Of Instincts and Instinctual Drives: Some Developmental Considerations

It is now some 65 years since Freud (1915) gave systematic consideration to the general theoretical problems posed by instinctual phenomena as they pertain to psychoanalysis. That he viewed his effort as at best a tentative first approximation he makes clear in the introductory paragraph (p. 117). He points out that no science—even the most precise—begins with clear and sharply defined basic concepts. Ideas that will later become basic concepts will at first “necessarily possess some degree of indefiniteness….” He goes on to suggest that:

So long as they remain in this condition, we come to an understanding about their meaning by making repeated references to the material of observation from which they appear to have been derived but upon which, in fact, they have been imposed [italics mine]. Thus, strictly speaking, they are in the nature of conventions—although everything depends on their not being arbitrarily chosen but determined by their having significant relations to the empirical material, relations that we seem to sense before we can clearly recognize and demonstrate them. It is only after more thorough investigation of the field of