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When freud (1915) placed the instincts “on the frontier between the mental and the somatic” (p. 122) he anticipated our present endeavor to address the interface of psychoanalysis and neuroscience. His view of an instinct was that of an endogenous excitation or “stimulus applied to the mind”; he noted its constant effects as opposed to external stimuli which are “momentary” (p. 118). He made the assumption that “the nervous system is an apparatus which has the function of getting rid of the stimuli that reach it, or of reducing them to the lowest possible level; or which, if it were feasible, would maintain itself in an altogether unstimulated condition” (p. 120).
Freud later (1920), in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” amended this view as follows: “The mental apparatus endeavours to keep the quantity of excitation present in it as low as possible or at least to keep it constant” (p. 9, emphasis added). He used the term “Nirvana principle” to denote that condition and saw it as distinct from the “pleasure principle.” He viewed the pleasure principle as a transformation by libido or “life instinct” of the Nirvana principle, which he aligned with the “death instinct.”
In “Instincts and their Vicissitudes” Freud proposes two groups of primal instincts: “the ego, or self-preservative instincts and the sexual instincts” (p. 124). By the time he wrote “An Outline of Psychoanalysis” in 1938, he had concluded that it was possible to