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In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Freud draws attention to our tendency to believe that there is an instinct towards perfection at work in psychic development. Such an instinct would be irreducible in psychological terms; we are tempted to see it as a basic force characteristic of human beings, motivating both the individual and the entire culture in striving towards greater intellectual and ethical achievements. Unwearingly, it watches over and guides us in our growth towards ever higher humanity.
Freud himself considers that he is unable to share in this pleasing and optimistic view; he concludes that both human civilization and individual development result from the repression of desires.
The repressed instinct never ceases to strive for complete satisfaction, which would consist in the repetition of a primary experience of satisfaction. No substitutive or reactive formations and no sublimiations will suffice to remove the repressed instinct's persisting tension; and it is the difference in amount between the pleasure of satisfaction which is demanded and that which is actually achieved that provides the driving factor which will permit of no halting at any position attained, but, in the poet's words, ‘ungebändigt immer vorwärts dringt’1. The back ward path that leads to complete satisfaction is as a rule obstructed by the resistances which maintain the repressions. So there is no alternative but to advance in the direction in which growth is still free—though with no prospect of bringing the process to a conclusion or of being able to reach the goal (p. 42).