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In this widely-ranging essay I offer a few thoughts about the concept that aggression, whether or not it is linked to the death instinct, is a primary drive, one of the poles of the dual-instinct theory. This is a concept which may too readily lapse into the state of comfortable assumption or even dogma. My approach to it is largely empirical, and deliberately naïve and, for the most part, is not based on the fundamental explanatory theory itself. I address myself rather to the phenomena which may give rise to theory.1
I view the phenomenon of aggression, and its psychological functions and representations, as the aggregate of diverse acts, having diverse origins, and bound together, sometimes loosely, by the nature of their impact on objects rather than by a demonstrably common and unitary drive. In psychic development, the indispensable components of wish, intention, or purpose are secondarily assimilated to the consequences. This does not mean that certain elements of aggression do not have an instinctual origin or affiliation; nor do I deny the existence of a latent drive to die (pragmatically considered), even if my view of such a drive and its relationship to aggression differs from that proposed by Freud.
Some writers, such as Bibring (8) and Hartmann, Kris, and Loewenstein (54), have tended to examine the explanatory adequacy of Freud's theory more thoroughly than its empirically