Self-Preservation and the Death Instinct

There is a certain uneasiness among psychoanalysts today regarding those fundamentals of psychoanalytic theory, the theories of the libido and of instinct. This uneasiness originated when Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle developed a dualistic instinct theory which assumed that life in its normal as well as abnormal manifestations was controlled by the antagonistic dynamics of a libidinal, constructive life instinct and a nonlibidinal, self-destructive death instinct. It should be remembered that Freud's first fundamental instinct theory, developed on the basis of the clinical study of the transference neuroses, was also dualistic. It envisaged a conflict between the ego and the sexual instinct, or, as Freud phrased it at the time, a conflict between ego instincts and sexual instincts.

In his Introductory Lectures1 Freud says, 'Psychoanalysis has never forgotten that nonsexual instincts also exist; it has been built upon a sharp distinction between sexual instincts and ego instincts; and in the face of all opposition it has insisted not that they arise from sexuality but that the neuroses owe their origin to a conflict between ego and sexuality.'

The ego instincts were the instincts of self-preservation. Freud once formulated this principle of self-preservation inherent in the ego instincts in a very simple way when he said, 'The ego in all its conflicts can have no other aim than to maintain itself'.

The instinct theory with which Freud started his psychoanalytic researches thus had one thing in common with the theory with which he concluded it: the principle of a dualism