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In making the transition from observation to theoretical formulation, psychoanalysts, starting with Freud, have tried to enrich their understanding with knowledge additional to that obtained from therapeutic sessions. Most of these attempts have failed because the level of molarity of the ancillary data has been incompatible with that of psychoanalysis; neither physiological and biochemical correlates of behavior, nor philosophical and metaphysical speculations about the essence of humanity add to our understanding of how specific behavior comes about. Ethology studies behavior as a function of instinctive and environmental factors and is a discipline on a level of conceptualization very similar to that of psychoanalysis; in fact, like psychoanalysis, it is accused of vitalism by the strict operationalists, and of reductionism by the idealists. Konrad Lorenz is one of the giants of this discipline, and his On Aggression is an indispensable book for the psychoanalyst who has not succumbed to the culturalist fallacy and denied the biological nature of man, and for the psychoanalyst who is still open to knowledge that does not originate in the consulting room.
With a lucid and lively style that avoids much of the sentimentality of his King Solomon's Ring as well as the ponderousness of journal articles, Lorenz examines aggression as an instinct, its function in the preservation of the species, its relationship to social and