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.
The relationship of the individual to his environment is “disrupted” from moment to moment and must again and again be returned to an equilibrium. The “equilibrium” is not necessarily normal; it may be pathological. (It would be meaningless to call every disruption of equilibrium a conflict. This would rob the concept of all precision. Every stimulus disrupts the equilibrium, but not every stimulus causes conflict. These processes therefore occur partly in the conflict-free sphere.) Apparently every organism has mechanisms for maintaining or re-establishing equilibrium.1 We can picture the process as an oscillation around the equilibrium. It is not that every process in the organism must subserve the individual's survival: the biological task of procreation may supersede that aim, and the theory of the death instinct postulates regulatory processes whose aim is different. E. Bibring has rightly stated that Freud's theory implies both forms of regulation: “The life system is governed by two trends: it moves towards zero potential but in doing so it creates new tensions” (1936, p. 122). R. Ehrenberg's (1923)