A Psychoalytic Perspective on the Opposing Forces in Human Development

Psychoanalysis is a tripartite system of investigation—at once a system of research, a system of therapy, and a system of understanding human development. This paper consists of reflections on the creative and destructive forces in human development, viewed from a psychoanalytic perspective and in the light of the dual drives. It will refer to the three systems of investigation as observed in case studies and in theoretical postulations.

The early analytic theroists were concerned with questions that had been pondered for millennia before them and that still confront us today. They were addressing the creative and destructive forces in human development—the vital forces of sexuality and aggression—in an attempt to understand their impact on human behaviour. From these pursuits grew a language and a science whose evoltion continues in our own time (Ellenberger, 1970).

Fredud's theories on sexuality, the creative force, were profound and far-reaching. Because they were so strongly resisted, however, Freud spent a great part of his professional life contending with his detractors. He ascribed the resistance that met his theories of sexuality to society's collective inability to overcome its own repressions of sexual strivings, impulses, and wishes. Although infant sexuality was observable and evident, he felt that adult observers were inclined to deny it; and that, in fact, they ojected forcefully to recognizing sexuality as normal developmental functioning. Freud (1913) believed that the taboo of incest was—and is—at the heart of this resistance.

In Freud's later years (1930) he came to recognize and to begin to account for aggression and the destructive force in human development. His insight here was equally profound, but his development