Human Aggression and Depression: Can these Drives Be Utilized in a Constructive Way?

A review of psychoanalytic literature on aggression leads one to think that aggression is a drive that is constantly undergoing successive qualitative transformations. As early as 1908, Adler suggested that aggression is a primary instinctual drive, and he later expressed this drive as the “will to power” and then as “striving for superiority and perfection.”1

What are the sources of human aggression, and what are the aims of aggression? Tinbergen has quoted Lorenz's idea that man, like animal, has an internal pleasurable urge to attack. The individual does not simply wait to be provoked. Even if actual attack has not been possible for some time, this urge to fight builds up until the individual actively seeks the opportunity to indulge in fighting or in one way or another discharge his aggression.2 Freud's original view indicates that aggression, unlike the discharge of libido, is not accompanied by pleasure.3 However, in his later views he says that aggression can be fused with libido (i.e. eroticized) and then directed toward representations of external objects and give rise to pleasure.4

Freudian psychoanalysts are not in agreement regarding source, vicissitude, object, or aim of aggression. Freud himself regarded aggression as an instinct, equal and opposite to the sexual instinct. Aggression originally takes the form of self-directed “death instinct.” This hypothesis derived from the fact that living organisms developed out of inorganic matter.5 Today most classical analysts are accepting the theory of a primary instinct of aggression but disregarding the self-directed death instinct (thanatos).

Aggression has been considered to be an instinct that is manifested either constructively or destructively. It can serve the ego or the superego, but there is no object constancy for aggression.6 Furthermore, it has been stated by Anna Freud and others that sex and aggression have one thing in common, they cannot be accommodated in the individual's life; they have to be