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Dr. Bally attempts a biological approach to the subject of ego development
(including consciousness and differentiation between the ego and the environment) through behaviouristic animal psychology which stresses aim or goal rather than object relation.
He shows that the nearer the animal comes to the satisfaction of the biological aim to which it is, as it were, bound, the more stereotyped its actions become. For example, he compares the relative freedom of the lion to vary and improve its hunting methods not only with the strictly limited, but incredibly precise motor structures of some insects, but also with the lion's own stereotyped actions in devouring the prey and in copulation. In each case one organ dominates the whole motor apparatus. 'The animal is all mouth—all genital'. Distance gives greater freedom. It is in the field of approach only that considerable variations appear, just as in human beings in the sexual approach as compared with the sexual act itself. These possibilities of variation occur only when the young in animals enjoy a lengthy period of parental protection, during which the oral end-pleasure is obtained without satisfaction of the biologically connect ed prey-hunting and enemy-avoiding functions. These are exercised in play in comparative aimlessness. In other circumstances the animal must act and move in the more or less direct line of the goal the more direct the nearer its fulfilment. Strong effects, then, says Dr. Bally, intensify the endeavours in this more or less direct line, and restrict the field of action. Fixation to the biological goal denotes action according to the pleasure principle, and weaker but more permanent affect alone gives opportunity for the emergence of the reality principle.
Dr. Bally thus puts the accent not on instinct itself so much as on the fate of the instincts and the resulting affects.
With some illuminating examples drawn chiefly from Köhler, Dr. Bally develops the theme that only freedom from