When the body is worn out and the brain is tired,
the whole organism welcomes death.... The body dies because it wants to. It
finds it beyond its power to resist the disease or to mend the injury, and so,
tired out with the struggle, turns to death. If the consciousness were more
sensitive to the feelings and impulses of the whole organism, it would share
this desire, and, indeed, sometimes does so (Alan Watts).
Instinct Theory
Instinct theory is a theory that all actions, thoughts, and intents can
be traced back to being caused by instinct. Human actions such as ridiculing
others can be thought to be akin to an animal attacking a younger animal of the
same species so as to deter them from trying to usurp a leader in the pack. It
is often this that offers an explanation for why a person would act one way or
another. Adultery is another form of this. Instinct tells animals to take the
easiest path to survival. If a significant other doesn't produce offspring or
sufficiently please a person, that person might look for another way to
perpetuate the species or to live more easily. It is an advanced form of crude
animal behavior.
The influence of dualism on early psychology provided a temptingly simple answer to the question of why people behave as they do. Because dualist views of human nature supported the idea of free will, the dualist 'theory' of motivation succinctly asserted that people choose their courses of action.
This view presented problems for scientific psychologists, especially as research identified indisputable environmental influences on behavior. Given the mechanistic influences on early psychology, a more appealing theory of motivation explained human behavior as being, like animal behavior, governed by instincts. Instincts are innate, goal-directed sequences of behavior; they are more complex than simple reflexes but are impervious to the influence of learning and experience.
Life Instincts
Freud saw all human
behavior as motivated by the drives or instincts, which in turn are the
neurological representations of physical needs. At first, he referred to them
as the life instincts.
These instincts perpetuate:
(a) The life of the
individual, by motivating him or her to seek food and water.
(b) The life of the
species, by motivating him or her to have sex.
The motivational energy of
these life instincts, the "oomph" that powers our psyches, he called libido,
from the Latin word for "I desire."
Freud's clinical
experience led him to view sex as much more important in the dynamics of the
psyche than other needs. We are, after all, social creatures, and sex is the
most social of needs. Plus, we have to remember that Freud included much more
than intercourse in the term sex! Anyway, libido has come to mean, not any old
drive, but the sex drive.
So, Eros (one more
definition of the life drive/instinct, libido) is concerned with the
preservation of life and the preservation of the species, It thus appears as
basic need for health, safety and sustenance and through sexual drives. It
seeks both to preserve life and to create life.
Eros is associated with
positive emotions of love, and hence pro-social behavior, cooperation,
collaboration and other behaviors that support harmonious societies.
Death Instincts
Later in his life, Freud
began to believe that the life instincts didn't tell the whole story. Libido is
a lively thing; the pleasure principle keeps us in perpetual motion. And yet
the goal of all this motion is to be still, to be satisfied, to be at peace, to
have no more needs. The goal of life, you might say, is death! Freud began to
believe that "under" and "beside" the life instincts there
was a death instinct. He began to believe that every person has an
unconscious wish to die.
This seems like a strange
idea at first, and it was rejected by many of his students, but it definitely has
some basis in experience: Life can be a painful and exhausting process. There
is easily, for the great majority of people in the world, more pain than
pleasure in life -- something we are extremely reluctant to admit! Death
promises release from the struggle.
Thanatos (one of the
applied labels for the death drive/instinct) appears in opposition and balance
to Eros and pushes a person towards extinction and an 'inanimate state'. Freud
saw drives as moving towards earlier states, including non-existence.
‘The aim of all life is death...inanimate things
existed before living ones’ (Freud 1920).
Thanatos is associated
with negative emotions such as fear, hate and anger, which lead to anti-social
acts from bullying to murder (perhaps as projection of the death drive).
Freud also referred to a nirvana
principle. Nirvana is a Buddhist idea, often translated as heaven, but
actually meaning "blowing out," as in the blowing out of a candle. It
refers to non-existence, nothingness, the void, which is the goal of all life
in Buddhist philosophy.
The day-to-day evidence of
the death instinct and its nirvana principle is in our desire for peace, for
escape from stimulation, our attraction to alcohol and narcotics, our penchant
for escapist activity, such as losing ourselves in books or movies, our craving
for rest and sleep. Sometimes it presents itself openly as suicide and suicidal
wishes. And, Freud theorized, sometimes we direct it out away from ourselves,
in the form of aggression, cruelty, murder, and destructiveness.
In 1924, Freud drew a clear distinction between main principles of his
dual instincts theory: "The nirvana principle, belonging as it does
to the death instinct, has undergone a modification in living organisms
through which it has become the pleasure principle ... the pleasure principle represents the
demands of the libido; and the modification of the latter principle, the reality principle, represents the
influence of the external world”.
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