In psychodynamics, Teresa Brennan (1952-2003) was an American feminist philosopher and social-political theorist noted for her theories on how energetics applies to social issues, such as relations between men and women, theorizing on concepts such as the physics of social pressure. [1]

Overview
Brennan’s work is largely based on the Austrian psychologist Sigmund Freud’s theories of how forces act on the mind in a physical sense in connection to psychological energy. In summary to her first book, the 1992 Interpretation of the Flesh: Freud and Femininity, Brennan explains that “the solution to the riddle of femininity depends on unraveling Freud’s neglected if confused theories on psychical energy, while discarding the assumption that the subject is energetically and emotionally self-contained.” In this work she discusses social energy, emphasizing Freud’s physical psyche model using the notion of conflicting forces complemented by bound energy and free energy. [2] This bound energy, supposedly, is said to lead to psychic rigidity while freely mobile energy leads to psychic flexibility. [3]

In her 1997 article “Social Pressure”, she argues that social pressure operates as physical energy, arguing that social pressures are pressures to conform but also those exerted on the psyche in the same way that physical pressures are exerted on the body. [4] In her last book, the 2004 The Transmission of Affect, which seems to be the most popular, she presents the idea that one can soak up someone else’s depression or anxiety or sense the tension in a room, arguing that the emotions and energies of one person or group can be absorbed by or can enter directly into another.

Education
In 1992, Brennan was a professor of social and political sciences at the University of Amsterdam, also teaching regularly at the universities of Cambridge and London. In 2003, she was the chair of the humanities department at Florida Atlantic University.

References
1. Jardine, Alice, Lundeen, Shannon, and Oliver, Kelly. (2007). Living Attention: on Teresa Brennan (pg. xi). SUNY Press.
2. Brennan, Teresa. (1992). The Interpretation of the Flesh: Freud and Femininity. London: Routledge.
3. Oliver, Kelly. (2001). Witnessing: Beyond Recognition (pg. 196-197). University of Minnesota Press.
4. Brennan, Teresa. (1997). “Social Pressure”, American Imago 54(3): 257-88.
5. Brennan, Teresa. (2004). The Transmission of Affect. Cornell.

Further reading
● Brennan, Teresa. (1993). History after Lacan. New York: Routledge.