A History of Aggression in Freud: Paul E. Stepansky. New York:  International Universities Press, 1982.

Stepansky's history traces what seems to be all of Freud's thinking about aggression and its role in the neuroses. He begins with Freud's earliest clinical investigations of hysteria (Chapter 2), followed by a presentation of the contrasting, qualitative shift in Freud's thinking signaled by the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams (Chapter 3). Next, Stepansky highlights the emergence of a new strand of Freudian aggression (not generally acknowledged) discovered in the dream analysis and applied in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (Chapter 4). Then he shows the reasons for the growing disagreement between Freud and Adler regarding the primary or secondary nature of aggression and the importance of the drives, and draws attention to a situation in which these theoretical issues were confounded with extra-scientific institutional matters. Finally, the impact of war on Freud's character and thought and the development of dual drive theory are elaborated (Chapter 6). In this way Stepansky's formal theoretical understanding and historical perspective demarcate the various stages in the evolution of Freud's thought. In addition, the book contains two important chapters (1 and 7) in which metapsychological terms such as entropy, Eros, and Thanatos are criticized, with the backing of a substantial review of the literature.

Aggression explicitly appears as a concept when Freud attempts to understand why some people become hysteric and others obsessive. Clinical data and a developmental analysis indicated that hysteria is related to a genital physical sexual experience imposed on a child, in which the child remained passive. The result was sex, unpleasure, and shock, and in later life, hysteria. Passivity—identified with being female, accounted for the fact that