Is Freud's Concept of Instinct Incoherent?: Resolving Strachey's Dilemma

Given how central the concept of “instinct” is to Freud's theory, and given how much he wrote about this concept, one would expect Freud's account of instinct to be reasonably clear. On the contrary, the standard view is that Freud's various assertions about the nature of instinct are mutually inconsistent and leave the entire topic clouded with confusion. I call this the “standard view” because it is the view taken by Strachey (1957, pp. 111-114) in his influential commentary in the Standard Edition of Freud's work, and it is accepted by many other respected interpreters of Freud's theory (Nagera, 1970; Laplanche and Pontalis, 1973; Compton, 1981). According to the standard view, Freud vacillated between talking about instincts as mental contents, as somatic processes, and as some combination of the two.