You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Before coming to my main theme of the death instinct, a few words on the concept of instinct in general may not be out of place.
If, as external observers, we study any animal, we note that it has certain dispositions to behave in certain ways in certain situations.1 We say these dispositions are partly innate and partly acquired, but a difficulty arises when we try to say which part is which. At least in the higher species, and especially in man, every behaviour pattern is the joint product of heredity and environment. We know that the two contributions are not separate entities like the foundation and superstructure of a building, but we often speak of them as if they were, and so become involved in such misleading dichotomies as that between what is there at birth and what develops subsequently, or between what develops in a ‘normal’ environment and what deviates from it in an abnormal one. We should come nearer the implied distinction if we regarded what is innate as a range of potentialities, and what is acquired as an actuality selected from them under the influence of a particular environment. Thus we have an instinct to eat and acquire specific eating habits.
The range of potentialities comprised by instincts has widened in the course of evolution. The instincts of lower forms of life are relatively stereotyped; those of the higher animals are much more plastic, and include mechanisms for modifying themselves in accordance with the experience encountered. Both the stereotyped and the plastic dispositions could be