Instincts and their Vicissitudes

What a drive is, the four fates that can befall it, and why hate is older than love.

German, the original language

Original title: Triebe und Triebschicksale
First published: 1915(aged 59)
Original language: German

Overview

A science, Sigmund Freud objects at the start of this essay, does not begin from sharply defined concepts, however often its critics demand them. It begins by describing, and its basic ideas stay vague, close to conventions, until research fills them in. The essay then sets out to fix one such idea: the drive, Trieb in German, which James Strachey's English translation renders as "instinct". A drive, Freud argues, is a concept on the frontier between mind and body. It is the mind's representative of stimuli arising inside the organism, and it makes a constant demand for work. One can turn away from a strong light; from a drive there is no running away. Every drive has a pressure, an aim, an object and a source, and the object is the most changeable of the four. Freud then lists what can happen to a drive: it can be reversed into its opposite, turned round upon the self, repressed, or sublimated, and he treats only the first two here, leaving repression for a paper of its own. Sadism becomes masochism, the wish to look becomes the wish to be looked at, and love can change into hate — which, Freud argues, is the older of the two, born of the infant's first rejection of a world that disturbs it. The essay appeared in the Internationale Zeitschrift für ärztliche Psychoanalyse in 1915, one of five papers Freud published from a planned series of twelve on the foundations of psychoanalysis. Its basic division, between drives that preserve the self and sexual drives, did not last: five years later Beyond the Pleasure Principle replaced it with drives of life and of death.

Key concepts

What are a drive's pressure, aim, object and source?

They are the four parts Freud finds in every drive. The pressure is its force, the amount of work it demands. The aim is always satisfaction, removing the stimulation at its source, though the routes to it can differ. The object is whatever the drive uses to reach its aim, another person or part of one's own body. The source is the process in an organ from which the stimulus comes.

What is a vicissitude of a drive?

A vicissitude, Freud's Triebschicksal, is a fate a drive can meet on its way to satisfaction, usually as a defence against it. He names four: reversal into its opposite, turning round upon one's own self, repression, and sublimation, the redirection of a drive to an aim far from sex. The essay works through the first two and leaves repression and sublimation for elsewhere.

What are the three polarities of mental life?

Freud says mental life is governed by three pairs of opposites: self against outside world, pleasure against unpleasure, and active against passive. The first is forced on us by the difference between stimuli we can flee and those we cannot. The second decides our actions. The third is biological in origin. Love and hate, he argues, can only be understood by seeing which pair they belong to.

What is the purified pleasure-ego?

It is the early self that sorts the world by pleasure alone. Whatever gives pleasure it takes into itself, as if swallowing it; whatever brings unpleasure it casts out as foreign, even when it comes from within. Outside, object and hated thing are at first the same. What is taken in is felt as part of the self, and the self becomes, for a time, everything pleasant.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

A Stimulus No One Can Flee

What exactly pushes us, from inside, to act? Freud tries to fix the basic concept of his theory and admits at the outset that it cannot yet be sharply defined.

A science, Freud insists, starts from description and lets its concepts sharpen later. The drive is his test case: a demand on the mind arising within the body, constant and inescapable, unlike an outside stimulus one can flee. Every drive has a pressure, an aim, which is always satisfaction, an object, and a source in the body. The object is the loosest bond of the four and can be exchanged. He divides the drives provisionally into self-preserving and sexual ones, and says so.

drive theory
definitions
methodology
scientific method
biology
nervous system
satisfaction
self-preservation

Enter a dialogue

How Love Turns into Hate

Can a drive change direction, or even become its opposite? Freud follows looking, cruelty and love through their reversals and finds hate at the very beginning.

Of four possible fates of a drive, the essay treats two: reversal into its opposite and turning round upon the self. Sadism turns into masochism, looking into being looked at, though the earlier active form always survives beside the new one. Love is the hardest case, since it has three opposites. Hate, Freud concludes, is not love inverted: it is older, rooted in the infant's first rejection of a world that brings it disturbance, and it lends love its ambivalence.

love and hate
love
hate
sadism
masochism
ambivalence
activity and passivity
autoeroticism
narcissism
object relations

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 39
distinct concepts: 76
by passages held, corpus-wide: #687

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “drive theory” and “sadism”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 3 concepts, joined by 2 pairings. 31 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
drive theory	sadism	4
drive theory	love and hate	2

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1900 The Interpretation of Dreams (Die Traumdeutung)
Begun from his own dreams in the 1890s and enlarged in edition after edition, this is where Freud sets out the method of interpretation that his later books apply to slips of the tongue, jokes and myths.
DE
1901 The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens)
The dream book's method carried into waking life; its slips and forgettings became the opening part of the lectures Freud later gave to beginners in Vienna.
DE
1905 Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewußten)
Freud's only book-length study of comedy, and the one most built from borrowed material: puns, anecdotes and Jewish jokes, each taken apart in turn.
DE
1907 Frühe Schriften zu Religion und Dichtung
Two early excursions from the clinic, gathered here in one volume: the seed of Freud's later books on religion, and his short account of where a writer's stories come from.
DE
1910 Zur Theorie des Unbewußten
Four theoretical papers written between 1910 and 1915 and gathered here in one volume, on the road from the dream book to the metapsychological essays of 1915 — the last of the four is one of those essays.
DE
1913 Spätere Schriften zu Dichtung und Mythos
Two essays from 1913 and 1917, gathered here in one volume, that show Freud the reader of Shakespeare and Goethe: the dream-book method applied to a stage motif and to the first page of a famous autobiography.
DE
1913 Totem and Taboo (Totem und Tabu)
The first of Freud's books on society and religion, where he moves from the patient to the human species; Group Psychology, The Future of an Illusion and his last book, on Moses, all build on its story of the murdered father.
DE
1914 On Narcissism: An Introduction (Zur Einführung des Narzißmus)
A short essay written as Jung was breaking with Freud, and the hinge between his early theory of the drives and the later picture of ego and super-ego.
DE
1915 Instincts and their Vicissitudes (Triebe und Triebschicksale) you are here DE
1915 Schriften aus dem Weltkrieg
Freud's direct responses to the First World War, gathered in one volume on this site: a long essay of 1915 on disillusionment and death, and a short one of 1916 on transience and mourning.
DE
1915 The Unconscious (Das Unbewußte)
Freud's fullest account of what he meant by the unconscious, written in wartime Vienna eight years before The Ego and the Id redrew his map of the mind.
DE
1917 Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse)
Freud's own introduction to his work, and the closest thing he wrote to a textbook: his books on dreams and on everyday slips retold for listeners, then carried on into a general theory of neurosis.
DE
1919 The 'Uncanny' (Das Unheimliche)
A rare venture by Freud into aesthetics, a field he says psychoanalysts seldom feel drawn to, written in 1919 beside the first draft of Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
DE
1920 Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Jenseits des Lustprinzips)
The hinge of Freud's later work: the 1920 book that introduces the death drive, followed within three years by the new map of the mind in The Ego and the Id.
DE
1921 Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse)
The bridge between Freud's speculations on prehistory and his new model of the mind: its chapter on a "grade in the ego" sets out the ego ideal that The Ego and the Id would rename two years later.
DE
1923 The Ego and the Id (Das Ich und das Es)
The book in which Freud's later model of the mind takes its final shape; the essays and books that follow it, on anxiety, religion and civilisation, all speak its language of ego, id and super-ego.
DE
1924 Späte Schriften zur Ich-Psychologie
Three short papers of the mid-1920s, gathered here in one volume, in which Freud tests the model of The Ego and the Id on psychosis, on memory and on laughter.
DE
1926 Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (Hemmung, Symptom und Angst)
Written three years after The Ego and the Id, it rebuilds the theory of neurotic symptoms in that book's terms, starting from the difference between a symptom and an inhibition, a restriction the ego places on itself.
DE
1927 The Future of an Illusion (Die Zukunft einer Illusion)
Freud's most direct case against religion, written fourteen years after Totem and Taboo had traced it to the murdered father, and the opening of the late cultural writings that continue in Civilization and Its Discontents.
DE

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