Instinct

Instinct, for both psychology and ethology is a preformed behavioral pattern, often manifesting
itself immediately from birth. Its arrangement is determined hereditarily and is repeated
according to modalities relatively adapted to a certain kind of object. (from Laplanche, Life and
Death in Psychoanalysis) Instinctive behavior contributes to the survival of species and is
evolved like morphological structure. (Bowlby) Charles Darwin outlined the modern theory of
instinct in The Origin of Species.

For Descartes, instinct was "a Kind of Inspiration to Brutes, mixing itself with, and helping out,
that Part of their Faculties which corresponds to Reason in us, and which is extremely
imperfect in them." Erasmus Darwin irritably observed that instinct had "been explained to be
a divine something, a kind of inspiration; whilst the poor animal, that possesses it, had been
thought little better than a machine!" When coupled with a behavioristic approach, the concept
of instinct serves to deny animals any possible consciousness, making the most elaborate
behavior one thier part only a machine-like expression of a genetic program. In Animal Minds,
Donald R. Griffin ridicules the inhibitions that keep behaviorist scientists from even considering
animal consciousness. He describes situations where animals adapt and learn, where they
use tools or communicate, and claims that it is far simpler to explain these behaviors through
cognitive concepts such as learning, remembering, problem solving, rule and concept
formation, perception and recognition, than it is to describe them all as genetically pre-
programmed and inflexible behaviors. In the words of Kety (1960,1862) "Nature is an elusive
quarry, and it is foolhardy to pursue her with one eye closed and one foot hobbled." (Animal
Minds, p.23) For Griffin the accusations of anthropocentrism that are used to deny the
possibility of animal consciousness are only expressions of the prejudiced assumption that
consciousness is only a human trait.

Is there a difference between animal instincts and human instincts? Most writers dealing with
instinct in humans use the concept to tie human behaviour into an evolutionary framework. At
the same time, the apparent variability of human behaviour, even when instinctually driven,
requires a more flexible or elaborate theory of instinct.

The standard concept of instinct, even when it leads to complex behaviour such as nest
building, implies predictable sequences of stereotypical responses to precise "releasing
stimuli." -- N. Tinbergen, A Study of Instinct, Oxford U. Press, 1969 -- ref. in Ronald de Sousa,
The Rationality of Emotion, p. 84. This is the form of instinct that causes a hare to run in a zig-
zag pattern, even in front of a car which could avoid it much more easily if it ran in a straight
line. ( But how could the hare ever know that the car was controlled by a driver who preferred
to avoid it rather than run it down? ) Ronald De Sousa describes human instincts as
motivational. They do not determine fixed patterns of behavior, but can produce quite different
patterns of goal-oriented behavior in different circumstances. They also involve motivation and
emotion. Nonetheless, human instincts must be preprogrammed wants that are the result
of evolution. "Rembering the primacy of individual variation over types in modern evolutionary
theory, we should not infer that natural instincts, wants, or emotions will be universal ones.
Instead, we should assume that we might make sense of the notion of individual natures. " (De
Sousa, p. 105)
Sigmund Freud developed his theories of instinct in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
(1905), in "Instincts and their Vicissitudes" (1915), and later elaborated a different and more
general concept in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. (1920)For Freud, the instinct concept is a
borderline concept, on the border between the somatic and the psychic realms. He wavered
between characterizing instinct as an organic stimulus -- a "need" affecting the psychic
apparatus -- and as a psychic representative of such an organic need-stimulus. This ambiguity
lead Freud to wonder, for example, whether it was possible to have instinctual memories. Here
the conceptual identification between the instinctive and the unconscious is manifest. 

Freud's term for instinct, Trieb, (from treiben, "to push") is more accurately translated as

"instinctual drive," and its translation as "instinct" in the Standard Edition of Freud's work has
been a source of criticism and confusion. 

Jean Pontalis points out that Freud uses two distinct words, Instinkt and Trieb, and although
their usage overlaps, there remain slight differences of meaning. For Pontalis, the drive
is derived from the instinct. He stresses the importance of "propping" -- a translation of Freud's
references to anlenhung, usually translated into English as "anaclitic." (fr. étayage)-- as the
relation of the drive to nonsexual, vital functions, upon what Freud calls "a bodily function
essential to life." If these functions are oriented by instinct, then the drives prop themselves on
the instincts. The archetypal model for this relation is orality, which is a sexual process that
begins to appear in relation to breast feeding. Thus the instinct is the source of a process that
mimics, displaces, and denatures it: the drive. (Laplanche, p.22) (cf desire as a "cartography
of the body.)For Jean Pontalis, "It is sexuality which represents the model of every drive and
probably consitutes the only drive in the strict sense of the term." (Life and Death in
Psychoanalysis, p.8) 

In "Instincts and their Vicissitudes," Freud states that "The aim of an instinct is in every
instance satisfaction (Befriedigung ), which can only be obtained by removing the state of
stimulation at the source of the instinct." Thus climactic phenomena become the prototype of
satisfaction through the discharge of tension (Abfuhr ). This is known as the Nirvana (or
constancy) principle, whose satisfaction is the state of rest. Freud goes on to describe how,
while the final aim (Endziel ) of an instinct remains unchangable, intermediate aims may arise,
which he defines as aim-inhibited instincts. Freud related the growth of civilization to the
suppression of the instincts, In Totem and Taboo, "Civilized" Sexual Ethics, and most
famously, in Civilization and its Discontents.

For Freud, sublimation was the utilization and transformation of instinctual goals for

intellectual and professional achievement. Unlike repression, which runs counter to instinct,
sublimation utilizes the instinctual forces by channeling or modeling them. Leonardo da Vinci
was the classic case of sublimation, which did not involve repression, even as it left Leonardo
without much overt sexual drive. (Freud sees Leonardo's turn to scientific activities as part of a
neurotic repression, however. What had started as study in service of his art (eg. anatomy)
came to inhibit it.)Later, in 1920, Freud formulated the theory of dual instinctual drives: Eros
and Thanatos. (respectively libido-aggression and erotic-destructive)

(Georges Bataille developed the overlap between love and death in Eroticism) 

The "economic," or discharge, model of instinctual satisfaction required revision to conform to

this new conception of the dual instincts: the satisfaction of the life instinct could hardly consist
in the elimination of tension, which would at that point be identified with the death instinct. It
required qualitative as well as quantitativecharacteristics. In "The Economic Problem of
Masochism" (1924) Freud acknowledged that there must be pleasurable tensions and
unpleasurable relaxations of tensions as well. The introduction of the life instinct (which
encompassed different conceptions of pleasure and of the pleasure principle) was a true and
unsettling innovation in psychoanalytic theory -- an innovation that Freud could no longer
circumvent but with which he felt much less at home than he did with the death instinct.
(Loewald. p. 30) 

Didier Anzieu describes Freud's own sublimation as reflexive rather than expressive -- as a
knowledge of the workings of instinct, which provided only a partial and insufficient discharge
of instinctual energies. According to Hans Loewald, in the scientific work of psychoanalysis,
sublimation turns around on itself, and as it were against itself --to unmask itself. Loewald
emphasizes the symbolic linkages which still obtain between instinctual and deinstinctualized
elements. He describes sublimations as progressive differentiations that culminate in new
synthetic organizations in which oneness stays alive as connection. see play Do humans have
a "language instinct?"