A Note on Some Biologic Parallels Between Certain Innate Animal Behavior and Moral Masochism

Viewed biologically the function of living things is directed toward their own survival and the perpetuation of their kind. In relation to primitive organisms this premise seems simple and direct and remains unchallenged. The development of instinctual behavior patterns at these levels is almost always clearly apparent as serving self-preservative or species-preservative ends. Even as we regard increasingly differentiated structures in the animal kingdom with an ever-increasing complexity of instinctual pattern, both individual and social, the primary purpose of the instinctual life seems clearly directed toward survival. It is when we reach man (and perhaps some of the larger anthropoids) and are confronted with the enormous intricacy of the psychic life which has become so much more than an instinctual pattern that we are prone to lose sight of the evolutionary continuum of living things, not only in their organic development but in their psychological development. With this dimming of vision we forget that the primary purpose of this psychological development, no matter how seemingly devious and contradictory, must inevitably be the survival of individual and species.

It seems to me that this long view into the past with its biologic emphasis can give us an important perspective on the origin and meaning of certain human behavior—a perspective which is often lost in the psychological study of man as a creature separate and apart. It is obviously the advent of consciousness, language and conceptualized thinking, the resulting conflict between this consciousness and the primitive instinct life, the capacity for sublimation and for intricate social organization that indeed mark man as a creature apart, and that make the study of his psychology a separate science. In the broadest sense, however, human psychology is a highly specialized subdivision of a more basic study, namely psychobiology.

Julian Huxley has expressed in his book, “Evolution in Action” (7), the realiz