In Freud’s theory of mind, a drive in a broad sense is the force of psychological motivation. In a narrow sense, it is the force of an active innate mental need. An innate mental need is made active by an impulse of an innate need of the body, and its drive forces the mind to do work to the end of satisfying the mental need. The drive does so increasingly until physical action is taken that has the effect of doing away with the somatic impulse, thereby satisfying the innate mental need.

1. Freud Instincts And Their Vicissitudes Pdf Merger

In Freud’s theory there are a multiplicity of drives, and part of the work of psychoanalysis is to identify and understand the most fundamental ones – sexual, self-survival, life, and death. All drives have a source, aim, object, and exert pressure. When a homing pigeon flies home, we might say it does so because of a homing instinct. Freud referred to such instincts with the German term Instinkt, which Freud’s editor James Strachey translated into English as “instinct.” Unfortunately, Strachey also translated Freud’s Trieb as instinct, which as well as being confusing is misleading. Trieb, rather than being an instinct, is a drive, a translation that Alix Strachey acknowledged in her German-English lexicon of psychoanalytic terms (Strachey ).

The confusion over instinct and drive also obscures the debt Freud implicitly owed to Johann Blumenbach (1752–1840) and explicitly acknowledged to Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805), Johann Goethe (1749–1832), and classical Greek and Roman literature on the topic of drive. Freud did not invent drive theory.There are those who claim drive does not capture the nuances of Trieb or its verbal form Treiben (Laplanche and Pontalis; Vermorel; Porte ).

The latter term had been in use at least since the sixteenth century and meant to drive (cattle), impel, push, propel, and get plants to grow, and the former term meant motor force and its energy, pressure, the increase of a herd, and the force that causes botanical sprouting and shooting and came to mean a motivating force in our mental lives. Over time Trieb became associated with, and shaded off into, Liebe (love) and Lust (pleasure).

Long before Freud was born, it was understood that Trieb referred to an internal urge or force associated with pleasure, where explanatory emphasis was placed on its source, aim, and direction. In this paradigm, Trieb was either opposed to Vernunft (reason) or there was a Trieb to Vernunft. When Freud turned his mind to psychological motivation against this historic background, Trieb became the internal innate psychological motivating force in our mental lives, and contrary to popular opinion, the term appeared in his work as early as 1893 and was given its first formulation in 1895 (Freud 1894). A Freudian drive ( Trieb) is to be understood through its source, aim, object, and pressure (Freud ). The paradigmatic example of drives seems almost trivial – we have an innate need for food and when we feel hungry, we are motivated by the drive for nutrition to eat to satisfy our need for food. Eating is efficacious just because it does away with the physical cause of feeling hungry.

However, under Freud’s theory of mind (metapsychology), this formulation, although true, obscures more than it reveals and the implications are anything but trivial.Freud’s theory of drives amounts to a commitment to philosophical internalism – our internal beliefs, desires, and needs drive us to do what we do, no matter what external reason may require us to do. Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) was committed to the latter idea (externalism) whom Freud explicitly draws on (although not on psychological motivation). Whereas Kant of the Enlightenment requires us to act in the light of reason alone, the Freud of German Romanticism posits that the best reason can do is steer the drive forces of our internal needs. The Freud of German Romanticism and the Freud of its theoretical opposite, the rationality of the Enlightenment acquired in his education in medicine and histology, are emblematic of Freud’s disposition to theoretical opposites that are said to explain our mental lives. Sexuality, Nutrition, Eros, and Thanatos. A drive is the force of an innate mental need.

The more pressing the need is, the greater the force of the drive. At first, Freud asserted that the two most powerful motivating psychological forces were built on the idea of Schiller’s hunger and love, reformulated by Freud as the innate needs for nutrition and sexuality, to be later displaced by the life drive (Eros) and the death drive (Thanatos) (Freud, ).

These latter drives are often mistakenly said to be the life drive and the death drive, whereas Eros and Thanatos are stand-ins for two classes of drives, just as the drives for nutrition and sexuality are stand-ins for a plurality of drives. Eros connotes the drives that create greater unities and go on to preserve them, and its dialectical antagonist Thanatos connotes those that undo connections and destroy. The drives of Eros are ones of affection, sex, creativity, and survival. The drives of Thanatos are ones of aggression, harming, and destruction.

At the most abstract and ambitious Freudian level of theorizing, the drives of Eros and Thanatos are, respectively, mental instantiations of the life force that brings together two gametes to form a new life and those that decompose life back to its organic and eventually its inorganic origins (Freud 1938).In Freud’s early work, the drive for nutrition was representative of ego or self-survival drives, and the drives for sexuality, seemingly having no regard for self-survival, were the antithesis of those drives. However, since the survival of our species relies on the drives for sexuality, the ego drives and the sexual drives were eventually united in Eros.

Even though Eros and Thanatos are in dialectical opposition, Freud claims they can and do act in concert to our benefit:In biological functions the two basic instincts the drives of Eros and Thanatos operate against each other or combine with each other. Thus, the act of eating is a destruction of the object with the final aim of incorporating it, and the sexual act is an act of aggression with the purpose of the most intimate union. This concurrent and mutually opposing action of the two basic instincts gives rise to the whole variegation of the phenomena of life.

The analogy of our two basic instincts drives extends from the sphere of living things to the pair of opposing forces – attraction and repulsion – which rule in the inorganic world. (Freud 1938, p. 149)The drives of Eros, Thanatos, sexuality, and nutrition are the mental forces of innate needs.

Freud formulated those needs as innate somatic needs represented in the mind and elsewhere as mental needs that represent innate somatic needs. After some 40 years of working on needs and drives, he concluded that from the perspective of psychoanalysis, the innate needs are needs of the unconscious id (Freud 1938) and that they and their drives become active when stimulated by an impulse of an innate somatic need. Schiller aside, the prominence Freud gave to the drive for sexuality was due, he claimed, to evidence from his clinical practice engaged with psychoneuroses, from which he drew the inference that the causes of all psychoneuroses are unconscious in nature and sexual in origin, although sexuality is not the cause of all psychological disorders.

In fact, Freud claims that neurosis requires nonsexual repressing forces. In other words, psychoanalysis does not claim that sexuality is the driver of all psychological disorders or all the behaviors of the mentally well (Freud 1924). Source, Aim, Object, Pressure, and Direction. In Freud’s anthropomorphic teleological language, consistent with the use of language at the end of the nineteenth century, the source of the drive of a need for nutrition is an impulse of an innate somatic need for nutrition.

The aim of the drive is to satisfy a mental need for nutrition by means of obtaining an object in the world that in the light of experience will satisfy or facilitate satisfying, not the somatic need, but an impulse of that need, and thereby satisfy the mental need. Although we have a continual need for nutrition supplied by food, we do not constantly act to acquire objects to satisfy a need for nutrition – the implication being that the need and drive for nutrition come in bursts or impulses. The aim of the drive is to satisfy an impulse of the need, no matter that impulses will occur again. The pressure of the drive is the pressure it exerts on the mind to undertake mental work, first to call up from memory a salient object, then to work out how to obtain that object or an instantiation of that object, obtain it, and eat.

The aim of the drive is satisfied when the object is obtained in the world and eating ensues. And it is satisfied just because the mind is no longer under pressure to do work since the somatic impulse has been satisfied (done away with). The overarching sequence of events is that of the body not needing an intake of food, then needing an intake, mental work being done, obtaining a salient object, eating, and salient mental work ceasing since the body no longer needs an intake of food.

No matter that drives drive to action, they are conservative in nature since they return the body and mind to the states they were in prior to an impulse of an innate need.Since a drive is a force, it requires that its specification includes direction. Two objects may be traveling at the same speed but have different velocities. Unlike speed, velocity defines the direction in which objects are speeding. Velocity is a vector and so is a force. It follows that the drive force must have direction, and Freud gives the clearest explanation of this when he employs and extends the nineteenth-century idea of the physiological reflex arc (Freud ): the body is stimulated by exogenous sources on the surface (sensory receptors), the results of which are conducted into the interior of the body (at least to the spine if not the brain) and then conducted back to muscles at the surface of the body, and action (muscle burst) ensues.

By extension, the mind is stimulated by endogenous sources on its surface at the somatic-mental frontier, and the drive forces the stimulated ideas into the interior mental processes. The results are then driven to the surface again at the somatic-mental frontier, and there stimulate the body and action ensues. The direction of the drive force is always toward motility. Wishing, Thinking, and Acting. The primary process of wishing in the id recalls an object associated with a previous satisfaction of an impulse of the need for nutrition. The process of wishing, just because it is an id function, takes no account of either the rationality of thinking or the danger it may place the agent in if the object is obtained in the world or is attempted to be obtained. The id demands action and demands it right now!

In contrast, the secondary ego processes of rational type thinking do take into account external realities (the reality principle) and are willing, if need be, to forestall or attempt to deny stimulating the body into action. If a wish brings about action, it can only come about once it has been brought up against the rational type judgment of the ego in the realm of the preconscious, the mental region between the unconscious and the conscious. In this light, the force of the drive entailed in satisfying the id’s needs directs the wished-for object toward the preconscious (toward motility), which is only accessible from the region of the unconscious under the control of ego functions.

It follows that the wished-for object is subjected to the rational type thinking of the ego which takes time. Time is made available so long as the forces of the ego are sufficiently strong to resist the force of the drive.

As long as the ego processes persist, which may include forestalling or denying action, the pressure of the drive increases just because the somatic source of the active need has not been satisfied by eating. It will not stop until the need of the id is satisfied by obtaining the wished-for object or something close to it, and the satisfying action is completed. More often than not, under the increasing pressure of the force of the drive, a compromise is formed, which amounts to the ego functions deflecting or steering the force of the drive to objects and actions consistent with the safety of the agent, insofar as the ego can stand up to the force of the drive:The functional importance of the ego is manifested in the fact that normally control over the approaches to motility devolves upon it. Thus in its relation to the id it is like a man on horseback, who has to hold in check the superior strength of the horse; with this difference, that the rider tries to do so with his own strength while the ego uses borrowed forces. The analogy may be carried a little further. Often a rider, if he is not to be parted from his horse, is obliged to guide it where it wants to go; so in the same way the ego is in the habit of transforming the id’s will into action as if it were its own.

Freud Instincts And Their Vicissitudes Pdf Merger

25)The ego, however, is just not required to hold back one drive force at any one time. The id under stimulation by multiple impulses of somatic needs, classified under either Eros or Thanatos, will wish for multiple objects of desire, the obtaining of which may well conflict with each other.

I may desire a strawberry milk shake driven by an impulse of the need for nutrition, and I may also desire not to obtain a milk shake, strawberry or not, driven by the need for self-survival since the saturated fats in milk add to the clogging of arteries with cholesterol. Pleasure, Unpleasure, and Hunger. In Freud’s early work, the underlying cause of mental work was unpleasure due to either external or internal stimuli (Freud 1895), later overlaid by the pleasure principle (Freud ) – eating a mediocre tasting food will do away with unpleasure, but given the choice, we would prefer the less than mediocre taste of, say, a Viennese Sacher torte that delivers pleasure as well as a lack of unpleasure. Following Freud (Freud, 1938), any feeling of mental tension or pressure is by definition a feeling of unpleasure, warranted by the claim that the feeling of mental pressure is not pleasant, and by extension the release from mental pressure is pleasure. Freud claims that the conscious feeling of mental pressure is no more than a perception in consciousness of an increase in the force of a drive being held back by the ego, and pleasure the perception of a decrease in the force once the ego has done its work and resistance is withdrawn. Likewise, the feeling of hunger is the perception in consciousness of an urgent demand of the innate need for nutrition.

It would then seem that the feeling of hunger and mental pressure are the forces of the need for nutrition that drives us to eat. However, no matter how counterintuitive it may seem, Freudian theory does not require the conscious feeling of hunger or mental pressure for a person (or any other biological organism) to be driven to eat, simply because we are driven by needs of which we are not conscious that can and do issue in efficacious action without the need for conscious awareness. Nevertheless, our conscious mental lives are not epiphenomenal.Freud argues that it would be incoherent to claim there to be unconscious affective states, such as the feeling of hunger.

It follows that the parts of our mental lives of which we are not conscious trade only in ideas (not affects). Nevertheless, the conscious feeling of hunger and mental pressure acts as feedback to the nonconscious, and we come to nonconsciously know the ideas salient to the affective state of hunger and mental pressure. The feelings of hunger, unpleasure, and pleasure (change in mental pressure) act as feedback to the unconscious ego functions to inform them if the results of their work are increasing or decreasing the force of the drive – in other words, successfully steering the force of the drive or not assisted by the feeling of hunger and mental pressure – just because the ego functions operate to obtain pleasure and avoid unpleasure, restrained by the disposition to avoid danger.

Neither a feeling of hunger nor mental tension motivates eating; rather, Freud claims, they act as guides that make the ego functions in the preconscious more efficient. The Neonate, Reality, and Learning. The mental life of a neonate is not much more than conscious perceptions and the unconscious id. When she screams and kicks helplessly, more often than not screaming and kicking stop once she is fed (Freud ). Nevertheless, when she first encounters an impulse of a need for nutrition, she has no salient objects of desire to be the objects of wishing, and she screams and kicks driven by the drive for nutrition in a vain attempt to satisfy the need. It is only when another, usually her mother, helps her out that the need is satisfied. This is the neonate’s first confrontation with the reality of the world outside the internal reality of her unconscious id and its functioning under the drive for nutrition.

The neonate has now experienced the unpleasure of the drive of an impulse of the need for nutrition and the subsequent pleasure once the need was satisfied. Provided that her attention was sufficiently drawn to an object at the time of pleasure, she has a memory of her first object of desire, which is more often than not the breast. The formation of that first object of desire in the face of the reality of the world under the force of the drive for nutrition is the event that starts the formation of the ego out of the id and inaugurates the process of learning. We learn to learn in the first place due to the drive of the need for nutrition in its confrontation with the reality of the world (Freud ).

Sexuality, Components, Mobility, and Sublimation. When a neonate experiences the pleasure of satisfaction due to feeding, she associates not only the breast as an object of desire but also the act of sucking as pleasure, just because Freud claims the mucous membrane of the lips has the innate capacity to deliver pleasure (Freud ). The parts of our bodies that have the innate capacity to deliver pleasure, including the skin and all sensory organs, are by Freudian definition erotogenic zones, and the pleasure they deliver is libidinous (sexual in the broadest sense, including the mother’s love of her baby). Freud refers to these functions as component drives (some prefer the term partial drives) of the drive of the need for sexuality. Different erotogenic zones, under Freud’s theory of childhood development, are more important at different developmental stages (oral, anal-sadistic, phallic, infantile genital) than at others, until at puberty the needs and their drives become organized under the primacy of the genitals:Sexual life includes the function of obtaining pleasure from zones of the body – a function which is subsequently brought into the service of reproduction.

(Freud 1938, p. 152)In the developmental stages, the objects of desire, the objects that the drive of sexuality drives toward, in concert with the process of wishing, change from the lips, to the anus, to the genitals.

This is taken as evidence that the need for sexuality is highly mobile in the objects that it chooses to facilitate satisfaction, strengthened in the knowledge that in the mentally and physically mature, the love of another, as love fades, may be transferred onto another other (Freud ). Freud claims that in the mentally and physically mature, the innate drive for sexuality aims at heterosexual conjugation that serves reproduction.

Nevertheless, due to the exigencies of a life, the sexual drive may undergo vicissitudes – distortions (Freud ) – in the sense that the objects of desire are not, or not primarily, those that serve reproduction, including the genitals when they are the object of masturbation, and those of the same sex, parts of the body not serving reproduction, fetishes, animals, and so on. It may also undergo distortions when the drives of Thanatos constitute a greater part than those of Eros, the results being sadism and masochism. It has been said that Melanie Klein (1882–1960) was the last significant psychoanalytic theorist to adhere to drive theory (Skelton et al. This is underscored by other twenty-first-century views from within psychoanalysis, which assert that any residual traces of the term drive should be expunged from any psychoanalyst’s lexicon, since, on one hand, there is no credible biological basis for contradictory life and death drives, either when Freud posited them, now or ever, and on the other hand, it is of little or no therapeutic value (Badcock; Jackson ). In opposition to this view, others within psychoanalysis claim that drives are a necessary concept if we are to explain why we do what we do, although in need of revision (Schmidt-Hellerau, ). Revision or not, others (Solms and Zellner ) turn to neuroscience to bolster the theory of drives, particularly that of Jaak Panksepp (Panksepp and Biven ) who offers “RAGE”, “SEEKING”, “LUST” and other components as stand-ins for neurochemical processes that are claimed to explain why we do what we do.

And there are philosophers who claim that the concept of drive is alive and well (Brakel; Gomez ), no matter that it faces contemporary challenges, and others who argue that the concept of an unconscious mental life, let alone drives, is incoherent (Searle ). We all have the same sort of drives because of our phylogenetic evolutionary past and variations because of our idiosyncratic ontogenetic development and life experiences. The paradigmatic example of drives seems to be an obvious truth – we have an innate need for food and when we feel hungry, we are motivated by the drive for nutrition to eat to satisfy our need for food, and eating is efficacious just because it does away with the physical need for food. However, Freud’s filling out of the seemingly obvious truth is not so obviously true – we have an innate need of the unconscious id for nutrition and when there is an impulse of the somatic need for nutrition in the form of food, we are motivated by the drive for nutrition to eat to satisfy our unconscious mental need for nutrition in the form of food whether we feel hungry or not. Eating is efficacious just because it does away with the impulse of the somatic need for nutrition. The ego is made more efficient in its pursuit of pleasure by the increase or decrease in conscious mental tension and the feeling of hunger, if those feelings obtain.

The acceptance or not of Freud’s theory of drive relies on more than his explanation of the force of the drive of innate mental needs. It relies on acceptance of, if not all, then other, salient parts of his theory of mind. Until one at least contingently accepts other parts of Freud’s theory of mind, no assessment can be made of the validity of his theory of drive. That said, Freud has the last word:The power of the id expresses the true purpose of the individual organism’s life. This consists in the satisfaction of its innate needs and the concurrent and mutually opposing action of the two basic instincts the drives of Eros and Thanatos gives rise to the whole variegation of the phenomena of life. (Freud 1938, pp.

148–149) Cross-References.