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This collection of eleven papers, only one of which was written by Lorenz, elaborates what Eckhard Hess calls in his foreword the “etho-logical viewpoint.” They disclose the reasons why certain types of data are gathered, the way they are used, and the way they are interpreted by ethologists. More important, the essays reveal an attitude of mind compounded of both pride and humility. Correcting the apocalyptical “misunderstanding” that ethology's ambition would devour such disciplines as psychology, psychiatry, and cultural anthropology, Leyhausen reassures us:
All that we are doing is to add a new, or at least totally neglected, dimension to these disciplines—the dimension of one or two billion years of evolution.
Out of this primeval and fertile “background” grows ethology's physiological theory of motivation. Leyhausen predicates such a theory on the notion that the psyche is the one place where explanations for psychical events will not be discovered. Realizing—as Freud did also— that since the life history leaves a good deal of human behavior unintelligible, research must attend to mankind's lengthy history, “a history which for enormous periods of time was shared with the mammals and all other vertebrates.” Leyhausen asserts that, phenomenologically distinguishable as man may be, “at the basis of the most variable modes of human behavior lie peristostable ‘instinctive elements.’” The abiding and not unrewarded faith remains that animals have much to teach us about the score of what we have been and are.
Instincts and innate releasing mechanisms are two concepts fundamental