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This paper is an enlarged version of a contribution made to a symposium on ‘Aggression and Adaptation’ at the Sigmund Freud Institut, Frankfurt am Main, West Germany, in 1964. It was published in German in A.Mitscherlich (ed.) Bis hierher und nicht weiter. Ist die menschliche Aggression unbefriedbar? Munich: Piper, 1969a, and has been translated for this book.
I would like to discuss the questions of how the experience of the psychoanalyst is similar to that of the ethologist, and how they differ. These questions raise for me, however, a number of problems and difficulties that stem from the different nature of the objects studied by these sciences. I would like to point out this restriction at the beginning of my paper.
I have reservations about what those who study animals and those who study man have in common. I find it striking, even stunning, how frequently animal watchers use concepts from human psychology to interpret and describe animal behaviour. They speak of love, hate, anger, courage, fear, triumph, and so on, and in this way lead us to view animals in human terms (as one of Lorenz’s colleagues once said in the fire of a heated discussion, ‘But geese are also only human’). Yet, viewing animals in this way is beset by dangers, especially that of anthropomorphism, as Konrad Lorenz himself has observed. He gives an illustrative example of a misinterpretation that he made. Although he made the necessary corrections in his study, the person who reads his descriptions without having participated in the study itself can still mistake analogies for identities.
The title of the German edition of Konrad Lorenz’s book (1963) has two parts: Zur Naturgeschichte der Aggression (literally, ‘the natural history of aggression’) and Das sogenannte Böse
(‘the so-called or purported evil’). We have learned from Freud that a sequence of two thoughts implies a third. Thus, these two titles imply that the knowledge of ethology which Lorenz wants to convey leads us to the r