4 | MOTIVATION
Motivation is the psychological energy —physics defines energy as the ability to generate work,9 in other words, the ability to generate movement—that causes an individual to present a behavior—remember that behavior, as has been presented, is every movement with a specific goal.10,11 Motivations can be conscious and unconscious.
In general, from a psychodynamic point of view, there are four types of motivations: the search for pleasure through perception —libido—, aggressive impulses, the desire to attach to others, and narcissistic needs—namely, the desire to reach the maximum attainable development of an individual.10 Each one of these motivations, of course, has their corresponding counterparts. In medical practice, these motivations can be easily detected: for example, the diabetic patient who does not take his drugs could be behaving motivated by a self-aggressive impulse, the somatizing patient who repeatedly goes to the emergency room to receive medical attention even though the doctors have tell him continuously that he has no physical disease could be behaving motivated by an impulse of dependence, etc.
The concept of motivation is relevant because it implies intentionality, namely, it implies that all mental phenomena are directed to an object that is not the mental phenomenon in itself5—in the interpersonal context, this object is individuals­—, a property of the mind that is basic to explain the concepts that follow.