Efficiency occupies a remarkable and troubling position across the depth-psychology corpus. It is not treated as a neutral technical virtue but as a psychological and moral phenomenon whose uncritical valorization conceals profound dangers. Hillman’s extended meditation in *Kinds of Power* constitutes the most sustained engagement: tracing the concept’s genealogy through Aristotle’s four causes, he demonstrates how the reduction of efficient causality to mere operational effectiveness — stripped of formal and final causes — enabled the machinery of the Holocaust, as embodied in Franz Stangl’s administration of Treblinka. For Hillman, efficiency divorced from purpose and value is not a rational achievement but a delusional abdication. Van der Hart and the structural-dissociation school, drawing on Janet, deploy the term in an entirely different register: here ‘mental efficiency’ names the organism’s capacity to focus and deploy available mental energy in adaptive action — a concept intimately tied to the theory of action tendencies, dissociation, and the integration of traumatic memory. These two registers — one socio-critical and archetypal, one clinical-phenomenological — rarely intersect, yet together they reveal efficiency as a term that cannot be ideologically innocent. Armstrong adds a third note, tracing how specialization and reinvested capital made efficiency self-amplifying in the modernizing West. Jung and Damasio contribute peripheral but suggestive observations on diminished cognitive efficiency as a marker of psychological disturbance.
Nothing must interfere with the efficiency of the procedures… The absolute rule of efficiency. The first clear articulation of efficiency in Western thought occurs neither in the mechanics of physics nor in
Hillman identifies the Holocaust’s operational logic as the paradigm case of efficiency severed from moral finality, marking this as the terminal pathology of Western instrumental reason.
, Kinds of Power: A Guide to Its Intelligent Uses, 1995thesis
what is its purpose, or in Aristotle’s phrase, ‘that for the sake of which’ your efficient actions are performed?… Stangl’s final cause was devoid of all ideals and passions; no other end but profit.
Hillman invokes Aristotle’s four causes to expose how Stangl’s efficiency collapsed final cause into mere profit, demonstrating that efficiency without telos becomes a morally vacant and lethal mechanism.
, Kinds of Power: A Guide to Its Intelligent Uses, 1995thesis
There is an intimate and reciprocal relationship between mental efficiency and level of action tendencies… mental efficiency as the ability to efficiently focus and use whatever ment
Van der Hart establishes ‘mental efficiency,’ following Janet, as the organism’s capacity to marshal mental energy into integrated, adaptive action — the clinical counterpart to the philosophical critique Hillman offers.
, The Haunted Self Structural Dissociation and the Treatmentthesis
mental level indicates the ability to efficiently focus and use whatever mental energy is available in the moment. Mental efficiency includes the concept of integrative capacity.
The structural-dissociation framework defines mental efficiency as synonymous with integrative capacity, making it a direct measure of personality integration and trauma recovery.
, The Haunted Self Structural Dissociation and the Treatmentthesis
the principle of improving mental efficiency involves patients learning to master increasingly complex mental and behavioral actions that support adaptive living, including the ability to prioritize and adjust their goals when needed.
Van der Hart articulates therapeutic improvement of mental efficiency as a graduated, goal-sensitive process, distinguishing it sharply from mere energy expenditure.
, The Haunted Self Structural Dissociation and the Treatmentsupporting
Trauma-related phobias are a major obstacle to improving mental efficiency and consume much mental energy… each successful step in overcoming the phobias also improves mental efficiency.
Phobia maintenance and mental efficiency are shown to exist in a reciprocal inhibitory relationship, with therapeutic desensitization simultaneously freeing and generating mental efficiency.
, The Haunted Self Structural Dissociation and the Treatmentsupporting
The mental efficiency of ANP is generally higher than that of EP. However, it is lower than the level developed by the survivor prior to traumatization, because incompleted trauma-related actions lower the mental level.
Mental efficiency is shown to vary systematically across dissociative personality parts, with the apparently normal part (ANP) retaining higher but still compromised efficiency relative to pre-trauma baselines.
, The Haunted Self Structural Dissociation and the Treatmentsupporting
Scientists, for example, depended upon the increased efficiency of instrument-makers… this in turn affected its own efficiency. Capital was systematically reinvested and multiplied on the basis of continued development.
Armstrong traces the self-amplifying logic of efficiency in Western modernization, where specialization and capital reinvestment create an interlocking momentum that progressively redefines civilization’s organizing values.
, A History of God, 1993supporting
complemented by a modification in the style and efficiency of the thought process… both the signal of the body state (positive or negative) and the style and efficiency of cognition were triggered from the same system.
Damasio locates efficiency of cognition within the somatic-marker framework, showing that emotional valence and cognitive efficiency share a common neural substrate.
, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, 1994supporting
here is a question from Mrs. Crowley about the decrease of efficiency through the mirroring process… the discovery of a new standpoint from which one can judge oneself by means of a newly acquired function.
Jung notes parenthetically that the individuation process of acquiring a new psychological function can temporarily decrease efficiency, suggesting a developmental cost to expanded self-awareness.
, Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928-1930, 1984aside