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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 integrate the bio-psychological features of the concept. To Hartmann and Schur, the term ‘instinctual drive’ retained the somatic underpinning of the ‘Trieb’, while delinking the concept from its reflexive and behavioral connotations. The next step, conceptually elaborating the Drive Theory of 1920 was to employ terminology of ‘libidinal instinctual drive’ and ‘aggressive instinctual drive’ (Akhtar 2009). This contributed to progressive ‘psychologization’ of ‘Trieb’ in North American psychoanalysis, as evidenced in writings of Edith Jacobson (1964), Hans Loewald (1971, 1978), Fred Pine (1988) and others. The term ‘instinctual drive’ contributed to conceptual controversies over their origins. On one hand, there was a group of analysts (Brenner 1982a) who considered them inborn, while others (Kernberg 1976) use the term ‘instinctual components’ as a synonym for/closely related to, ‘affects’, fitting with the prevalent conception of ‘instincts’ in biology, denoting inborn perceptive, behavioral, communicative, psychophysiological experiential patterns, in contrast to Freudian ‘drives’, which they preserve for the motivational systems of libido and aggression. Drive ‘Expressions’: Representations, Derivatives As a cornerstone of Freudian metapsychology, drives are never seen in pure culture. They are always mitigated and modulated by variously conceptualized combinations of intrapsychic, inter-psychic and relational experiences. As a metapsychological concept, drive needs to be distinguished from its expressions/manifestations, on the level of clinical phenomenology, (conscious and unconscious) wishes and desires, which are variously theorized to be derived from the underlying drives. Conversely, Freud mentions deriving his theories and interpretations from the ‘raw material’ on a manifest level (1900, 1933, 1937). Relationships between different psychic systems, especially related to drives’ passing between the unconscious and pre-conscious/conscious systems, are mediated via representational processes (1900, 1915a, b). Drive Representatives and Representations The way that Freud conceptualized drive as “on the frontier between the mental and the somatic, as the psychical representative of the stimuli originating from within the organism and reaching the mind” (1915b, p. 121-122) included the idea of representational processes, through which drive can be known. These representative processes can be on different levels of abstraction and relating to drive in different ways. The most abstract is ‘the representative’ ( Repräsentanz) , which denotes ‘delegation’, used mostly in the specific context of the drive’s relationship to its own representative in a psychic sphere, relationship between psyche and soma, and in his Metapsychology papers (1915a, b, c, d), as in ‘idea representing the drive’.
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