Meetings of the New York Psychoanalytic Society

March 11, 1980. THE PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY OF THE DRIVES. Charles Brenner, M.D.

Dr. Brenner emphasized the fundamental importance of the role of the drives in psychoanalytic theory and the fact that the nature of the concept of the drives has often been misunderstood. He quoted Freud as saying, "The theory of the [instinctual drives] is so to say our mythology. Instincts are mythical entities, magnificent in their indefiniteness. In our work we cannot for a moment disregard them, yet we are never sure that we are seeing them clearly." The speaker subsequently proposed a substantial revision of Freud's theory of the nature and source of the drives, hoping to offer a more definite and less mythical view of some aspects of drive theory.

Dr. Brenner pointed out that Freud thought of the mind as an apparatus that deals with stimuli. The stimuli that activate the mental apparatus are of two sorts, sensory stimuli from the environment and bodily stimuli of a special kind. These latter Freud called drives for the reason that they impel or drive the mental apparatus to activity in accordance with the pleasure principle. It was Freud's conviction that the sources of the drives were somatic and not psychic. This idea of the drive as a frontier phenomenon, as something somatopsychic whose source is somatic and whose effect is psychic, is one which Freud maintaied throughout the course of the development of his drive theory. Freud described somatic origins for both libido and aggression. The erogenous zones are the source of the libido. As for aggression, the source, according to Freud, is a biological death drive common to all living matter. Dr. Brenner stated that Freud did not want to rely on psychoanalytic data for the part of his libido theory that has to do with its somatic source or origin. He believed that reliable data could come only from other sources, such as observation of sexual behavior, a better knowledge of the nature and function of sexual hormones,