Aggression, Rage, and the “Destructive Instinct,” Reconsidered from a Psychobiological Point of View

Freud's investigations concerning the basic repertoire of human behavior focused on sex during his early years as a psychoanalyst, and only much later on aggression. This sequence is probably a reflection of his own evolution as a scientist and of the life stages through which he inevitably passed. The history of the times may have played a role as well. Having studied with Charcot at the Salpêtrière, he became closely acquainted with the then popular topic of hysteria, the sexual basis for which French neuropsychiatrists had already begun to suspect (Gay, 1988, p. 92). Freud's interest in dreams may have also contributed to his originally monochromatic (i.e., purely sexual) view of the instinctual life, since—as Freud could not have known in his lifetime—mammalian REM sleep is grafted onto a physiological mechanism subserving sexual tumescence. Because of this coincidence, dreams speak perforce in a sexual “language,” even when dealing with problem solving in quite other spheres of activity. Freud was not to turn his attention to the theme of aggression till the late middle period of his life-around the time (1923) when he developed the palatal cancer that afflicted him for the remainder of his life (Gay, 1988, p. 428). Freud turned his notice to aggression and death, one might say, just when Death began taking notice of Freud. In the meantime, of course, the two bullets of Gavrilo Princip, having brought down the Austrian heir-apparent and his wife (Princip unaware that Franz Ferdinand, as a pacifist, was the Serb's best friend), had unleashed World War I and the deaths of another ten million souls. Freud had ample reason, in the late teens of this century, to contemplate aggression and death.

As of this writing, on the 50th anniversary of Freud's death, much more is understood about the inner workings of human aggression, owing to research in many areas of neurobiology. This