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Freud's instinctual drive theory is counted as one of his most important and distinctive contributions.1 In the late nineteenth century when he began to formulate what ultimately became psychoanalysis, the idea of instinct was conspicuous in Western scientific thinking. Yet Freud did not utilize his contemporaries' biological and psychological work; instead he drew on an independent and distinctive medical tradition for his conceptualization. Although his thinking was insulated from the lively interest in instinct that developed in biology and related disciplines around the turn of the century, his teachings survived other theories because his contributions to the science of man fitted the needs of the new century's social organization.
Freud began theorizing at a time when his practice in Vienna had brought to his attention human sexual phenomena in their many manifestations.2 As his letters to Wilhelm Fliess (Freud, 1887-1902) and his papers of the 1890's (e.g., Freud, 1898) show, Freud was at first concerned particularly with the ways in which somatic conditions influence sexual phenomena (cf., Stewart, 1967). His description of the anxiety neurosis (1895[1894]) involved, in an explicit way, purely physical concomitants of