Brilliance before its Time: A Commentary on “Instinct and the Ego During Infancy”

I will comment on Ives Hendrick's farsighted paper under three headings: the paper itself, its place in history, and its place in my theory of motivational systems.

Hendrick advances two arguments: first, it is false to assume that the unconscious mental life of older children and adults is a replica of the infant's experience (later called the genetic fallacy), and, second, a key factor in development is the instinct to master, defined as an inborn drive to do and learn how to do. The first argument removes the burden of finding the infant totally preoccupied with sensual or libidinal pursuits. This change in perspective freed Hendrick to make the second argument, that infants are often (or even primarily) motivated to master their environment. The second argument is the innovative core of this paper.

I see Hendrick as struggling to make a simple, straightforward proposal while in the arms of an octopus whose constricting tentacles consisted of the then-existing psychoanalytic theory and its terminology. He had to establish the new concept that functioning in order to master is itself pleasurable. The pleasure in doing provides an affective goal that is separate from the pleasure gained from “pleasure-seeking mechanisms” (p. 388) of traditional libidinal theory, in which pleasure was associated primarily or exclusively