Meetings of the New York Psychoanalytic Society

May 27, 1969. PROBLEMS IN THE PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY OF AGGRESSION. Charles Brenner, M.D.

Dr. Brenner discussed several problems raised by the psychoanalytic theory of aggression as an instinctual drive. In 1920, Freud derived the aggressive drive from a postulated biologically universal active drive to die; in 1949, Hartmann, Kris, and Loewenstein stated that the aggressive drive should not be tied to the existence of a death drive. Freud wrote in 1915 that a satisfactory drive theory should be based on biological as well as psychoanalytic data since a drive represents the demands of the body on the function of the mind; in the case of the sexual drive he had been able to find biological evidence for its existence and its possible origin. Because he had no comparable evidence in the case of aggression, he postulated a universal death drive.

Dr. Brenner notes that in daily clinical work the difference tends to be obscured between our knowledge of the source of the sexual drive and our ignorance of the source of the aggressive drive. The analyst does not deal directly with very primitive drive manifestations but with mental phenomena expressive of conflicts aroused by infantile wishes that are already drive derivatives. Hence, on the psychoanalytic evidence, the analyst must assume that sex and aggression both have been present from birth and play their part in the development of the mind and its later functioning. In the case of the sexual drive these assumptions are supported, but in the case of aggression we have no support thus far that an aggressive drive is present from birth.

Freud felt aggression was directed at destruction of the object, a formulation that apparently is still accepted. Where the object is animate, this is equivalent to death of the object. Dr. Brenner questions this assumption; it is an unwarranted generalization to assert that destruction of the cathected object is a necessary condition for fully adequate discharge of aggression. Wit