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This poorly titled book aims to present the history of Freud's views on the role of aggression in the neuroses and to explore his succeeding
formulations in terms of his own personal and clinical experience. The first chapter begins at the point in the metapsychological history of the aggressive drive at which Freud related the drive to Thanatos or the death instinct. Subsequent chapters review the steps that led up to this point.
The opening chapter seems to me to be the least thoughtful one in the book. The author's recurrent fault of making impressive statements that do not bear close scrutiny is evident right from the start. In the preface, for example, Menninger is quoted as stating that man's chief fears do not involve the immensity of the universe but the malignity of his own aggressive instincts. The quotation sounds impressive, but it does not take into account the role of primitive aggression in promoting separation anxiety, let alone other adaptive uses of aggression in all phases of development. This failure to go beneath the surface, already evident in the preface, is also characteristic of the first chapter. Little effort is made to understand Freud's intent. His efforts are dismissed with quotations from his critics. For example, Stepansky writes a paragraph in which he states that "modern theoretical biology has dismissed Haeckel's biogenetic law, which Freud appropriated to illustrate the repetition compulsion, as an 'outworn theory'—speculative, logically inconsistent, and misleading…" (p. 10).
The author's confusion of levels of theoretical abstraction is apparent in this statement: "It is highly questionable that any clinical implications at all can be posited from a biological death instinct" (p. 14). My understanding is that no such implication was ever intended. A more thorough understanding of Freud's purposes than the author seems to have will increase the reader's understanding of the criticisms made in this first chapter. Step