Notes on the Theory of Aggression

The concern with problems of aggression crystallized only gradually in Freud's thinking, but once it had taken root, the delay seemed to him hardly comprehensible (1932). Freud made his own "resistance" responsible for that retardation; however, it seems preferable to consider some of the steps that led him to the final formulation of his views.

The age-old religious tradition that abounds with references to the dichotomy of love and hate seems not to have determined his interest before he had established his own approach; nor did he seek stimulation in Nietzsche's revelatory writings. He relied mainly on his own tools, on the constant interaction of clinical data and theoretical assumptions. Most of Freud's formulations on the problem of aggression are intimately linked to that period in his writings, approximately from 1911 to 1926, in which he reformulated in several steps his basic hypotheses.

Freud's points of departure were his earlier findings and hypotheses regarding the nature of instinctual drives. In his first theoretical formulations on this subject (Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex, 1905), his attention centered on the development of sexuality and on the vicissitudes of psychic energy attached to the sexual impulse, i. e., on the vicissitudes of libido. Impulses of an aggressive nature—manifestations of destructiveness or cruelty—were treated as components of sexuality as "an admixture to it, a propensity to subdue, the biological significance of which lies in the necessity for overcoming the resistance of the sexual object by actions other than courting" (p. 22). Aggressive impulses were thus considered as derivatives of a drive for sexual mastery (Bemaechtigungstrieb).1 This assumption was not modified for a decade, a period during which clinical data on the importance of aggressive impulses during the various phases of libidinal development gradually