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This paper is an enlarged and expanded version of a contribution Paula Heimann made to the ‘Controversial Discussions’ ((3)) at the British Psycho-Analytical Society. It was published in Melanie Klein, Paula Heimann, Susan Isaacs, and Joan Riviere Developments in Psycho-Analysis, London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis (1952).
A new psychological era began with the discovery by Breuer and Freud (1893)1 that the hysterical symptoms of their patient were caused by unsolved intrapsychic conflicts. Following the observations made in this particular case Freud continued to investigate his patients’ emotional life, and his researches into the nature of conflict led him to the discovery of the unconscious. From this point he proceeded to explore the dynamics and structure of the mind and to evolve his theories about mental illness and mental development. One might, therefore, call the systematic investigation of emotional conflict—up till then outside the sphere of medical science—the birth of psychoanalysis.
Freud traced emotional conflicts to the operation of basic forces with opposite aims, that is, antagonistic instincts. Throughout his work he maintained a dualistic approach to psychological processes and stressed the necessity to understand the nature of the instincts. At first, following the generally accepted contrast between hunger and love, he saw the opposing instinctual forces in the self-preservative and sexual instincts; later he differentiated between ego instincts and sexual instincts and thought that this dualism was in keeping with the human being’s double role of an individual and a representative of his species. But advances in his work did not corroborate this distinction, and ultimately he arrived at the conclusion that a life instinct and a death instinct are the prime movers of human behaviour.
It is interesting to see how Freud himself hesitated to give full recognition and status, as it were, to his last discovery about the instinc