VI
Freud had long been disturbed about negative aspects of the sex drive such as, for example, sadism. For him love did indeed "make the world go around" while sadism, though it was related to Eros, was aggressively destructive. How can the goodness of Eros be reconciled with the cruelty of sadism? The answer, as Freud points out in the following selection, is that life-enhancing Eros has an antithesis that seeks to destroy life. He calls the latter an instinct for death, a death wish that is forever locked in combat with the positive life-force of Eros. Sadism is therefore a manifestation of the aggressiveness of the death wish, a perversion of Eros, erotic but destructive. Furthermore, Freud points out, there are nonerotic aggressive instincts that threaten the stability of the individual and even that of society itself. His view of the aggressive, destructive instinct as a threat to civilization underscores the pervasive pessimism of the period between world wars, not to mention our own age.
Never before in any of my previous writings have I had the feeling so strongly as I have now that what I am describing is common knowledge . . . that I am using up paper and ink to expound things which are self-evident. If it should appear that the recognition of a special independent instinct of aggression -would entail a modification of the psycho-analytical theory of instincts, I should be glad to seize upon the idea.
We shall see that this is not so, that it is merely a matter of coming to grips with a conclusion to which we long ago committed ourselves, following it to its logical consequences. Analytic theory has evolved gradually enough, but the theory of instincts has groped its way forward. And yet that theory was so indispensable that something had to be put in its place. In my perplexity I made my starting point Schiller s aphorism that hunger and love make the world go around. .Hunger represents the instinct for self-preservation while love strives after objects; its chief function is preservation of the species. Thus first arose the contrast between ego instincts and object instincts. To denote the energy of the latter I introduced the term "libido." An antithesis was thus formed between the ego instincts and the libidinal instincts directed towards objects, i.e., love in its widest sense. One of these object instincts, the sadistic, stood out in that its aim was so very unloving; moreover, it clearly allied itself with the ego instincts, and its kinship with instincts of mastery without libidinal purpose could not be concealed. Nevertheless, sadism plainly belonged to sexual life—the game of cruelty could take the place of the game of love. Neurosis appeared as the outcome of a struggle between self-preservation and libido, a conflict in which the ego was victorious but at the price of great suffering.
Modifications in this theory became essential as our inquiries advanced from the repressed to the repressing forces, from the object instincts to the ego. The decisive step was the introduction of the concept of narcissism, i.e., the discovery that the ego is cathected with libido, that the ego is the libido s original home and, to some extent, its headquarters. This narcissistic libido turns towards objects, becoming object libido, and can change back into narcissistic libido. The concept of narcissism made possible an analytic understanding of the traumatic neuroses as well as many diseases bordering on the psychoses. It was not necessary to abandon the view that the transference-neuroses are attempts of the ego to guard itself against sexuality, but the concept of the libido was jeopardized. Since the ego instincts, too, were libidinal, it seemed inevitable that we should make libido coincide with instinctual energy in general, as Jung had already advocated. Yet I retained a groundless conviction that the instincts could not all be of the same kind. It was in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) that the repetition-compulsion and the conservative character of instinctual life first struck me. While speculating on the origin of life and of biological parallels, I concluded that, beside the instinct preserving the organic substance and binding it into ever larger units, there must exist an antithesis, which would seek to dissolve these units and reinstate their antecedent inorganic state; that is, a death instinct as well as Eros. The phenomena of life would be explicable from the interplay and counteracting effects of the two. Demonstrating the working of this hypothetical death instinct was not easy. Manifestations of Eros were conspicuous enough; one might assume that the death instinct worked within the organism towards its disintegration but that was no proof. A more fruitful idea was that part of the instinct is diverted towards the external world and surfaces as an instinct of aggressiveness and destructiveness. In this way the instinct could serve Eros in that the organism was destroying something other than itself. One can suspect that the two kinds of instinct seldom—perhaps never— appear in isolation from each other, but are alloyed with each other in varying and very different proportions. In sadism, long known to us as a component instinct of sexuality, we observe a particularly strong alloy between trends of love and the destructive instinct; while its counterpart, masochism, would be a union between destructiveness directed inwards and sexuality.
The assumption of the existence of an instinct of death or destruction has met with resistance even in analytic circles; I am aware that there is a frequent inclination rather to ascribe whatever is dangerous and hostile in love to an original bipolarity in its own nature. To begin with it was only tentatively that I put forth the views I have developed here, but in the course of time they have gained such a hold upon me that I can no longer think in any other way. To my mind, they are far more serviceable from a theoretical viewpoint than any other possible ones; they provide that simplification, without either ignoring or doing violence to the facts, for which we strive in scientific work. I know that in sadism and masochism we have always seen before us manifestations of the destructive instinct (directed outwards and inwards), strongly alloyed with egotism; but I can no longer understand how we can have overlooked the ubiquity of non-erotic aggressivity and destructiveness and can have failed to give it its due place in our interpretation of life. I remember my own defensive attitude when the idea of an instinct of destruction first emerged in psycho-analytic literature, and how long it took before I became receptive to it. That others should have shown, and still show, the same attitude of rejection surprises me less. For "little children do not like it" when there is talk of the inborn human inclination to "badness," to aggressiveness and destructiveness, and so to cruelty as well. God has made them in the image of His own perfection; nobody wants to be reminded how hard it is to reconcile the undeniable existence of evil— despite the protestations of Christian Science—with His all-powerfulness or His all-goodness.
The name "libido" can once more be used to denote the manifestations of the power of -Eros in order to distinguish them from the energy of. the death instinct. It must be confessed that we have much greater difficulty in grasping that instinct; we can only suspect it, as it were, as something in the background behind Eros, and escapes detection unless its presence is betrayed by its being alloyed with Eros. It is in sadism, where the death instinct twists the erotic in its own sense and yet at the same time fully satisfies the erotic urge, that we succeed in obtaining the clearest insight into its nature and its relation to Eros. But even where it emerges without any sexual purpose, in the blindest fury of destructiveness, we cannot fail to recognize that the satisfaction of the instinct is accompanied by an extraordinarily high degree of narcissistic enjoyment, owing to its, presenting the ego -with a fulfillment of the latter s old wishes for omnipotence. The instinct of destruction, moderated and tamed, and, as it were, inhibited in its aim, must, when it is directed towards objects provide the ego with the satisfaction of its vital needs and with control over nature. This is how things appear to us now; future research and reflection will no doubt bring further light which will decide the matter.
In all that follows I adopt the viewpoint, therefore, that the inclination to aggression is an original, self-subsisting instinctual disposition in man, and that it constitutes the greatest impediment to civilization. At one point I was led to the idea that civilization was a special process In the service of Eros whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind. Why this has to happen, we do not know; the work of Eros is precisely this. These collections of men are to be libidinally bound to one another. Necessity alone, the advantages of work in common, will not hold them together. But man s aggressive instinct, the hostility of each against all and of all against each, opposes this programme of civilization. This aggressive instinct is the derivative and the main representative of the death instinct which we have found alongside of Eros and which shares world dominion with it. And now I think the meaning of the evolution of civilization is no longer obscure to us. It must present the struggle between Eros and Death, between the instinct of life and the instinct of destruction as it works itself out in the human species.