On the Psychobiology of Motivation

Although there is general consensus that psychoanalysis is a science of motivations, there is much less agreement about how motivation should actually be defined. According to the dictionary, the word refers to whatever impels a person to act, or more narrowly, to act volitionally. In Freud's metapsychology, the focus shifted to mental acts, and motivation became the force that sets the mental apparatus in motion—what psychoanalysis viewed from the “dynamic” viewpoint. This conceptualization presented depth psychology in the language of physics, particularly that of the late 19th-century science of electricity. In parallel with measurements in terms of volts, ohms, and amperes, Freud relied on concepts of forces, resistances, and energies. In other words, a dynamics of motives implicitly required complementary concepts of structure and intensities. Freud outlined such a theoretical schema between 1892 and 1900, from “Sketches for the Preliminary Communication of 1893” to chapter 7 of The Interpretation of Dreams.

For two decades thereafter, Freud tried to define the nature of psychological forces in terms of innate, constitutionally determined potentialities he called instinctual drives (in German, Trieb). At first these were subdivided into self-preservative and sexual motives; because this classification failed to account for narcissistic issues (Freud, 1914), the libidinal drives were further differentiated into narcissistic and object libido. The discovery of various kinds of automatic repetitions of behavior (as in traumatic neuroses) again showed