IPA Inter-Regional Encyclopedic Dictionary of Psychoanalysis

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II. TERMINOLOGY: INSTINCTS, DRIVES, WISHES, NEEDS AND DESIRE

As far as the usage of the German terms, Trieb and Instinkt , Freud preferred Trieb , best translated as drive. He preferred this because he conceived of drives as relatively continuous psychic motivational systems, at the border of the physical and the mental (Freud, 1915 a, b). In contrast, Freud mostly used the term Instinkt when designating discontinuous, rigid, genetically pre-wired inborn behavioral schemes and pre-dispositions, patterns of which are same for all individual members of the same species as seen in animals, or analogous to animals. Yet, in spite of Freud’s clearly distinct usage, in the Standard Edition, Strachey translates Trieb mostly, if not consistently, as “instinct”. For instance, he translated “Triebe und Triebschicksale” (Freud 1915a) as “Instincts and their Vicissitudes” (Freud 1915b). Strachey’s translation has been repeatedly criticized and consequently, in contemporary psychoanalytic literature, the term most often utilized in English globally is ‘drive’. The word ‘trieb’ in German language accentuates the irresistible nature of the pressure rather than the stability of its aim and object. (The corresponding verb form ‘trieben’ means to push.) Freud coined more than forty-five expressions based on the word Trieb, such as Triebkonflikt , Strachey’s ‘‘instinctual conflict.’’ Further, Freud qualified drives in myriad ways, including the sexual drives, the ego-drives, the drive for self-preservation, the aggressive drives, the drive for power, the drive for mastery, the destructive drive, the life-drive, the death- drive, the drive for knowledge, and the social drive, the partial drives, and the theory of the drives, Trieblehre. In English speaking North American psychoanalysis , the terminology underwent evolution from ‘instincts’ and ‘instinctual drives’ to ‘drives . Not dissimilar to Europe, connotation of the term ‘instinct’ in Post-Freudian North American psychoanalysis is quite different from its usage in biology and ethology, especially in the study of animal behavior (Lorenz 1963, Tinbergen 1951, Wilson 1975). Consistently with Freud’s usage of ‘trieb’ (Freud 1915a), North American authors use ‘instinct’ to refer to psychic representation (mostly through wishes) of the stimuli arising from somatic processes. In North American psychoanalytic use of the term, no specific behavioral response is assigned to an ‘instinct’, in contrast to the ethological use of the term, which always implies a specific reflexive behavioral pattern. While North American use of the term ‘instinct’ may be rooted in Freud’s ‘Trieb’ of “Instinct and Their Vicissitudes’ (1915 a, b), and may refer to ‘First’ or ‘Second’ ‘Dual Instinct Theories’, early Post-Freudian writers with legacy in North America (Hartmann 1948, Schur 1966) began using the term ‘instinctual drive’ to denote the capacity to integrate the bio- psychological features of the concept. To Hartmann and Schur, the term ‘instinctual drive’

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