Drive theory

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Drive theory is an umbrella term for a number of theories from ethology , psychology and psychoanalysis . They all share the view that humans are essentially controlled by a number of endogenous (i.e. innate) instincts and basic needs . The best known and most influential drive theory developed by Sigmund Freud . Today the drive concept is only used sporadically in scientific literature; However, decisive elements of it live on in the more modern technical terms of motivation and the motivation system .

According to Freud, the drive arises from a physical state of tension. Instincts generally serve the preservation of life, species and self. Freud distinguishes between two groups of these primal instincts, namely those of the ego or self-preservation instincts and those of the sexual instincts . The instinctual impulse, which starts out from the physical and forms a mental precipitate (the so-called drive representations ), occurs constantly anew (even after satisfaction) and independently of the will of the ego-consciousness; However, this is able to direct the realization of the wishes in an environmentally appropriate manner and even suppress it. Freud called the drive energy itself the libido , and the striving for immediate drive satisfaction as the pleasure principle . He later supplemented this concept with the additional assumption of a death instinct , which, however, remained highly controversial.

Drive modes according to Freud

Drives are distinguished on the one hand according to their origin ( primary and secondary drives ) and on the other hand according to their functions ( life and death drives ).

  • "After the emergence": Primary instincts are present from birth and ensure the preservation of the species and the individual. They include the need for food, water, oxygen, rest, sexuality and relaxation. The secondary drives (e.g. the need for recognition and security) develop between the first half and second year of life. Without secondary drives, we would remain at the level of a very young child.
  • "According to the function": Here a distinction is made between the life instinct (Eros), which includes all life-sustaining instincts that support the preservation of the species, and the death instinct (Thanatos), which describes the urge to return to the inorganic and inanimate. Both drives work in polarity , but also often together and mixed with one another.

Stages of psychosexual development

According to Freud, human sexuality develops from earliest childhood, with psychosexual development going through an oral , anal ( urogenital ) and phallic-oedipal phase along the respectively predominant, erogenous zones (oral mucosa, intestinal and urogenital mucosa, genitals) ; this development is interrupted by a latency phase , only to be resumed and completed in puberty.

Multiple revisions of the drive theory

The concept of instinct did not appear in Freud until 1905 in the Three Essays on Sexual Theory . In the first phase of his work, he attributed the symptoms of his patients to trauma . But on September 21, 1897, he wrote to his friend Wilhelm Fliess , he had come to realize "that the unconscious is not one indication of reality, so that one truth and with affections occupied can not distinguish fiction". So he developed the concept of unconscious fantasies and desires, which from 1905 onwards is based on a theory of the instincts, which are to be seen as the source of the fantasies. First and foremost, he now saw the instinctual conflicts in individual psychosexual maturation as causing disease.

In Freud's treatment of the subject of instincts, three work phases can be defined:

First phase (according to Robl), 1905–1914:

  • Dualistic model: "Of particular importance for our attempt at explanation is the undeniable opposition between drives, which serve sexuality, the acquisition of sexual pleasure, and the others, which aim at the self-preservation of the individual, the ego drives." (Freud, [ 1910], 1982, 209).
  • Ego instincts or self-preservation instincts: Type of instinct whose energy the ego uses in defensive conflict. The ego drives function according to the reality principle .
  • Sexual instincts (libido): The energy of the sexual instincts is the libido . The libido can be divided into "ego libido" and "object libido" according to its cathexis.

Second phase, 1914–1915:

  • No dualistic drive model, instead Freud assumes a libidinal drive in this phase , which appears in two forms, in an aggressive and in the broadest sense sexual form.

Third phase, from 1920:

  • Another dualistic drive model: life drive and death drive . Drives are described by the qualities of source , object , goal and urge .

Concept of drive

Freud's use of the concept of instinct was not always consistent. He wrote in 1905: “At first we cannot understand an instinct to be anything other than the psychological representation of a continuously flowing, internal somatic stimulus source, as opposed to the stimulus that is produced by isolated and external stimuli. Drive is one of the concepts used to distinguish the soul from the physical (...). "

Freud describes the drive as a psychological quantity, but his drive concept is extremely fluctuating, inconsistent and characterized by constant reformulations. The following quote from 1926 also contradicts this in that it places the drive on the somatic level: "The economic view assumes that the psychic representations of the drives are occupied with certain quantities of energy (...)."

Wilhelm Reich paraphrased this second view as follows: “It is perfectly logical that the instinct itself cannot be conscious, because it is that which rules and rules us. We are his object. Let's think of electricity . We don't know what and how it is. We only recognize them by what they say, the light and the electric shock. The electric wave can be measured, but it is only a property of what we call electricity and actually do not know. Just as electricity can be measured through its expressions of energy, the instincts can only be recognized through expressions of affect. "

But even the question of whether the construct of drive can even be ascribed to one of these levels is contradictingly dealt with by Freud. "We cannot evade the 'drive' as a borderline concept between psychological and biological conception." This statement contradicts the previous statement in that it is stated here that the drive cannot be assigned to the somatic or psychological level, but is a borderline concept.

Freud describes the central qualities of the drive as follows: “The source of the drive is an exciting process in an organ and the next goal of the drive is to remove the organ stimulus” “On the way from the source to the goal, the drive becomes psychologically effective. We think of it as a certain amount of energy that pushes in a certain direction. (…) The goal can be reached on one's own body, as a rule an external object is inserted, on which the drive reaches its external goal; his inner being remains the body change perceived as satisfaction every time. ”(Freud [1933] 1982, Volume 1, 530). The trigger is therefore an internal stimulus that arouses a certain instinctual tension that is perceived as unpleasant. This tension awakens the desire to reduce it by satisfying the instinctual goal, usually the object.

The drive provides a certain amount of energy for this task. It is important here that the human being cannot evade the instinctual stimulus as an internal stimulus, as is usually the case with an external stimulus. He cannot therefore escape the instinctual tension without satisfying the instinct, although he can postpone the instinctual satisfaction for a while. The longer the delay, the greater the aversive tension and the desire for instinctual satisfaction. The quality of the instinct is determined by its instinctual goal. All other shoots can be integrated into the main shoots of these models as sub-shoots. “Which shoots can you set up and how many? Obviously, the arbitrariness is left a lot of leeway. There is nothing to be said against it if someone applies the concept of a play instinct, an instinct for destruction, an instinct to socialize, where the subject requires it and the limitations of psychological analysis permit it. However, one should not ignore the question of whether these instinctual motives, which are on the one hand so very specialized, do not allow a further decomposition in the direction of the instinctual sources, so that only the original instincts that cannot be further decomposed can claim a meaning. "

An instinct requires its own satisfaction and usually also an object of its own, nevertheless a certain amount of the original instinctual energy can be shifted to another goal and thereby be satisfied. Freud calls this process sublimation . The instinctual goal is to ease the tension of excitement.

criticism

Psychoanalytic criticism of Freud's drive theory

The founder of ego psychology , Heinz Hartmann , tried in the late 1930s to distance himself from Freud's concept of the life and death instincts. He suggested replacing the term instinct with the introduction of libidinal and aggressive motivations.

The Freudian drive theory was criticized and revised, among others, by a group of psychoanalysts who were later referred to as neo-psychoanalysts . They include u. a. Harald Schultz-Hencke , Karen Horney , Erich Fromm , Harry Stack Sullivan , Frieda Fromm-Reichmann and Clara Thompson . The mainstream of criticism suspected the drive theory to be a mechanistic-biologic holdover from the 19th century. Freud's image of man was also criticized as being culturally pessimistic with his acceptance of the instinct to death and destruction . The neo-psychoanalysts wanted to re-establish psychoanalysis as a theory of human relationships (cf. also object relationship theory ). It is disputed whether they have thereby disclosed essential, decisive (a unique selling point) content of Freudian psychoanalysis. In the so-called “culturalism dispute”, this question is being investigated by the opponents Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse .

Other representatives of psychoanalysis such as Otto F. Kernberg see the drives as a result of the affects, that is, as a secondary phenomenon. Freud still saw the drive as an “inner somatic source of stimulus”, on the borderline between the somatic and the psychological; it can be recognized through the expression of affect. With this, Kernberg approaches the model of the motivational system, which summarizes basic needs as motivation within the mental system. Other authors such as Joseph D. Lichtenberg and Martin Dornes see the drive theory itself, and with it the use of the term “drive” in the Freudian sense, as refuted. Lichtenberg, based on Heinz Hartmann and the development of American self-psychology according to Kohut , instead starts from motivational systems, which also include human sexuality. Dornes sees the drive theory as a biologically based “driving force” of the psyche as refuted. What all authors have in common is that they regard affect as the central motivating aspect of the psyche.

Criticism from the perspective of trauma research

Fundamental criticism of the psychoanalytic drive theory comes from authors who have since broken away from psychoanalysis, e. B. Alice Miller , Thomas Mertens , Jeffrey Masson ( Final Analysis , 1992), Dörte von Drigalski ( Flowers on Granite , 1980), Hilarion Petzold . Your accusation is that the drive theory of psychoanalysis on the one hand does not do justice to the victims of sexual abuse in any way. Because on the basis of drive theory, the abused as a “victim” can be turned into the abused as a “perpetrator”. This connection is easy to see in criminology: it was only when the drive theory was abandoned that it was possible to abandon the so-called “provocation thesis” in the case of rape. On the other hand, it was only with the abandonment of the drive theory that the conviction of the perpetrators as violent offenders prevailed, without a z. B. particularly strong sex drive is accepted as a justification.

The student, companion and close confidante of Freud Sándor Ferenczi , who in his last creative years increasingly drew attention to the limits of psychoanalytic dogmatics , had a significant influence on the more recent criticism of the instinct theory . Ferenczi recently emphasized the influence of exogenous, i.e. traumatizing factors on the development of the psyche and asked in particular about the influence of adult passion on the unfinished child's soul. In doing so, however, he not only turned the classical analytical model on its head, which envisages the child as an instinctual subject in relation to a world of incestuously desired objects or objects to be eliminated in the service of infantile sexuality , but at the same time also called into question the core of Freud's teaching, the so-called Oedipus complex as possible effect of the parents' instinctuality towards the child as an object. An example of this dissident train of thought, developed especially in his diary from 1932, is his lecture, Speech Confusion Between Adults and Children, given at the Wiesbaden Congress of the IPV shortly before his death . The language of tenderness and passion. Here he developed the concept of the aggressor's introjection as an effect of traumatizing attacks on the child.

Even Sigmund Freud himself had published for the sexual abuse of children by adults, for. B. in The Etiology of Hysteria . When he gave a lecture to the Psychiatric and Neurological Society in May 1896, he came across, according to Freud in a letter to Wilhelm Fließ, an “icy reception” and Krafft-Ebing, who chaired it, commented succinctly: “It sounds like a scientific fairy tale ”. In The Etiology of Hysteria it was said of him:

“Individuals who are not concerned about satisfying their sexual needs in children cannot be expected to be offended by nuances in the manner of that satisfaction, and childhood sexual impotence inevitably urges the same surrogate acts as it does the adult lowers in the case of acquired impotence. "

In this context, Freud also discussed the unequal relationship in child abuse, in which the child is exposed to the will of the adult:

"All the strange conditions under which the unequal couple continues their love affair: the adult who cannot escape his share in the mutual dependency that necessarily emerges from a sexual relationship, but who does so with all authority and the right to chastisement is equipped and swaps one role for the other for the uninhibited satisfaction of his whims; the child, abandoned to this arbitrariness in its helplessness, prematurely awakened to all sensibilities and exposed to all disappointments, often interrupted in the exercise of the sexual achievements assigned to it by its imperfect control of natural needs - all these grotesque and yet tragic disproportions are shaped in the distant future Development of the individual and his neurosis in a myriad of permanent effects which would be worthy of the most detailed persecution. "

However, in the wording in the above quotation "... the adult who cannot escape his share in the mutual dependence that necessarily emerges from a sexual relationship ..." again the "understanding" of the drives (here of the adult who this "... could not withdraw ...").

In addition, Freud revoked his theory of hysteria a year later. “I no longer believe in my neurotica,” it said in a letter dated September 21, 1897. “He, Freud, took the patient's descriptions at face value and overlooked the way fiction and truth kept intermingling.” Nevertheless, it belonged Freud to those who at that time addressed the issue of child abuse, but with his drive theory at the same time “supplied” the cause, which excused the perpetrator as the victim.

A critical view of the drive theory as the core of psychoanalysis can often be seen in former psychoanalysts. So was z. B. Child abuse and child abuse particularly addressed by Alice Miller , who rejected drive theory as well as psychoanalysis as a whole, since within these childhood traumas are (can) only be understood as childish generations, which would deny the reality of child abuse and child abuse. Miller sees the reason for this as being rooted in the internal logic of psychoanalysis, which marginalizes exogenous causes in favor of internal instinctual conflicts and systematically misunderstands their meaning. In 1988 she therefore resigned from both the Swiss Society for Psychoanalysis and the International Psychoanalytic Association .

The trauma researcher Ulrich Sachsse took a similar step when he announced his “farewell to psychoanalytic identity”. He said similarly and explicitly: “While this uncertainty (of keeping the categories of 'repressed memory' and 'ubiquitous unconscious fantasy' apart) comes astonishingly close to the equation of memory and fantasy of inner soul reality, it is fatal if the victim on the level of external reality, the everyday level, thereby being made an accomplice. Psychoanalysis relativized the perpetrator as a victim of his unconscious processes and qualified the victim as an unconscious accomplice due to his unconscious processes. "

See also

Individual evidence

  1. Sigmund Freud: instincts and instinct fates. (1915). Psychology of the Unconscious, Study Edition, Volume III, Fischer, Frankfurt am Main, Special Edition 2000, ISBN 3-596-50360-4 , p. 87.
  2. Freud [1905] 1982, Volume 5, p. 76.
  3. Freud [1926] 1960, Volume 14, p. 302.
  4. Reich 1972, p. 33.
  5. Freud [1913] 1960, Volume 8, p. 410.
  6. Freud [1905] 1982, Volume 5, p. 77.
  7. Freud [1915] 1982, Volume 3, p. 87
  8. OF Kernberg: Borderline personality organization and classification of personality disorders. In: Kernberg, Dulz, Sachsse (Ed.): Handbook of Borderline Disorders. Schattauer, Stuttgart 2000: “Satisfying, rewarding and lustful affects become libido as a superordinate drive, while painful, uncomfortable and negative affects are integrated into aggression as a superordinate drive. [...] The affectively charged development of object relationships - in other words, real and fantasized interpersonal interactions that are internalized into a complex world of self and object representations in the context of affective interactions - is, as I understand it, the basic pattern for the development of the unconscious mental life and the structure of the psyche. "
  9. ^ A b Sandra Maurer: The woman as a special object of protection of criminal law norms. Verlag Logos, Würzburg 2009, p. 61.
  10. ^ S. Freud: Letters to Wilhelm Fließ 1887–1904. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, p. 193.
  11. ^ S. Freud: On the aetiology of hysteria. Study edition, Volume VI, Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1896/2000, p. 74.
  12. a b S. Freud: On the etiology of hysteria. Study edition, Volume VI, Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1896/2000, p. 75.
  13. Reinhard Gasser: Nietsche and Freud. de Gruyter, Berlin 1997, p. 421.
  14. Alice Miller: You shouldn't notice . Frankfurt am Main Suhrkamp Verlag , 1983 (here in particular Chapter 8: Eighty Years of Drive Theory, pp. 248–281), as well as: Alice Miller: Location 1990 . Frankfurt am Main (Suhrkamp Verlag), 1990, SV
  15. Ulrich Sachsse: Farewell to my psychoanalytic identity. In: Otto F. Kernberg, Birger Dulz, Jochen Eckert (eds.): WIR: Psychotherapists about themselves and their impossible job. Stuttgart 2006, pp. 444-459, here p. 450; Google Books (excerpts)