In hmolscience, Sean Joseph O’Reilly (1952-) is an American philosopher noted, in human thermodynamics, for his 2001 book How to Manage Your Dick, in which he outlines a energy-entropy based Freudian moral philosophy of how to govern and use one's sexual energy productively. [1]“Making good choices regarding your urges and acting accordingly is more commonly referred to as morality. Without arguing over what constitutes ‘good’, morality might simply be described as responsible urge and information management. Urges use energy, so if we are going to understand how urges work, we must also understand how energy works. Some of the same rules that apply to energy also apply to that friend who lives between your legs.”This understanding of urges, in terms of energy and entropy, to note, is similar to the impulse philosophy developed by American philosopher Elizabeth Porteus. In short, in O'Reilly's model, building on the philosophies of Plato, Aristotle, and Thomas Aquinas, and the id-ego-superego, libido, energy, entropy psychologies of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, he outlines a model for governing one’s personal energy to get what one really wants out of existence, with particular reference to the governance of one’s sexual impulses and sexual energy, examined in the context of a mixture of metaphysics, politics, and modern science, and the three laws of thermodynamics. Although it is ironic that a book on how to manage your dick comes from a man with six kids, it is one of the relatively few works to pick up on the energy psychology of Freud with focus on his ideas of sex, repression, and catharsis.
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| Second edition cover of O'Reilly's 2001 How to Manage Your Dick. [1] |
“The fundamental breakthrough came in trying to find a bridge between the metaphysics of Aristotle, Plato and Aquinas, and the extraordinary insights of new age and other spiritual philosophies. It began with a reflection on the inadequacy of modern epistemology and psychology in dealing with the problem of evil and bad choices. How can you know what is a good choice or a bad choice unless there is a mechanism whereby human beings can know truth?
What is virtue, what is vice and what are the energy dynamics involved in both moral evolution and the devolution associated with evil? The beginning of an answer came from an unusual quarter. Sigmund Freud's concept of cathection describes how instinctual energy gets invested in objects of desire but understanding how this can possibly be is much akin to religious faith describing the actions of grace. Freudian psychology takes it on faith that cathection of instinctual energy is possible and has many ways of demonstrating cathection but much like religion describing the actions of grace, it cannot prove that cathection actually exists. Who has ever seen instinctual energy? But the concept of cathection gave me a clue. How does cathection really work? What is the mechanism of the instinctual energy conversion that is at the root of Freud's insight into human psychology and the sublimation of instinctual energy?
If it could be demonstrated, as the Aristotelians and Scholastics claim, that you intentionally become the thing known, then the metaphysics of cathection could take Freud into places he never would have dreamed of. Cathection hinted of energy transferences at a level not described by traditional psychology. Theology was largely useless in describing the actions of cathection. There seemed to be no clearly articulated theology of the soul's kinetic activities on behalf of the body. To state as does Aristotle that the soul has five powers: the vegetative (growth), locomotive (movement), the sensitive (sensory organs), the appetitive (the will), and the intellectual (mind) tells us absolutely nothing about what those powers are doing on a daily basis—other than that they exist. Cyber kinetics attempts to account for the powers of the soul using metaphysical analogs taken from quantum physics and superstring theory.”
