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The purpose of this paper is to establish a distinction between the vicissitudes which instincts undergo in the ordinary course of development and the neurotic defences with which they are met. Although both originate in an accumulation of instinct and a narcissistic injury, instinctual vicissitude removes those accumulations and injuries by effecting certain suitable changes in the instinct in question, under the influence of the external world; whereas instinctual defence tries to prevent them from becoming conscious at all, and the changes it institutes are done under the guidance of the ego and super-ego. Moreover instinctual vicissitude is directed towards the outer world and the future and is plastic; instinctual defence is directed inwards and to the past and is rigid.
The material upon which the two mechanisms operate are the instinctual fusions of aggressiveness and of sexuality (which are themselves based upon the two main biological instincts of life and death). But these are only visible in their derivatives, viz. in ideas, affects and actions. Such derivatives can be studied not only in the neuroses but in normal adults and children. Certain of them are associated with either one or other of the instinctual fusions. Thus, for instance, in the sphere of action, those reactive motor discharges which go back to sexual pleasure have the following characteristics: they involve pleasure for the object as well as for the subject; they can have both active and passive instinctual aims; and they are continued and completed by acts done by the object to the subject.
A tabulation is then made of the changes which instinctual vicissitude brings about in these derivatives in order to avoid an accumulation of instinct or a narcissistic injury. These include change of object, change of direction of the action (instead of saying: 'I am taking milk from my mother', the child says: 'She is giving me milk'), change from object to narcissistic libido, change of sce