar with (or more exactly a process behind the window) which is triggered by some combinations of perceived (input) data and the "internal state", and which - in stark contrast to "bottled-up" pressurized gas - can be cancelled in a split of a second by the user, or by the agent's own inner higher cybernetic level. The goal of the 21st century's affective computing in science and technology is to build software agents and robots guided by their own emotions and psychodynamics.
Essentially, the original concepts of mental energies, i.e. the work attributed to various human psychological activities, was developed and presented by Freud and Jung during the years approximately 1880 to 1950.

See also

^ Hall, Calvin S.; Nordby, Vernon J. (1999). A Primer of Jungian Psychology. New York: Meridian. ISBN 0-452-01186-8. 
Jung, C.G. (1960). On the Nature of the Psyche. Princeton: Princiton University Press. ISBN 0-691-01751-4.