The Place of Motivation in Psychoanalysis*

Commentators are generally agreed that psychoanalysis is a theory of motivation. However, there is controversy over what is the motivational essence of the theory and, relatedly, on how motivation itself should be conceptualized. One common solution to these issues is to treat the commonsense form of explanation, that of appealing to wishes and beliefs to explain action, as the model for psychoanalytic explanation and, at the same time, to reject causal drive accounts of motive like Freud's. This solution retains motivation's central place in psychoanalysis, but depicts the person as by nature a striver toward goals. However, as long as the concept of wish (or motive) is merely that of something defined in terms of its goals or objects, or constituted by its relation to such objects, then it is not anything in itself, it is incoherent, and wish explanations are only teleological pseudo-explanations, inadequate for psychoanalysis. Freud's drive theory, whatever its theoretical problems, provides an account of motivation that is free of these metatheoretical difficulties. It treats motives as drives and drives as processes defined by source and not by object. It offers an account of how objects are learned to be instrumental in regulating drive processes and how wishes derive from more basic motive states. In doing this, Freud's drive theory is a candidate for a coherent and proper explanation of motivation.