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Some of my medical colleagues have looked upon my theory as a purely psychological one…. It is the therapeutic technique alone that is psychological; the theory does not by any means fail to point out that neuroses have an organic basis. (Freud, 1905, p. 113)
It is clear throughout Freud's writings that he believed psychoanalysis and psychobiology shared points of contact. In “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes” he described one such point.
If now we apply ourselves to considering mental life from a biological point of view, an “instinct” appears to us as a concept on the frontier between the mental and the somatic, as the psychical representative of the stimuli originating from within the organism. (Freud, 1915a, p. 22)
Freud had twice before described what he meant by an instinct, once in the case of Schreber (1911) and before that in his Three Essays (1905). In these discussions, Freud more or less saw instincts as forces that “have their origins in the cells of the body,” forces that were “chemical” in nature (Freud, 1895/1950 p. 297). But gradually Freud's struggle with instinct shifted from trying to understand their nature to trying to understand their consequences:“An instinct can never become an object of consciousnes…. If the instinct did not attach itself to an idea or manifest itself as an affective state, we could know nothing about it”(Freud, 1915b, p. 177).
In this article, I would like to go back to that “frontier between the mental and the somatic,” back to what Freud abandoned, and examine instinct. To do so, I present aspects of a treatmenty—the conscious, the verbal, and “the mental”—and, alongside that the affective, the behavioral, and the “somatic.” I then go back to describe the nature of an instinct.