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The concept of goal-directed striving is essential to an adequate orientation for most psychological problems. Nevertheless there has been a great deal of resistance to the frank recognition of this fact probably because it was too intimately associated in many minds with teleological concepts, derived from theology. Psychoanalysis has recognized it for the most part tacitly in its primary interest in motives, wishes, instinctual drives, all of which are concepts implying a goal-directed striving.
Our fear of teleological concepts often persists, however, even after we seem to have accepted the concept of a goal-directed striving. In order to get away from teleological thinking as quickly as possible, we attempt to understand wishes and purposes upon the analogy of a mechanical force, as though the goal were like the pole of a magnet exerting a direct attraction upon the individual.
Only a little reflection, however, is necessary to convince us that this is not a trustworthy analogy.2 In the first place, the success of a