A similar notion occurred to someone with better credentials, Sigmund Freud, who theorized that the self depended on mental activities involving the transfer of energy. But Freud’s energy model of the self was generally ignored by subsequent researchers. It wasn’t until recently, in Baumeister’s laboratory, that scientists began systematically looking for this source of energy. Until then, for most of the past century, psychologists and educators and the rest of the chattering classes kept finding one reason or another to believe it didn’t exist.
