Various Instincts and Their Development

Human beings find themselves adapted to life from the beginning and much before appears the consciousness of the adaptation; that is to say that the adaptation is first of all unconscious. The unconscious supplies nearly all the vital possibilities. Reflection and intellect are only a varnish on them, a luxury. To understand how human beings live, men like others, one must first of all study these unconscious determinations and that is why deep psychology appears only at the birth of psychoanalysis, that is to say the first study of instinct as such.

Instincts are unconscious tendencies to a certain form of behavior, common to all the individuals of the same species. These tendencies develop themselves, affirm themselves and fix themselves with the first vital experiences. Their definitive expansion is thus linked to individual evolution and their manifestation can, to a certain extent, vary from one individual to the other.

Instincts have been classified into various sorts. In reality, they are part of all vital manifestations and form like life itself a complex whole in which classifications are conventional. Instead of reducing them into artificial compartments, one had better discover in their complexity a certain direction according to very general characteristics. Thus one can recognize on the one hand the instincts through which the individual asserts his personality at the expense of his surroundings; on the other hand the instincts through which the individual maintains his responsibility to the group. The type of the first category is supplied by the “captative” instinct of nutrition: the individual tries to absorb the universe in himself. The second is represented by the sexual instinct through which the individual tries to expand, to multiply himself in the universe (even if it means sacrificing himself in this projection for the sexual partner or offspring). This can be classed under the “oblative” category. Between the two one c