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Attributing human destructiveness to an inborn “instinct” of aggres-sion seems to be a recurrent feature of our species appraisal of itself. A notable recent example of this pattern, one that Ashley Montagu (1973a, p. 3) has aptly termed the “new litany of innate depravity in man,” is an erudite article by Richard Chessick in this journal (1996), rich in ancient philosophical references but conspicuously lacking in modern scientific ones, in which Chessick traces the origins of the concept of an instinctual drive of aggression and destructiveness, and confidently asserts that “all humans are born with a primal biological archaic-destructive drive, gratification of which gives satisfaction just like the sexual drive” (Chessick, 1996, p. 612).
Superficial reflection finds a certain plausibility in this assumption. The world is full of examples of people relishing cruel and destructive actions. It was precisely on this basis that Freud came to his conclusions about a human aggressive “instinct,” stating: “Who in the face of all of his experience of life and of history, will have the courage to dispute this assertion?” (Freud, 1930, p. 85).
In arriving at this assumption, Freud, like the distinguished philosophers who preceded him, made the unfortunate error of generalizing about all human beings from the behavior of people in his culture. There was indeed evidence of the existence of nonaggressive peoples in his day but, probably because it would have undermined his theory of ineluctable innate aggression, Freud chose to disbelieve it. Though he can be forgiven for this error, with the multiplication of later cross-cultural studies, which clearly demonstrate that human beings behave quite differently under different sociocultural conditions, contemporary writers who reiterate this long-refuted “assertion” no longer merit this forbearance. Freud was trained as a clinical neurologist, and his Project for a Scientific Psychology was an earnest attempt to establish a verifia