Basic Psychoanalytic Concepts on the Theory of Instincts

Humberto Nagera

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138964419
• eBook ISBN: 9781317670445
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Originally published in 1970, this volume describes in condensed but detailed form Freud's development of the theory of instincts. As is well known, Freud reformulated and amplified his theory of instincts at several points during his lifetime. Such periodical amplifications and reformulations were made necessary by a number of factors, for as Freud gained experience he not only developed fresh insights but also was faced with the problem of explaining an increasing amount of clinical phenomena that offered itself for examination under the psychoanalytic microscope.

There can be no doubt that Freud considered his theory of instincts as one of the corner stones of psychoanalysis and yet at the same time he recognised that it was an area where many of his formulations were necessarily of a tentative character and open to discussion and modification.

In this volume the reader will be able to follow the development of Freud's thought from his initial discovery of the duality of 'sexual' and 'ego' instincts and his recognition of the fundamental importance of the aggressive forces in human nature and behaviour, to the formulation of his theories regarding life and death.

INSTINCT AND DRIVE

In the original German of Freud’s works the terms ‘Instinkt’ or ‘instinktiv’ appear in five works only, namely in Totem and Taboo (1912–13), in the paper on The Unconscious’ (1915e), in the clinical paper ‘From the History of an Infantile Neurosis’ (1918b [1914]), in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921c) and in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926d). In his descriptions of instinctual urges, impulsions, needs, or drives, Freud invariably used the term ‘Trieb’. In the Standard Edition Freud’s term ‘Trieb’ has been translated by ‘instinct’ throughout. It is important to bear this in mind, as Freud makes a clear distinction between ‘Instinkt’ and ‘Trieb’.

In the General Preface to the Standard Edition the editors argue that ‘from the standpoint of modern biology, Freud used the word “Trieb” to cover a variety of different concepts’. For this reason they rejected the suggestion of rendering Freud’s ‘Trieb’ by ‘drive’ and gave preference to choosing ‘an obviously vague and indeterminate word’ like ‘instinct’.¹

Jones, in his biography of Freud, points out that ‘… the German word Trieb is less committal than the English “instinct”, which definitely implies an inborn and inherited character.

‘Other words such as “urge”, “impulsion” or the more colloquial and expressive American “drive”, have been suggested as translations, but none of them is entirely satisfactory. On the whole the word in Freud’s writings more often means “instinct” in our sense.’²

In four of the passages where Freud uses the term ‘Instinkt’ with regard to human beings he makes the comparison with phenomena as they can be observed in the animal world. But whereas there can be no doubt about the existence of Triebe in every human being, Freud is more doubtful as to the existence of Instinkte in human beings: ‘If inherited mental formations exist in the human being—something analogous to instinct [Instinkt] in animals—these constitute the nucleus of the Ucs.¹ This seems to point to a first important differentiation between an Instinkt and a Trieb in Freud’s view. Whilst Instinkte are ‘inherited mental formations’, a Trieb is a frontier-concept ‘between the mental and the physical’, and the ‘source of an instinct [Trieb] is a process of excitation occurring in an organ’,² which subsequently may find a—conscious or unconscious—representation.³ In the continuation of the above quotation from ‘The Unconscious’ Freud maintains a clear distinction between the two: ‘Later there is added to them [den Instinkten] what is discarded during childhood development as unserviceable; and this need not differ in its nature from what is inherited. A sharp and final division between the content of the two systems does not, as a rule, take place till puberty’⁴ (The meaning of the last sentence seems somewhat obscure.)

Other passages seem to suggest that when Freud is talking of Instinkte he is not so much talking of them in regard to internal phenomena but of an inherited recognition of external situations, particularly danger situations:

‘The external (real) danger must also have managed to become internalized if it is to be significant for the ego. It must have been recognized as related to some situation of helplessness that has been experienced. Man seems not to have been endowed, or to have been endowed to only a very small degree, with an instinctive [instinktiv] recognition of the dangers that threaten him from without. Small children are constantly doing things which endanger their lives, and that is precisely why they cannot afford to be without a protecting object. In relation to the traumatic situation, in which the subject is helpless, external and internal dangers, real dangers and instinctual demands [Triebanspruch] converge … the fear of small animals, thunderstorms, etc., might perhaps be accounted for as vestigial traces of the congenital preparedness to meet real dangers which is so strongly developed in other animals.’⁵

In discussing the later reactivation of the primal scene observation made by the Wolf Man at the age of one-and-a-half, Freud makes a similar point:

‘It is hard to dismiss the view that some sort of hardly definable knowledge, something, as it were, preparatory to an understanding, was at work in the child at the time. We can form no conception of what this may have consisted in; we have nothing at our disposal but the single analogy—and it is an excellent one—of the farreaching instinctive [instinktiv] knowledge of animals.

If human beings, too, possessed an instinctive [instinktiv] endowment such as this, it would not be surprising that it should be very particularly concerned with the processes of sexual life, even though it could not be by any means confined to them. This instinctive [instinktiv] factor would then be the nucleus of the unconscious, a primitive kind of mental activity, which would later be dethroned and overlaid by human reason, when that faculty came to be acquired, but which in some people, perhaps in everyone, would retain the power of drawing down to it the higher mental processes.’¹

Implicit in the last sentence of this passage seems to be a further distinction between an Instinkt and a Trieb. Whereas a Trieb is defined by Freud as ‘an endosomatic, continuously flowing source of stimulation’ and is regarded as ‘a measure of the demand made upon the mind for work’ with the ‘immediate aim of … the removal of this organic stimulus’,² an Instinkt, in Freud’s sense, does not seem to have the qualities of a continuous internal stimulation, of making demands on the mind, and its aim seems to lie more in self-preservation than in the removal of an organic stimulus. Furthermore, the vicissitudes of Triebe, described by Freud in ‘Instincts and their Vicissitudes’ (‘Triebe und Triebschicksale’), do not seem to apply to the inherited mental formations called ‘Instinkte’ by Freud.

These considerations lead us to a last difference inherent in Freud’s distinction between Instinkten and Trieben. One of the characteristics of the latter is that they continuously seek discharge or satisfaction. This does not seem to apply in the case of an Instinkt.

In the remaining two works (Totem and Taboo and Group Psychology) Freud uses the term ‘Instinkt’ in reviewing some literature relevant to the respective topics discussed, but neither passage throws any further light on the precise meaning which the concept of Instinkt had for Freud.

In Totem and Taboo Freud discusses and discards Westermarck’s contention that the ‘horror of incest’ should be regarded as a consequence of an innate instinct (Instinkt).

‘A biological instinct [Instinkt] of the kind suggested would scarcely have gone so far astray in its psychological expression that, instead of applying to blood relatives (intercourse with whom might be injurious to reproduction), it affected persons who were totally innocuous in this respect, merely because they shared a common home…. Thus the view which explains the horror of incest as an innate instinct [Instinkt] must be abandoned.’¹

In Group Psychology the term ‘Instinkt’ appears several times in the context of Freud’s discussion of Trotter’s work on Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War (1916). Freud does not seem to make a clear distinction between Trieb and Instinkt, using the term ‘Herdeninstinkt’ in one paragraph, ‘Herdentrieb’ in another.²

We should like to add two other passages which may help to throw some light on Freud’s use of the terms ‘Instinkt’ and ‘Trieb’. The first one seems to indicate that he uses the term ‘Trieb’ to denote something which differs from the more commonly used ‘Instinkt’: ‘We give these bodily needs, in so far as they represent an instigation to mental activity, the name of “Triebe” [instincts] a word for which we are envied by many modern languages.’³

On the other hand, in his Preface to Reik’s Ritual: Psychoanalytic Studies (1919) we read the following sentence: ‘These instincts [Triebe] which have fallen victim to repression—untamed and indestructible, yet inhibited from any kind of activity—together with their primitive mental representatives, constitute the mental underworld, the nucleus of the true unconscious, and are at every moment ready to assert their demands and, by hook or by crook, to force their way forward to satisfaction.’⁴ In the characteristic of forming the ‘nucleus of the true unconscious’ this definition of ‘Triebe’ comes close to that given by Freud of ‘Instinkte’ in his paper on ‘The Unconscious’.⁵

1  Editor’s General Preface, S.E., Vol. I, p. 25.

2  Jones, E., Sigmund Freud. Life and Work, The Hogarth Press, London 1958, Vol. 2, p. 354.

1  (1915e) ‘The Unconscious’, S.E., Vol. 14, p. 195.

2  (1905d [1915]), Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, S.E., Vol. 7, p. 168.

3  (1915e) ‘The Unconscious’, S.E., Vol. 14. p. 177.

4  ibid., p. 195.

5  (1926d) Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, S.E. Vol., 20, p. 168.

1  (1918b [1914]) ‘From the History of an Infantile Neurosis’, S.E., Vol. 17, p. 120.

2  (1905d [1915]) Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, S.E., Vol. 7, p. 168.

1  (1912–13) Totem and Taboo, S.E., Vol. 13, p. 123n.

2  (1921c) Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, S.E., Vol. 18, pp. 117–20.

3  (1926c) The Question of Lay Analysis, S.E., Vol. 20, p. 200.

4  (1919g) Preface to Reik’s Ritual: Psychoanalytic Studies, S.E., Vol. 17, p. 260.

5  See reference 1 on p. 20 above.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF FREUD’S INSTINCT THEORY, 1894–1939

I. INTRODUCTION AND DEFINITION

Freud’s efforts to understand the nature of the forces participating in mental conflict ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND COPYRIGHT NOTICES
• FOREWORD
• INTRODUCTION
• 1. Instinct and Drive
• 2. The Development of Freud’s Instinct Theory, 1894-1939
• 3. Component Instincts
• 4. Erotogenic Zones
• 5. Source, Aim, Pressure and Object of the Sexual Component Instincts
• 6. The Death Instinct
• 7. The Aggressive Drive
• 8. Fusion-Defusion
• 9. Repetition Compulsion
• 10. Activity-Passivity; Masculinity-Femininity
• 11. Masochism
• 12. Sadism
• 13. Bisexuality
• INDEX