Freud - Complete Works (622 page)

   The attributes of life were at
some time evoked in inanimate matter by the action of a force of
whose nature we can form no conception. It may perhaps have been a
process similar in type to that which later caused the development
of consciousness in a particular stratum of living matter. The
tension which then arose in what had hitherto been an inanimate
substance endeavoured to cancel itself out. In this way the first
instinct came into being: the instinct to return to the inanimate
state. It was still an easy matter at that time for a living
substance to die; the course of its life was probably only a brief
one, whose direction was determined by the chemical structure of
the young life. For a long time, perhaps, living substance was thus
being constantly created afresh and easily dying, till decisive
external influences altered in such a way as to oblige the still
surviving substance to diverge ever more widely from its original
course of life and to make ever more complicated
détours
before reaching its aim of death. These
circuitous paths to death, faithfully kept to by the conservative
instincts, would thus present us to-day with the picture of the
phenomena of life. If we firmly maintain the exclusively
conservative nature of instincts, we cannot arrive at any other
notions as to the origin and aim of life.

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   The implications in regard to the
great groups of instincts which, as we believe, lie behind the
phenomena of life in organisms must appear no less bewildering. The
hypothesis of self-preservative instincts, such as we attribute to
all living beings, stands in marked opposition to the idea that
instinctual life as a whole serves to bring about death. Seen in
this light, the theoretical importance of the instincts of
self-preservation, of self-assertion and of mastery greatly
diminishes. They are component instincts whose function it is to
assure that the organism shall follow its own path to death, and to
ward off any possible ways of returning to inorganic existence
other than those which are immanent in the organism itself. We have
no longer to reckon with the organism’s puzzling
determination (so hard to fit into any context) to maintain its own
existence in the face of every obstacle. What we are left with is
the fact that the organism wishes to die only in its own fashion.
Thus these guardians of life, too, were originally the myrmidons of
death. Hence arises the paradoxical situation that the living
organism struggles most energetically against events (dangers, in
fact) which might help it to attain its life’s aim rapidly -
by a kind of short-circuit. Such behaviour is, however, precisely
what characterizes purely instinctual as contrasted with
intelligent efforts.

   But let us pause for a moment and
reflect. It cannot be so. The sexual instincts, to which the theory
of the neuroses gives a quite special place, appear under a very
different aspect.

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   The external pressure which
provokes a constantly increasing extent of development has not
imposed itself upon
every
organism. Many have succeeded in
remaining up to the present time at their lowly level. Many, though
not all, such creatures, which must resemble the earliest stages of
the higher animals and plants, are, indeed, living to-day. In the
same way, the whole path of development to natural death is not
trodden by
all
the elementary entities which compose the
complicated body of one of the higher organisms. Some of them, the
germ-cells, probably retain the original structure of living matter
and, after a certain time, with their full complement of inherited
and freshly acquired instinctual dispositions, separate themselves
from the organism as a whole. These two characteristics may be
precisely what enables them to have an independent existence. Under
favourable conditions, they begin to develop - that is, to repeat
the performance to which they owe their existence; and in the end
once again one portion of their substance pursues its development
to a finish, while another portion harks back once again as a fresh
residual germ to the beginning of the process of development. These
germ-cells, therefore, work against the death of the living
substance and succeed in winning for it what we can only regard as
potential immortality, though that may mean no more than a
lengthening of the road to death. We must regard as in the highest
degree significant the fact that this function of the germ-cell is
reinforced, or only made possible, if it coalesces with another
cell similar to itself and yet differing from it.

   The instincts which watch over
the destinies of these elementary organisms that survive the whole
individual, which provide them with a safe shelter while they are
defenceless against the stimuli of the external world, which bring
about their meeting with other germ-cells, and so on - these
constitute the group of the sexual instincts. They are conservative
in the same sense as the other instincts in that they bring back
earlier states of living substance; but they are conservative to a
higher degree in that they are peculiarly resistant to external
influences; and they are conservative too in another sense in that
they preserve life itself for a comparatively long period.¹
They are the true life instincts. They operate against the purpose
of the other instincts, which leads, by reason of their function,
to death; and this fact indicates that there is an opposition
between them and the other instincts, an opposition whose
importance was long ago recognized by the theory of the neuroses.
It is as though the life of the organism moved with a vacillating
rhythm. One group of instincts rushes forward so as to reach the
final aim of life as swiftly as possible; but when a particular
stage in the advance has been reached, the other group jerks back
to a certain point to make a fresh start and so prolong the
journey. And even though it is certain that sexuality and the
distinction between the sexes did not exist when life began, the
possibility remains that the instincts which were later to be
described as sexual may have been in operation from the very first,
and it may not be true that it was only at a later time that they
started upon their work of opposing the activities of the
‘ego-instincts’.²

  
¹
Yet it is to them alone that we can
attribute an internal impulse towards ‘progress’ and
towards higher development! (See below)

  
²
It should be understood from the context
that the term ‘ego-instincts’ is used here as a
provisional description and derives from the earliest
psycho-analytical terminology.

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   Let us now hark back for a moment
ourselves and consider whether there is any basis at all for these
speculations. Is it really the case that,
apart from the sexual
instincts
, there are no instincts that do not seek to restore
an earlier state of things? that there are none that aim at a state
of things which has never yet been attained? I know of no certain
example from the organic world that would contradict the
characterization I have thus proposed. There is unquestionably no
universal instinct towards higher development observable in the
animal or plant world, even though it is undeniable that
development does in fact occur in that direction. But on the one
hand it is often merely a matter of opinion when we declare that
one stage of development is higher than another, and on the other
hand biology teaches us that higher development in one respect is
very frequently balanced or outweighed by involution in another.
Moreover there are plenty of animal forms from whose early stages
we can infer that their development has, on the contrary, assumed a
retrograde character. Both higher development and involution might
well be the consequences of adaptation to the pressure of external
forces; and in both cases the part played by instincts might be
limited to the retention (in the form of an internal source of
pleasure) of an obligatory modification.¹

  
¹
Ferenczi (1913, 137) has reached the same
conclusion along different lines: ‘If this thought is pursued
to its logical conclusion, one must make oneself familiar with the
idea of a tendency to perseveration or regression dominating
organic life as well, while the tendency to further development, to
adaptation, etc., would become active only as a result of external
stimuli.’

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   It may be difficult, too, for
many of us, to abandon the belief that there is an instinct towards
perfection at work in human beings, which has brought them to their
present high level of intellectual achievement and ethical
sublimation and which may be expected to watch over their
development into supermen. I have no faith, however, in the
existence of any such internal instinct and I cannot see how this
benevolent illusion is to be preserved. The present development of
human beings requires, as it seems to me, no different explanation
from that of animals. What appears in a minority of human
individuals as an untiring impulsion towards further perfection can
easily be understood as a result of the instinctual repression upon
which is based all that is most precious in human civilization. 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 sublimations 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 backward 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. The processes involved in the formation of a
neurotic phobia, which is nothing else than an attempt at flight
from the satisfaction of an instinct, present us with a model of
the manner of origin of this supposititious ‘instinct towards
perfection’ - an instinct which cannot possibly be attributed
to
every
human being. The
dynamic
conditions for its
development are, indeed, universally present; but it is only in
rare cases that the
economic
situation appears to favour the
production of the phenomenon.

   I will add only a word to suggest
that the efforts of Eros to combine organic substances into ever
larger unities probably provide a substitute for this
‘instinct towards perfection’ whose existence we cannot
admit. The phenomena that are attributed to it seem capable of
explanation by these efforts of Eros taken in conjunction with the
results of repression.

  
¹
Mephistopheles in
Faust
, Part
I.

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3745

VI

The upshot of our enquiry so far has been the
drawing of a sharp distinction between the
‘ego-instincts’ and the sexual instincts, and the view
that the former exercise pressure towards death and the latter
towards a prolongation of life. But this conclusion is bound to be
unsatisfactory in many respects even to ourselves. Moreover, it is
actually only of the former group of instincts that we can
predicate a conservative, or rather retrograde, character
corresponding to a compulsion to repeat. For on our hypothesis the
ego-instincts arise from the coming to life of inanimate matter and
seek to restore the inanimate state; whereas as regards the sexual
instincts, though it is true that they reproduce primitive states
of the organism, what they are clearly aiming at by every possible
means is the coalescence of two germ-cells which are differentiated
in a particular way. If this union is not effected, the germ-cell
dies along with all the other elements of the multicellular
organism. It is only on this condition that the sexual function can
prolong the cell’s life and lend it the appearance of
immortality. But what is the important event in the development of
living substance which is being repeated in sexual reproduction, or
in its fore-runner, the conjugation of two protista? We cannot say;
and we should consequently feel relieved if the whole structure of
our argument turned out to be mistaken. The opposition between the
ego or death instincts and the sexual or life instincts would then
cease to hold and the compulsion to repeat would no longer possess
the importance we have ascribed to it.

   Let us turn back, then, to one of
the assumptions that we have already made, with the expectation
that we shall be able to give it a categorical denial. We have
drawn far-reaching conclusions from the hypothesis that all living
substance is bound to die from internal causes. We made this
assumption thus carelessly because it does not seem to us to
be
an assumption. We are accustomed to think that such is
the fact, and we are strengthened in our thought by the writings of
our poets. Perhaps we have adopted the belief because there is some
comfort in it. If we are to die ourselves, and first to lose in
death those who are dearest to us, it is easier to submit to a
remorseless law of nature, to the sublime ‘
A
n
a
g
c
h
, than to a chance which
might perhaps have been escaped. It may be, however, that this
belief in the internal necessity of dying is only another of those
illusions which we have created ‘
um die Schwere des
Daseins zu ertragen
’. It is certainly not a primaeval
belief. The notion of ‘natural death’ is quite foreign
to primitive races; they attribute every death that occurs among
them to the influence of an enemy or of an evil spirit. We must
therefore turn to biology in order to test the validity of the
belief.