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International Psycho-Analytical Association
12, March 1935
London
Dear Professor Freud,
I am to give a public lecture next week under the auspices of the British Psychological Society, the title being ‘Psycho-Analysis and the Instincts’.1 For this purpose I am naturally re-reading many of your writings and I should be very grateful if you could give me answers to the following two questions, which all relate to passages from ‘Das Ich und das Es’ (1923 edition).
I do not quite understand the sentence beginning ‘Beide Triebe’ on Seite 49, L. 18,2 specially in connection with the preceding sentence. I am referring only here to Eros. When you speak of the Wiederherstellung brought about by Eros do you mean simply the physical re-union of living substance or have you something else in mind? If so, how do we know that life began by dividing anything rather than by amalgamating simple molecules into more complex ones?
The sentence, Seite 51, L. 4, ‘Wir erkennen…..’ does not easily combine with the footnote on Seite 58.3 In another place you speak of the musculature of multi-cellular organisms being a device whereby the dangerous death-instinct directed inwards becomes more safely directed outwards.4 Are we to understand that Eros, perceiving the advantage of this path already laid down, takes advantage of it to flow outward from the narcissistic reservoir? In that case Eros would be making use of the death-instinct, exploiting it or subordinating it to its purpose. But in the footnote one would rather gather that the death-instinct would not of itself be flowing outwards unless it were directed thither by the outward flow of the libido. My question really is which precedes the other? Perhaps it cannot be answered in chronological terms.
With kindest regards
Yours very sincerely
[Ernest Jones]