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Introduced into philosophy by Christian Wolff (1679-1754), the notion of monism refers to ontologies maintaining that all things lead back to mind or to matter. More generally, monism describes a system in which the totality of things is reducible to a single type of entity, be it substantial, logical, physical, or moral. Variations in usage and the competing expression "philosophy of the One" mean that the term should be used judiciously. People speak of the monisms of Parmenides (515 BCE), Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919), and Wilhelm Ostwald (1853-1932); of the monism of psychophysical parallelism; and even of the monism of the bridge relation that characterizes dualism.

Freud, who deliberately kept away from philosophy, never used the noun monism and seldom used the adjective monist. Yet his dualistic theory of the instincts implicitly challenges the idea of instinctual monism. Freud's treatment of this issue began with his early notion of narcissism in "Psycho-Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides)" (1911c [1910]) and culminated in his positing the life and death instincts in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920g). General discussion of these issues included polemics between Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav Jung, and numerous authors have addressed the topic after 1920. According to Freud, instinctual dualism underlies psychic conflicts and forms the foundation for the psychic structures that result from them.

Narcissism, and thus the libido's cathexis of the ego (the locus of the instincts of self-preservation, according to the first topography) threatened to lead to an instinctual monism and left Freud stymied: "These are problems which we are still quite helpless and incompetent to solve" (p. 74), he wrote in "Psycho-Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides)." Moreover, Freud introduced major, complex, irreducible constructs, such as the ego and narcissism, within a theory whose objects he had been at pains to reduce, in the manner of traditional science. This development posed unprecedented epistemological problems for trying to understand these theoretical entitles and brought with it another threat, structural monism. The opposition between object-libido and ego-libido and the idea that the instincts exert continual and constant pressure explained the dynamics of the newly described agencies of the psyche (Freud, 1915c). Freud described additional forms—primary and secondary narcissism, ideal ego and ego ideal—but maintained, as he wrote in "On Narcissism," that "a unity comparable to the ego cannot exist in the individual from the start; the ego has to be developed ..., so there must be something added to auto-erotism—a new psychical action—in order to bring about narcissism" (p. 77). Freud spent three years developing the theory presented in "On Narcissism: An Introduction" (1914c). Freud thus reduced the threat of monism by positing of the life and death instincts (1920g) and developing the second topography, set forth in The Ego and the Id (1923b).

Freud's delayed introduction of narcissism and the ego was in part responsible for Adler's and Jung's monist dissents. Later, Jacques Lacan's theories on the signifier (the phallus) would suggest another form of monism, a correlate of his static structuralism.

MICHÈLE PORTE

See also: Destrudo; Dualism; Id; Object, change of/choice of; Oedipus complex; Psychosomatic limit/boundary.