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Psychoanalytic thinkers have struggled with the concept of aggression almost from the beginning. Freud's earliest dual instinct theory included not the aggressive drive but libido and the self-preservative or ego instincts. As Terman (1975) observed, what Freud later called aggression is similar to today's formulation of narcissistic rage in that hate derives from the struggle to preserve the self (ego) and is a derivative reaction by the ego instincts of self-preservation.
Today a Kleinian may say that what Klein saw was not a destructive orality but the urgency of an infant not responded to, an infant striving to extract something from its mother. Or a traditionalist may say that he does not consider the aggressive drive to be destructive in its aim but assertive, and that destructiveness occurs when assertiveness is thwarted. Both my Kleinian and my traditionalist colleagues consider these views consistent with their specific school of psychoanalytic thinking, a surprise to the self psychologist who thinks that other psychoanalysts all believe the aggressive drive to be a destructive drive.
In her closing remarks to the 27th International Psycho-Analytical Congress in 1971 in Vienna, Anna Freud (1972) took note of the disagreement:
Aggression can associate itself with aims and purposes of extraneous kinds, lending them their force…. Aggression also comes to the aid, either constructively or destructively, of purposes such as, for instance,
Page 129vengeance, war, honour, mercy, mastery, etc.… the intrinsic aim of innate, primary aggression … [is an] unsolved question [pp. 165, 170].
Contemporary infant research (Lichtenberg, 1983; Stern, 1985) does not support the drive concept, certainly not the destructive drive formulation. Stechler (1987; Stechler and Halton, 1987) sees assertion as proactive, the experience of the active, outreaching, and engaging baby who establishes contact with the world and acts upon it with interest, excitement, and joy. Aggression, arising from