British Journal of Medical Pgchology (1992), 65, 95-106
Printed in Greut Brituin
95
0 1992 The British Psychological Society
Psychoanalytic views of aggression : Some theoretical problems Jonathan Pedder* Psychotherapy Unit, The Maudsiy Hospital, Denmark Hili, London SE5 S A Z , UK
Various problems in relation to psychoanalytic theories of aggression are considered in a review which is by no means exhaustive but includes areas which have puzzled and interested the author. First to be considered is why the concept of aggression as a major drive was a relative late-comer in psychoanalysis; next the contentious concept of a ‘death instinct’ and some of the factors in Freud’s lifetime which may have contributed to both. Then it is suggested that we seem to have theories of aggression which might be called primary or secondary in two different senses. First is the question whether aggression is innate or secondary to frustration. In another sense, primary and secondary theories of aggression seem to survive paralleling Freud’s original primary and secondary theories of anxiety. In this sense the primary theory survives as an explanation of psychosomatic disorder. Lastly, the link between suicide and murder is considered and the turning of aggression against the self in depression and self-destructive attacks.
The first problem to be tackled is: why did theories about aggression apparently arrive so relatively late in psychoanalytic history? A previous paper referred to this (Pedder, 1987) when discussing, among other things, the differences between Freud and Adler. Yet, although Freud only formally recognized aggression as a separate major drive relatively late, hostile wishes were an inherent part of the theory of the oedipal complex and therefore part of his thinking very much earlier. As early as 1897, in Draft ‘N’ of the Fliess papers, Freud wrote to Fliess: Hostile impulses against parents (a wish that they should die) are also an integral constituent of neuroses. They come to light consciously as obsessional ideas.. .They are repressed at times when compassion for the parents is active - at times of their illness or death. On such occasions it is a manifestation of mourning to reproach oneself for their death ...or to punish oneself in a hysterical fashion ... It seems as though this death-wish is directed in sons against their father and in daughters against their mother (pp. 254-255).
So the importance of hostility was already stated in 1897, the year that Freud began his self-analysis. However, although 11 years later, in 1908, Adler first suggested that the aggressive drive was in his view just as central as sexual libido, it was a long time before Freud gave aggression as much importance - perhaps because at the time he had only just written the Three Essays on Sexualig (1905) and was seeing everything in the light of the libido theory. *
Requests for reprints.
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Perhaps another factor is Gillespie’s (1971) suggestion that Freud was fighting on two fronts: that is against both Jung and Adler. He was having to defend the libido theory and the importance of sexuality in the face of Jung’s objections ;and could not yet accept Adler’s emphasis on aggression as a separate drive. Aggression was still seen as a component of the sexual instinct. Similarly, in 1910, in the discussion on suicide (to which I will return later) Freud said: ‘The vicissitudes undergone by the libido in that condition [i.e. melancholia] are totally unknown to us’ (p. 232). That is, he was still trying to see depression and melancholia as well in terms of libido theory. Freud was still in the grip of the first of his dual-instinct theories. It may be helpful to recall the three phases of his dual-instinct theories : (i) First, trying to see everything in terms of sexual and self-preservative instincts; or, as he often liked to say, following, amongst others, the poet Schiller who said that ‘hunger and love are what moves the world’. This polarity closely followed the Darwinian paradigm (Sulloway, 1980) of two basic drives: the will to survive and the urge to reproduce. (ii) Second, from 1914, seeing the main duality between narcissistic libido and object libido; or between self-love and love of others; (iii) And then not till 1920 arriving at his final formulation, expressed in various ways as the conflict between life and death instincts; between love and hate; or sexual and aggressive drives. Throughout, he remained an ‘obstinate dualist ’, as Ernest Jones (1957) observed. Jones relates this to conflict between the masculine and the feminine sides of Freud’s nature. In the Little Hans case Freud (1909) commented: Alfred Adler, in a suggestive paper, has recently developed the view that anxiety arises from the suppression of what he calls the ‘aggressive instinct’ ...As we have come to the conclusion that in our present case of phobia the anxiety is to be explained as being due to the repression of Hans’s aggressive propensities.. . we seem to have produced a most striking piece of confirmation of Adler’s view.
So you would think he was agreeing with it. But he goes o n : I cannot bring myself to assume the existence of a special aggressive instinct alongside of the familiar instincts of self-preservation and of sex, and on an equal footing with them.. .(p. 140).
Then he adds a footnote in 1923: Since then I have myself been obliged to assert the existence of an aggressive instinct but it is different from Adler’s. I prefer to call it the ‘destructive’ or ‘death instinct’.
Well, was it different? It seems more as though there may have been some unwillingness on Freud’s part to accept the separate importance of aggression, perhaps merely because Adler had suggested the idea first. Twenty years later, in CivifiTation and its Discontents, Freud (1930) reacts with astonishment at his own earlier reluctance, and admits : I can no longer understand how we can have overlooked the ubiquity of non-erotic aggressivity and destructiveness ...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 (p. 120).
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What had happened in those intervening years between 1910 and 1930 to make Freud change his mind? Brenner (1971) suggests : It seems reasonable to assume that what chiefly influenced Freud in the direction of assuming the operation of aggression as an innate, driving force in mental life was the increasing appreciation of the importance of unconscious, self-destructive and self-punitive trends in mental life, an appreciation which derived from his psychoanalytic practie during the decade 191e1920 (p. 137).
That is, it was from his clinical experience that he came to give increasing importance to aggression - much more than from his theories about the death instinct as revealed in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud, 1920). Then, in addition to his clinical experience, after the relative peace that Freud had experienced under the Austro-Hungarian empire, there was the carnage of the First World War. Bruno Bettelheim, in an interview on BBC Television (‘Horizon’, March 1987), spoke of his childhood in Vienna, where he was born in 1903 into a middle-class assimilated-Jewish family. He recalled the Austro-Hungarian Empire before 1914 as a time of great progress and security, with a firm belief in further progress. That may be a nostalgic view, but it is very interesting in this context to read Freud’s ( 1 9 1 5 ~ )paper on ‘Thoughts for the times o n war and death’, written shortly after the outbreak of war. There is a note of disbelief in Freud; as if he could not accept that man could be quite so mad and throw away all that civilization had achieved over the centuries that now seemed to be abandoned in the murderousness of the first world war. He must have been concerned too about his sons fighting in the war, two at the front and one behind the lines - and whether they would survive. So there were several factors that may have combined to force his attention to the prime importance of aggression.
The ‘death instinct’ The second problem I want to turn to is the concept of the death instinct. Although the factors already mentioned above led to increased emphasis on the importance of aggression, apparently the concept of the death instinct did not explicitly follow from them. This highly speculative theory (Freud, 1920) derived from noting the phenomenon of repetition compulsion. Freud had become increasingly aware that not everything could be explained simply by the pleasure principle. As he says, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, it did not explain phenomena in three areas: first, traumatic neuroses and traumatic dreams, which g o against the simple idea of the pleasure principle and wish-fulfilment. Second, there were his observations of the repetitive game played by his grandson with a cotton-reel on a string. Freud noted the child never cried when his mother left and he felt that with this game the child was attempting to master his anxiety about her return. Third, the simple pleasure principle did not explain repetitions in analysis, with which Freud was becoming much more familiar. In the earlier historical phase Freud had said that the aim of analysis was simply making the unconscious conscious. But in ‘Remembering, repeating and working through’, Freud (1914) reminded us of the successive phases in the evolution of psychoanalytic treatment from the earliest
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cathartic model to psychoanalytic technique as it would now be recognized, with the accent on understanding and interpreting the developing transference. In the earlier cathartic phase ‘Remembering and abreacting, with the help of the hypnotic state, were what was at that time aimed at’ (Freud, 1914, p. 147). This cathartic model of psychotherapy is a time-honoured method which still plays a part in all psychotherapy; but in other cases, when there has been no clear-cut traumatic event (as there is, for example, in bereavement), there may apparently be nothing to remember. Freud writes : If we confine ourselves to this second type in order to bring out the difference, we may say that the patient does not remember anything of what he has forgotten and repressed, but acts it out. He reproduces it not as a memory but as an action; he repeats it, without, of course, knowing that he is repeating it (p. 150).
Freud’s evolving understanding of the phenomenon of transference had enabled him to see that repeating was another kind of remembering. This was in 1914; then in 1919, when he began to write Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud, 1920), he was becoming increasingly aware of the widespread phenomena of repetition. What psychoanalysis reveals in the transference phenomena of neurotics can also be observed in the lives of some normal people. The impression they give is of being pursued by a malignant fate or possessed by some ‘daemonic’ power; ...The compulsion which is here in evidence differs in no way from the compulsion to repeat which we have found in neurotics (pp. 21 -22).
And he gives several interesting examples, including : the man who time after time in the course of his life raises someone else into a position of great private or public authority and then, after a certain interval, himself upsets that authority and replaces him by a new one (p. 22).
Could he be talking about himself there, and his repeated relationships with people such as Breuer and Fliess? It is important to remember, since the death instinct is accepted as agiven in some analytic quarters, that at the beginning of the fourth section of Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud (1920) introduced it as a speculation. What follows is speculation, often far-fetched speculation, which the reader will consider or dismiss according to his individual predilection. It is further an attempt to follow out an idea consistently, out of curiosity to see where it will lead (p. 24).
Moreover, he links the repetition compulsion with the idea of an instinct to return to an inorganic state.
When he is talking about a ‘daemonic force ’ or a ‘daemonic power’ we may have no problem with that, because there obviously are dark destructive forces at work
within us. But when he shifts to a different conceptual framework and talks about a biological instinct to return to an inorganic state this presents much more difficulty. Partly there is a confusion of translation here; the German expression Todestriebe might have been better translated ‘death drive’, but was translated by Strachey as ‘death instinct ’. Trieb implies more a drive, an urge; not quite the same as ‘instinct’, which Freud on other occasions uses separately to imply simple in-built patterns of behaviour. Yet despite that Freud goes on to infer, from this idea of a desire to return to a former state, that the aim of all life is death, and, as Jones (1957) points out, there
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is a confusion of end and purpose here. Nevertheless, this led Freud to his third duality: the polarity between life and death instincts. We should not forget Freud’s (1920) own tentativeness in introducing these ideas. It may be asked whether and how far I am myself convinced of the truth of the hypotheses that have been set out in these pages. My answer would be that I am not convinced myself and that I do not seek to persuade other people to believe in them. Or, more precisely, that I do not know how far I believe in them (p. 59).
It is often suggested that he came increasingly to accept this idea. Indeed Freud (1930) himself at times conveys this impression : The assumption of the existence of an instinct of death or destruction has met with resistance even in analytic circles;. .. To begin with it was only tentatively that I put forward 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 (p. 119).
Yet at other times he seems in some doubt about it himself (Gillespie, 1971). He appears to alternate between liking it and doubting it. For instance, in two letters to Princess Marie Bonaparte (Jones, 1957), written towards the end of his life, he wrote, first in May 1937: The turning inwards of the aggressive impulse is naturally the counterpart of turning outwards of the libido when it passes over from the ego to objects. One could imagine a pretty schematic idea of all libido being at the beginning of life directed inwards and all aggression outwards, and that this gradually changes in the course of life. But perhaps that is not correct (p. 494).
This is a very neat idea, that libido starts being all turned inwards, and then gets directed outwards ; whereas aggression all starts outwards and then goes inwards. But then he writes to her again in June 1937, only a month later, ‘Please do not overestimate my remarks about the destructive instinct. They were only tossed off and should be carefully thought over if you propose to use them publicly’ (p. 494). So Freud regarded the death instinct at times as fairly speculative. And, as Ernest Jones (1957) commented: of the fifty or so papers they [his followers] have since devoted to the topic one observes that in the first decade [that is about 1925 to 19351 only half supported Freud’s theory, in the second decade only a third, and in the last decade none at all (p. 287).
But is that decline in support of the concept still quite true, because as Gillespie (1971) says, Klein and her followers have kept the idea very much alive? Klein herself, as Spillius (1983) puts it, ‘assumes, or, being Klein it would be more correct to say, she asserts, that there is experience of the death instinct from the beginning’ (p. 327). Similarly, Segal (1987), in a Freud Memorial Lecture in London, said: ‘...the concept of the death instinct is, to my mind, indispensable to clinical work ’. It has often been speculated that other personal factors may have contributed to Freud’s enthusiasm for the idea of the death instinct ; for example, the death of his daughter Sophie, in 1920, though he specifically disclaimed this, saying in a letter that he wanted everyone to be quite clear that Beyond the Pleasure Principle had been written before she became ill. Then there was Freud’s own experience of being eaten away by cancer of the mouth and those 33 operations, following the first diagnosis in 1923, which was also the fateful year that his grandson died (Jones, 1957). All these factors
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may have contributed to his paying increasing attention to aggression and selfdestructiveness. Obviously there are dark destructive forces at work in mankind, the daemonic power that Freud refers to, but whether we actually go so far as saying these arise from a death instinct, as a biological notion, seems very questionable philosophically and has not found favour with modern biologists. Segal (1987), having said the concept of the death instinct is indispensable to clinical work (which I would question), then goes on to say in the very next sentence something I would very much agree with, that beyond the pleasure principle, beyond ambivalence, aggression, persecution, jealousy, envy, etc., there is a constant pull of the self-destructive forces and it is the task of the analyst to deal with them (p. 12).
I think it is a pity she does not follow her own advice in a footnote to that paper, where she criticizes the translation of Todestriebe as ‘instinct’. It would have been much better, she suggested, translated as in French, ‘pulsion’, o r ‘drive’ in English. And yet she keeps on using the expression ‘death instinct’, as d o other Kleinian authors. Ellenberger (1970) relates the background of dynamic psychiatry to the Romantic Movement. Among others he mentions von Schubert (1780-1860) who was the author of a highly poetic vision of nature, striking in its similarities to certain Freudian and Jungian concepts. In Man, as in all living beings, the longing for love (Sehnsucht) cannot easily be separated from the longing for death (Todessehnsucht)which is the striving to return ‘home’ to nature, but which also points to a future life (p. 205).
As a romantic poetic notion the longing for death or a daemonic power seems very appropriate. But d o we need to tie these to a biological notion of a death instinct? Aggression : Primary or secondary The next problem I want to look at is whether aggression should be considered as primary or secondary; in the sense o f p r i m a y , as ethologists such as Lorenz (1966) have suggested ; o r seconday to frustration and deprivation, as Winnicott (1950) o r social-learning theorists imply. Lorenz (1 966) has stated : Intra-specific aggression is millions of years older than personal friendship and love. During long epochs of the earth’s history there have been animals that were certainly extraordinarily fierce and aggressive. Nearly all reptiles of the present day are aggressive and it is unlikely that those of antiquity were less so.But the personal bond is known only in teleost fishes, birds and mammals, that is in groups that did not appear before the early Tertiary period. Thus intra-specific aggression can certainly exist without its counterpart, love, but conversely there is no love without aggression (p. 186).
Nearby he states : A personal bond, an individual friendship, is found only in animals with highly developed intraspecific aggression, in fact this bond is the firmer, the more aggressive the particular animal and species is (p. 186).
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It recalls Freud’s (19156) view that hate is older than love, except that Lorenz observes : A behaviour mechanism that must be sharply differentiated from intra-specificaggression is hate, the ugly little brother of love. As opposed to ordinary aggression, it is directed towards one individual, just as love is, and probably hate presupposes the presence of love: one can really hate only where one has loved and, even if one denies it, still does (p. 186).
I think psychotherapists would probably agree about that, but it is stated by the ethologist Lorenz. So we might say that aggression comes before love, but love comes before hate. This is not unlike Winnicott’s (1950) view about aggression, when he distinguishes between a healthy assertive form of aggression, or a life force, and an anger and destructiveness that comes secondary to frustration. The debate continues as to whether aggression is innate in man or a response to frustration and deprivation. Maybe both views are valid. We could say there is a primary form of aggression or a healthy innate assertiveness which man needs for survival and competition; and a secondary form of aggression, or hate and destructiveness secondary to frustration. We could say these two parallel phylogeny and ontogeny. In the development of the species, or phylogeny, there has evolved a primary kind of innate potential aggressiveness ; but in personal development, or ontogeny, hate arises in a secondary sense. Along similar lines, Eric Fromm (1974) distinguishes between benign and malignant aggression, seeing the first as instinctive but the second as a product of human character. Benign aggression, he suggests, is phylogenetically programmed, biologically adaptive and defensive in function, leading to flight more often than fight in response to threat. He regards Lorenz’s view as an idolatry of Darwin and as an outmoded hydraulic view. War he considers is not innate but has increased with the development of civilization. Primitive man has to cooperate, much more than fight, for the purposes of hunting. By contrast, malignant aggression he considers non-adaptive and an expression of human destructiveness, sadism and cruelty, which has increased with civilization. Fromm tends to idealize primitive man and the notion of the noble savage, but he appears optimistic about the possibilities of changing society to avoid destructiveness. It is clearly an oversimplification to overemphasize the contribution either of instinct or of society, either of which polarities may then be used to exonerate each of us from personal responsibility. We are born with instinctive dispositions and have to take responsibility for them, or, as Freud said, ‘where Id was there Ego shall be ’. Reviewing Kohut’s theory of aggression, Shane 8t Shane (1982) suggested a very similar formulation of two developmental lines : The first, nondestructive aggression, is an integral constituent of healthy assertiveness. This line develops out of optimal frustration from an empathic environment. The second line of development is destructive aggression, which emerges secondarily out of nonoptimal frustration of an unempathic environment (p. 269).
Recently Bacciagaluppi (1989) has reviewed the role of aggressiveness in Bowlby’s work and likened his views to those of Fromm. Bacciagaluppi suggests that in both his early and his later work Bowlby distinguishes between a primary form of
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aggressiveness (simple aggression, or functional anger) and a secondary form (transformed aggression, or dysfunctional anger), which arises from the first as a result of adverse parental reactions. This is similar to the distinction made by Fromm between defensive and malignant aggression.
Aggression : Primary and secondary There is another, different but related way in which I think we can speak of problems with aggression being primary or secondary, in the sense of paralleling Freud’s primary and secondary theories of anxiety. Wolff (1969) (in a conference on ‘ Aggression and Psychosomatic Disorder ’) distinguished between conflict over aggression, which can lead to neurosis, and suppression of aggression, leading to psychosomatic disorder. If aggressive impulses and fantasies give rise to internal conflict leading to anxiety or guilt or both, psychiatric illnesses are likely to result; ...guilt on account of persistent aggressive impulses is likely to give rise to a depressive illness, sometimes resulting in suicidal attempts, themselves due to aggressive impulses directed partly against others but partly against oneself (p. 318).
Then he goes on (and note the shift) : ‘When.. .outward expression of anger is even more completely suppressed, then the aggressive posture leads to somatic changes and psychosomatic disorders ’. So he is saying : conjict over aggression leads to neurosis ;suppression of aggression to psychosomatic disorder. I think there is an important conceptual shift here, which I am not sure has been fully recognized. It seems to me that we have here two theories of how difficulties arise with aggression : primary and secondary theories, which somewhat parallel Freud’s primary and secondary theories of anxiety. It will be recalled that Freud offered different formulations of the origins of anxiety in the early and later phases of his career. His earlier model (Freud, 1894) was a more physiological, hydraulic one: he suggested that anxiety was the expression of undischarged sexual energy or libido. However, Freud (1926) later revised this view, and in his secondary theory came to see anxiety as the response of the ego to the threat of internal sexual o r aggressive drives. Although the primary theory of anxiety has largely been given up in favour of the secondary theory in relation to sexual drives, it looks as if we still covertly retain comparable primary and secondary theories in relation to aggression. Although I suggested this may not have been fully recognized before, recently I noted a comment by Mitchell (1986) that : ‘ Today the concept of actual neurosis has been replaced by the idea of psychosomatic illness’. She also drew attention to the final paragraph in Laplanche & Pontalis’s (1973) dictionary entry on actual neurosis: As a last point, it is worth noting that it is only the lack of satisfaction of the sexnulinstincts which is taken into consideration by Freud’s [theory of actual neurosis]. In attempting to understand the genesis of actual and psychosomatic symptoms, we should be well advised to pay some attention too to the suppression of aggressiveness (p. 11).
Other French psychoanalysts interested in psychosomatic disorder have made similar points, e.g. McDougall (1974):
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Freud’s belief that the actnal neuroses are brought about as a reaction to actual everyday tension, and in particular to the blockage of libidinal satisfactions, is closely related to certain modern conceptions of prychosomatic reactions, though today the notion of psychic ‘pressure ’ would lay equal emphasis on the blockage of aggressive impulses (p. 440).
This concept dies hard, even if it is incorrect. Freud (1940) still held it at the end of his life when he wrote: ‘Holding back aggressiveness is in general unhealthy and leads to illness’ (p. 150). Two recent editorial reviews (Biddle, 1989; Szabadi, 1988) suggesting the beneficial effects of exercise on anxiety and depression appear to have a similar message. The suggestion that we still covertly retain primary and secondary theories of aggression perhaps links with the ideas about primary and secondary aggression expressed in the previous section above. Could we say that undischarged aggression, ordinary healthy assertive aggression, may lead to psychosomatic disorder, rather as Freud’s first anxiety theory suggested, undischarged libido led to actual neurosis ? On the other hand, a conflict over hateful or destructive fantasies may lead to neurosis. Suicide and murder The last problem briefly considered is the relationship between suicide and murder. I have already in several places referred to suicide as aggression directed against the self. This is an old idea. As Winnicott (1950) said: ‘Murder and suicide are fundamentally the same thing’ (p. 204). This is an ancient link. In England, where murder is largely a domestic event, about a third of all murders are followed by the suicide of the murderer. As Storr (1968) wrote: The relation between aggression and depression may be further underlined by reference to D. J. West’s [1965]recent study Murder Followed by Suicide. Of every three murders committed in this country, one is followed by the suicide of the murderer. There could be no clearer demonstration of the truth of Freud’s hypothesis that aggression against others and aggression against the self are reciprocally related and to some extent interchangeable. As the author says: ‘The intimate connection between self-destructive and aggressive tendencies emerged clearly from the many incidents in which the offenders’ intentions wavered uncertainly between murder and suicide (P. 80).
Although suicide has been idealized at certain historical times, particularly in war, for a thousand years - from the time of St Augustine to the Renaissance - the view prevailed that both murder and suicide were a sin. Suicides could not be buried in consecrated ground. It remained a crime in the United Kingdom till 1961, and although many felt very uncomfortable about this law, it could be seen as a sort of public acknowledgement of the psychological truth that suicide and murder are very similar. In 1910 a discussion on suicide among schoolchildren was held in the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society (Alvarez, 1971). Adler talked about inferiority, revenge and antisocial aggression as contributory causes ; Stekel made his well-known remark ‘No-one kills himself who has never wanted to kill another - or at least wished the death of another.’ Freud, in 1910, was still resisting Adler’s views on aggression, and emphasizing the libido theory. As I have already quoted, he said in his brief concluding remarks to this discussion : ‘The vicissitudes undergone by the libido in
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that condition [i.e. melancholia] are totally unknown to us’ (Freud, 1910, p. 232). But then in 1917, in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ he said much the same as Stekel had been saying: We have long known, it is true, that no neurotic harbours thoughts of suicide which he has not turned back upon himself from murderous impulses against others (p. 252).
This, it must be remembered, was in the second phase of Freud’s dual instinct theories, when the suggested polarity was between narcissistic libido and object libido. This parallels the idea of an attack that may be on the self o r may be on others. And it relates to the rather over-neat idea, in Freud’s letter t o Marie Bonaparte (Jones, 1957), that, at the beginning of life, all love is directed inwards and slowly gets directed outwards ; whereas all aggression is first directed outwards and then gets directed inwards, towards the self. But I think I agree with Freud : that is rather an over-neat or ‘pretty ’ schematic speculation. There has been some epidemiological evidence, e.g. from Northern Ireland (Curran, Finlay & McGarry, 1988) of the inverse relationship between homicide and suicide. Kendell (1970) reviewed the relationship between aggression and depression and came to similar conclusions. Discussion In the earlier phase of psychoanalytic history, following the Darwinian influence, Freud emphasized conflicts over sexuality as the major drive. Later he gave the aggressive drive equal importance and would probably have embraced the findings of ethology. The emerging synthesis would be to accept aggression as a major drive which, in health, has more of the nature of an essential assertive life force than a death instinct, but when things go awry can be redirected destructively on the self and others. A few years ago it might have seemed appropriate to conclude with the remarks of Lorenz (1964) from a symposium on the Natural History of Aggression: There cannot be any doubt, in the opinion of any biologically minded scientist, that intraspecific aggression is, in Man, just as much of a spontaneous instinctive drive as in most other higher vertebrates. The beginning synthesis between the findings of ethology and psychoanalysis does not leave any doubt either, that what Sigmund Freud has called the ‘death drive’, is nothing else but the miscarrying of this instinct which, in itself, is as indispensable for survival as any other. In this symposium there has been a most satisfying agreement, on this point, between psychiatrists, psychoanalysts and ethologists (Lorenz, 1964, p. 49).
I have more recently been influenced by the book Aggression and War, edited by Groebel 8c Hinde (1989) which brings together a variety of views. They emphasize and cast doubt on the lingering belief in the instinctive inevitability of aggression, which in turn has been thought to lead inevitably to war. They regard this as a myth supported by Freud and Lorenz’s earlier hydraulic views of aggression which ignore the effects of learning and man’s creative capacities, both to wage war and to abolish it. War is not an inevitable human institution. Cannibalism, slavery and public executions have all at times been thought inevitable or desirable and yet abolished. Many contributors draw attention to the increased prevalence of aggression and crime in young men, particularly in the reproductive period, and especially in
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cultures where there is division of labour between the sexes. This is more marked either when fathers are more punitive or where fathers are absent so there is no male role model available (except that provided by TV). Several authors (Groebel & Hinde, 1989) suggest that aggressive crimes in young males are a defensive reaction against feminine identification. This brings us back to modern psychoanalytic views of sexual differentiation; and the task for boys of developing away from an identification with mother for which an acceptable male role model is necessary. Perhaps there is hope here that modern styles of parenting and role sharing will offer more acceptable models of adult male behaviour and reduce aggressive behaviour.
References Alvarez, A. (1971). The Savage God. Harmondsworth : Penguin, 1974. Bacciagaluppi, M. (1989). The role of aggressiveness in the work of John Bowlby. Free Associations, 16, 123-1 34. Biddle, S. (1989). Exercise and the treatment of depression. British Journal ojHospital Medicine, 42, 267. Brenner, C. (1971). The psychoanalytic concept of aggression. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis,52, 137-144. Curran, P. J., Finlay, R. J. & McGarry, P. J. (1988). Trends in suicide: N. Ireland. Irish Journal of Psychological Medicine, 5, 98-1 02. Ellenberger, H. F. (1970). The Discouery of the Unconscious. London: Allen Lane. Freud, S. (1894). The neuropsychoses of defence. In J. Strachey (Ed.), The Standard Edition o j the Complete Psychological Works o j Sigmund Freud, 24 vols. London: Hogarth, 1953-73. 3. Freud, S. (1897). Draft N in Extracts from the Fliess Papers. S.E., vol. 1. London: Hogarth Press. Freud, S. (1905). Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. S.E., vol. 7. London: Hogarth Press. Freud, S. (1909). Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-year-old Boy. S.E., vol. 10. London: Hogarth Press. Freud, S. (1910). Contributions to a Discussion on Suicide. S.E., vol. 11. London: Hogarth Press. Freud, S. (1914). Remembering, repeating and working through. S.E., vol. 12. London: Hogarth Press. Freud, S. (1915~).Thoughts for the Times on War and Death. S.E., vol. 14. London: Hogarth Press. Freud, S. (19156). Instincts and their Vicissitudes. S.E., vol. 14. London: Hogarth Press. Freud, S. (1917). Mourning and Melancholia. S.E., vol. 14. London: Hogarth Press. Freud, S. (1920). Beyond the Pleasure Principle. S.E., vol. 18. London: Hogarth Press. Freud, S. (1926). Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety. S.E., vol. 20. London: Hogarth Press. Freud, S. (1930). Civilization and its Discontents. S.E., vol. 21. London: Hogarth Press. Freud, S. (1940). Outline of Psychoanalysis. S . E . , vol. 23. London: Hogarth Press. Fromm, E. (1974). The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. Harmondsworth : Penguin, 1987. Gillespie, W. H. (1971). Aggression and instinct theory. International Journal o j Psycho-Anabsis, 52, 155-1 60. Groebel, J. & Hinde, R. A. (1989). Agression and War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jones, E. (1957). Sigmund Freud: Lye and Work, vol. 3. London: Hogarth Press. Kendell, R. E. (1970). Relationship between aggression and depression. Archives of General Psychiatry, 22, 308-318. Laplanche, J. & Pontalis, J.-B. (1973). The Language of Pychoanalyss. London: Hogarth Press. Lorenz, K. (1964). Ritualized fighting. In J. D. Carthy & F. J. Ebling (Eds), The Natural History of Aggression. London : Academic Press. Lorenz, K. (1966). On Aggression. London: Methuen. McDougall, J. (1974). The psychosoma and the psychoanalytic process. International Review of PsychoAnalysis, 1, 437-459. Mitchell, J. (1986). The Selected Melanie Klein. Harmondsworth : Penguin. Pedder, J. R. (1987). Some biographical contributions to psychoanalytic theories. Free Associations, 10, 102-1 16. Segal, H. (1987). On the clinical usefulness of the concept of death instinct. British Psycho-Ana!ytical Society Bulletin. (Unpublished.)
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Shane, M. & Shane, E. (1982). The strands of aggression: A confluence of data. Psychoanalytic I n p i t y , 2. 263-281. Spillius, E. B. (1983). Some developments from the work of Melanie Klein. International Journal of PsycboAnalyss, 64, 321-332. Storr, A. (1968). Human Aggression. London: Allen Lane. Sulloway, F. J. (1980). Freud, Biologist oftbe Mind. London: Fontana. Szabadi, E. (1988). Physical exercise and mental health. Britisb Medical Journal, 2%, 659-660. West, D. J. (1965). Murder Followed 6~ Suicid. London: Heinemann. Winnicott, D. W. (1950). Aggression in relation to emotional development. In D. W. Winnicott (1975), Through Paediatrics to Pychoana!ysis. London : Hogarth Press. Wolff, H. H. (1969). The role of aggression in the psychopathology of illness. Journal of Prycbosomatic Research, 13, 315-320. Received 29 Muy 199 1 ;revised version received 25 September 199 1
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0 1992 The British Psychological Society
Psychoanalytic views of aggression : Some theoretical problems Jonathan Pedder* Psychotherapy Unit, The Maudsiy Hospital, Denmark Hili, London SE5 S A Z , UK
Various problems in relation to psychoanalytic theories of aggression are considered in a review which is by no means exhaustive but includes areas which have puzzled and interested the author. First to be considered is why the concept of aggression as a major drive was a relative late-comer in psychoanalysis; next the contentious concept of a ‘death instinct’ and some of the factors in Freud’s lifetime which may have contributed to both. Then it is suggested that we seem to have theories of aggression which might be called primary or secondary in two different senses. First is the question whether aggression is innate or secondary to frustration. In another sense, primary and secondary theories of aggression seem to survive paralleling Freud’s original primary and secondary theories of anxiety. In this sense the primary theory survives as an explanation of psychosomatic disorder. Lastly, the link between suicide and murder is considered and the turning of aggression against the self in depression and self-destructive attacks.
The first problem to be tackled is: why did theories about aggression apparently arrive so relatively late in psychoanalytic history? A previous paper referred to this (Pedder, 1987) when discussing, among other things, the differences between Freud and Adler. Yet, although Freud only formally recognized aggression as a separate major drive relatively late, hostile wishes were an inherent part of the theory of the oedipal complex and therefore part of his thinking very much earlier. As early as 1897, in Draft ‘N’ of the Fliess papers, Freud wrote to Fliess: Hostile impulses against parents (a wish that they should die) are also an integral constituent of neuroses. They come to light consciously as obsessional ideas.. .They are repressed at times when compassion for the parents is active - at times of their illness or death. On such occasions it is a manifestation of mourning to reproach oneself for their death ...or to punish oneself in a hysterical fashion ... It seems as though this death-wish is directed in sons against their father and in daughters against their mother (pp. 254-255).
So the importance of hostility was already stated in 1897, the year that Freud began his self-analysis. However, although 11 years later, in 1908, Adler first suggested that the aggressive drive was in his view just as central as sexual libido, it was a long time before Freud gave aggression as much importance - perhaps because at the time he had only just written the Three Essays on Sexualig (1905) and was seeing everything in the light of the libido theory. *
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Perhaps another factor is Gillespie’s (1971) suggestion that Freud was fighting on two fronts: that is against both Jung and Adler. He was having to defend the libido theory and the importance of sexuality in the face of Jung’s objections ;and could not yet accept Adler’s emphasis on aggression as a separate drive. Aggression was still seen as a component of the sexual instinct. Similarly, in 1910, in the discussion on suicide (to which I will return later) Freud said: ‘The vicissitudes undergone by the libido in that condition [i.e. melancholia] are totally unknown to us’ (p. 232). That is, he was still trying to see depression and melancholia as well in terms of libido theory. Freud was still in the grip of the first of his dual-instinct theories. It may be helpful to recall the three phases of his dual-instinct theories : (i) First, trying to see everything in terms of sexual and self-preservative instincts; or, as he often liked to say, following, amongst others, the poet Schiller who said that ‘hunger and love are what moves the world’. This polarity closely followed the Darwinian paradigm (Sulloway, 1980) of two basic drives: the will to survive and the urge to reproduce. (ii) Second, from 1914, seeing the main duality between narcissistic libido and object libido; or between self-love and love of others; (iii) And then not till 1920 arriving at his final formulation, expressed in various ways as the conflict between life and death instincts; between love and hate; or sexual and aggressive drives. Throughout, he remained an ‘obstinate dualist ’, as Ernest Jones (1957) observed. Jones relates this to conflict between the masculine and the feminine sides of Freud’s nature. In the Little Hans case Freud (1909) commented: Alfred Adler, in a suggestive paper, has recently developed the view that anxiety arises from the suppression of what he calls the ‘aggressive instinct’ ...As we have come to the conclusion that in our present case of phobia the anxiety is to be explained as being due to the repression of Hans’s aggressive propensities.. . we seem to have produced a most striking piece of confirmation of Adler’s view.
So you would think he was agreeing with it. But he goes o n : I cannot bring myself to assume the existence of a special aggressive instinct alongside of the familiar instincts of self-preservation and of sex, and on an equal footing with them.. .(p. 140).
Then he adds a footnote in 1923: Since then I have myself been obliged to assert the existence of an aggressive instinct but it is different from Adler’s. I prefer to call it the ‘destructive’ or ‘death instinct’.
Well, was it different? It seems more as though there may have been some unwillingness on Freud’s part to accept the separate importance of aggression, perhaps merely because Adler had suggested the idea first. Twenty years later, in CivifiTation and its Discontents, Freud (1930) reacts with astonishment at his own earlier reluctance, and admits : I can no longer understand how we can have overlooked the ubiquity of non-erotic aggressivity and destructiveness ...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 (p. 120).
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What had happened in those intervening years between 1910 and 1930 to make Freud change his mind? Brenner (1971) suggests : It seems reasonable to assume that what chiefly influenced Freud in the direction of assuming the operation of aggression as an innate, driving force in mental life was the increasing appreciation of the importance of unconscious, self-destructive and self-punitive trends in mental life, an appreciation which derived from his psychoanalytic practie during the decade 191e1920 (p. 137).
That is, it was from his clinical experience that he came to give increasing importance to aggression - much more than from his theories about the death instinct as revealed in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud, 1920). Then, in addition to his clinical experience, after the relative peace that Freud had experienced under the Austro-Hungarian empire, there was the carnage of the First World War. Bruno Bettelheim, in an interview on BBC Television (‘Horizon’, March 1987), spoke of his childhood in Vienna, where he was born in 1903 into a middle-class assimilated-Jewish family. He recalled the Austro-Hungarian Empire before 1914 as a time of great progress and security, with a firm belief in further progress. That may be a nostalgic view, but it is very interesting in this context to read Freud’s ( 1 9 1 5 ~ )paper on ‘Thoughts for the times o n war and death’, written shortly after the outbreak of war. There is a note of disbelief in Freud; as if he could not accept that man could be quite so mad and throw away all that civilization had achieved over the centuries that now seemed to be abandoned in the murderousness of the first world war. He must have been concerned too about his sons fighting in the war, two at the front and one behind the lines - and whether they would survive. So there were several factors that may have combined to force his attention to the prime importance of aggression.
The ‘death instinct’ The second problem I want to turn to is the concept of the death instinct. Although the factors already mentioned above led to increased emphasis on the importance of aggression, apparently the concept of the death instinct did not explicitly follow from them. This highly speculative theory (Freud, 1920) derived from noting the phenomenon of repetition compulsion. Freud had become increasingly aware that not everything could be explained simply by the pleasure principle. As he says, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, it did not explain phenomena in three areas: first, traumatic neuroses and traumatic dreams, which g o against the simple idea of the pleasure principle and wish-fulfilment. Second, there were his observations of the repetitive game played by his grandson with a cotton-reel on a string. Freud noted the child never cried when his mother left and he felt that with this game the child was attempting to master his anxiety about her return. Third, the simple pleasure principle did not explain repetitions in analysis, with which Freud was becoming much more familiar. In the earlier historical phase Freud had said that the aim of analysis was simply making the unconscious conscious. But in ‘Remembering, repeating and working through’, Freud (1914) reminded us of the successive phases in the evolution of psychoanalytic treatment from the earliest
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cathartic model to psychoanalytic technique as it would now be recognized, with the accent on understanding and interpreting the developing transference. In the earlier cathartic phase ‘Remembering and abreacting, with the help of the hypnotic state, were what was at that time aimed at’ (Freud, 1914, p. 147). This cathartic model of psychotherapy is a time-honoured method which still plays a part in all psychotherapy; but in other cases, when there has been no clear-cut traumatic event (as there is, for example, in bereavement), there may apparently be nothing to remember. Freud writes : If we confine ourselves to this second type in order to bring out the difference, we may say that the patient does not remember anything of what he has forgotten and repressed, but acts it out. He reproduces it not as a memory but as an action; he repeats it, without, of course, knowing that he is repeating it (p. 150).
Freud’s evolving understanding of the phenomenon of transference had enabled him to see that repeating was another kind of remembering. This was in 1914; then in 1919, when he began to write Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud, 1920), he was becoming increasingly aware of the widespread phenomena of repetition. What psychoanalysis reveals in the transference phenomena of neurotics can also be observed in the lives of some normal people. The impression they give is of being pursued by a malignant fate or possessed by some ‘daemonic’ power; ...The compulsion which is here in evidence differs in no way from the compulsion to repeat which we have found in neurotics (pp. 21 -22).
And he gives several interesting examples, including : the man who time after time in the course of his life raises someone else into a position of great private or public authority and then, after a certain interval, himself upsets that authority and replaces him by a new one (p. 22).
Could he be talking about himself there, and his repeated relationships with people such as Breuer and Fliess? It is important to remember, since the death instinct is accepted as agiven in some analytic quarters, that at the beginning of the fourth section of Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud (1920) introduced it as a speculation. What follows is speculation, often far-fetched speculation, which the reader will consider or dismiss according to his individual predilection. It is further an attempt to follow out an idea consistently, out of curiosity to see where it will lead (p. 24).
Moreover, he links the repetition compulsion with the idea of an instinct to return to an inorganic state.
When he is talking about a ‘daemonic force ’ or a ‘daemonic power’ we may have no problem with that, because there obviously are dark destructive forces at work
within us. But when he shifts to a different conceptual framework and talks about a biological instinct to return to an inorganic state this presents much more difficulty. Partly there is a confusion of translation here; the German expression Todestriebe might have been better translated ‘death drive’, but was translated by Strachey as ‘death instinct ’. Trieb implies more a drive, an urge; not quite the same as ‘instinct’, which Freud on other occasions uses separately to imply simple in-built patterns of behaviour. Yet despite that Freud goes on to infer, from this idea of a desire to return to a former state, that the aim of all life is death, and, as Jones (1957) points out, there
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is a confusion of end and purpose here. Nevertheless, this led Freud to his third duality: the polarity between life and death instincts. We should not forget Freud’s (1920) own tentativeness in introducing these ideas. It may be asked whether and how far I am myself convinced of the truth of the hypotheses that have been set out in these pages. My answer would be that I am not convinced myself and that I do not seek to persuade other people to believe in them. Or, more precisely, that I do not know how far I believe in them (p. 59).
It is often suggested that he came increasingly to accept this idea. Indeed Freud (1930) himself at times conveys this impression : The assumption of the existence of an instinct of death or destruction has met with resistance even in analytic circles;. .. To begin with it was only tentatively that I put forward 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 (p. 119).
Yet at other times he seems in some doubt about it himself (Gillespie, 1971). He appears to alternate between liking it and doubting it. For instance, in two letters to Princess Marie Bonaparte (Jones, 1957), written towards the end of his life, he wrote, first in May 1937: The turning inwards of the aggressive impulse is naturally the counterpart of turning outwards of the libido when it passes over from the ego to objects. One could imagine a pretty schematic idea of all libido being at the beginning of life directed inwards and all aggression outwards, and that this gradually changes in the course of life. But perhaps that is not correct (p. 494).
This is a very neat idea, that libido starts being all turned inwards, and then gets directed outwards ; whereas aggression all starts outwards and then goes inwards. But then he writes to her again in June 1937, only a month later, ‘Please do not overestimate my remarks about the destructive instinct. They were only tossed off and should be carefully thought over if you propose to use them publicly’ (p. 494). So Freud regarded the death instinct at times as fairly speculative. And, as Ernest Jones (1957) commented: of the fifty or so papers they [his followers] have since devoted to the topic one observes that in the first decade [that is about 1925 to 19351 only half supported Freud’s theory, in the second decade only a third, and in the last decade none at all (p. 287).
But is that decline in support of the concept still quite true, because as Gillespie (1971) says, Klein and her followers have kept the idea very much alive? Klein herself, as Spillius (1983) puts it, ‘assumes, or, being Klein it would be more correct to say, she asserts, that there is experience of the death instinct from the beginning’ (p. 327). Similarly, Segal (1987), in a Freud Memorial Lecture in London, said: ‘...the concept of the death instinct is, to my mind, indispensable to clinical work ’. It has often been speculated that other personal factors may have contributed to Freud’s enthusiasm for the idea of the death instinct ; for example, the death of his daughter Sophie, in 1920, though he specifically disclaimed this, saying in a letter that he wanted everyone to be quite clear that Beyond the Pleasure Principle had been written before she became ill. Then there was Freud’s own experience of being eaten away by cancer of the mouth and those 33 operations, following the first diagnosis in 1923, which was also the fateful year that his grandson died (Jones, 1957). All these factors
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may have contributed to his paying increasing attention to aggression and selfdestructiveness. Obviously there are dark destructive forces at work in mankind, the daemonic power that Freud refers to, but whether we actually go so far as saying these arise from a death instinct, as a biological notion, seems very questionable philosophically and has not found favour with modern biologists. Segal (1987), having said the concept of the death instinct is indispensable to clinical work (which I would question), then goes on to say in the very next sentence something I would very much agree with, that beyond the pleasure principle, beyond ambivalence, aggression, persecution, jealousy, envy, etc., there is a constant pull of the self-destructive forces and it is the task of the analyst to deal with them (p. 12).
I think it is a pity she does not follow her own advice in a footnote to that paper, where she criticizes the translation of Todestriebe as ‘instinct’. It would have been much better, she suggested, translated as in French, ‘pulsion’, o r ‘drive’ in English. And yet she keeps on using the expression ‘death instinct’, as d o other Kleinian authors. Ellenberger (1970) relates the background of dynamic psychiatry to the Romantic Movement. Among others he mentions von Schubert (1780-1860) who was the author of a highly poetic vision of nature, striking in its similarities to certain Freudian and Jungian concepts. In Man, as in all living beings, the longing for love (Sehnsucht) cannot easily be separated from the longing for death (Todessehnsucht)which is the striving to return ‘home’ to nature, but which also points to a future life (p. 205).
As a romantic poetic notion the longing for death or a daemonic power seems very appropriate. But d o we need to tie these to a biological notion of a death instinct? Aggression : Primary or secondary The next problem I want to look at is whether aggression should be considered as primary or secondary; in the sense o f p r i m a y , as ethologists such as Lorenz (1966) have suggested ; o r seconday to frustration and deprivation, as Winnicott (1950) o r social-learning theorists imply. Lorenz (1 966) has stated : Intra-specific aggression is millions of years older than personal friendship and love. During long epochs of the earth’s history there have been animals that were certainly extraordinarily fierce and aggressive. Nearly all reptiles of the present day are aggressive and it is unlikely that those of antiquity were less so.But the personal bond is known only in teleost fishes, birds and mammals, that is in groups that did not appear before the early Tertiary period. Thus intra-specific aggression can certainly exist without its counterpart, love, but conversely there is no love without aggression (p. 186).
Nearby he states : A personal bond, an individual friendship, is found only in animals with highly developed intraspecific aggression, in fact this bond is the firmer, the more aggressive the particular animal and species is (p. 186).
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It recalls Freud’s (19156) view that hate is older than love, except that Lorenz observes : A behaviour mechanism that must be sharply differentiated from intra-specificaggression is hate, the ugly little brother of love. As opposed to ordinary aggression, it is directed towards one individual, just as love is, and probably hate presupposes the presence of love: one can really hate only where one has loved and, even if one denies it, still does (p. 186).
I think psychotherapists would probably agree about that, but it is stated by the ethologist Lorenz. So we might say that aggression comes before love, but love comes before hate. This is not unlike Winnicott’s (1950) view about aggression, when he distinguishes between a healthy assertive form of aggression, or a life force, and an anger and destructiveness that comes secondary to frustration. The debate continues as to whether aggression is innate in man or a response to frustration and deprivation. Maybe both views are valid. We could say there is a primary form of aggression or a healthy innate assertiveness which man needs for survival and competition; and a secondary form of aggression, or hate and destructiveness secondary to frustration. We could say these two parallel phylogeny and ontogeny. In the development of the species, or phylogeny, there has evolved a primary kind of innate potential aggressiveness ; but in personal development, or ontogeny, hate arises in a secondary sense. Along similar lines, Eric Fromm (1974) distinguishes between benign and malignant aggression, seeing the first as instinctive but the second as a product of human character. Benign aggression, he suggests, is phylogenetically programmed, biologically adaptive and defensive in function, leading to flight more often than fight in response to threat. He regards Lorenz’s view as an idolatry of Darwin and as an outmoded hydraulic view. War he considers is not innate but has increased with the development of civilization. Primitive man has to cooperate, much more than fight, for the purposes of hunting. By contrast, malignant aggression he considers non-adaptive and an expression of human destructiveness, sadism and cruelty, which has increased with civilization. Fromm tends to idealize primitive man and the notion of the noble savage, but he appears optimistic about the possibilities of changing society to avoid destructiveness. It is clearly an oversimplification to overemphasize the contribution either of instinct or of society, either of which polarities may then be used to exonerate each of us from personal responsibility. We are born with instinctive dispositions and have to take responsibility for them, or, as Freud said, ‘where Id was there Ego shall be ’. Reviewing Kohut’s theory of aggression, Shane 8t Shane (1982) suggested a very similar formulation of two developmental lines : The first, nondestructive aggression, is an integral constituent of healthy assertiveness. This line develops out of optimal frustration from an empathic environment. The second line of development is destructive aggression, which emerges secondarily out of nonoptimal frustration of an unempathic environment (p. 269).
Recently Bacciagaluppi (1989) has reviewed the role of aggressiveness in Bowlby’s work and likened his views to those of Fromm. Bacciagaluppi suggests that in both his early and his later work Bowlby distinguishes between a primary form of
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aggressiveness (simple aggression, or functional anger) and a secondary form (transformed aggression, or dysfunctional anger), which arises from the first as a result of adverse parental reactions. This is similar to the distinction made by Fromm between defensive and malignant aggression.
Aggression : Primary and secondary There is another, different but related way in which I think we can speak of problems with aggression being primary or secondary, in the sense of paralleling Freud’s primary and secondary theories of anxiety. Wolff (1969) (in a conference on ‘ Aggression and Psychosomatic Disorder ’) distinguished between conflict over aggression, which can lead to neurosis, and suppression of aggression, leading to psychosomatic disorder. If aggressive impulses and fantasies give rise to internal conflict leading to anxiety or guilt or both, psychiatric illnesses are likely to result; ...guilt on account of persistent aggressive impulses is likely to give rise to a depressive illness, sometimes resulting in suicidal attempts, themselves due to aggressive impulses directed partly against others but partly against oneself (p. 318).
Then he goes on (and note the shift) : ‘When.. .outward expression of anger is even more completely suppressed, then the aggressive posture leads to somatic changes and psychosomatic disorders ’. So he is saying : conjict over aggression leads to neurosis ;suppression of aggression to psychosomatic disorder. I think there is an important conceptual shift here, which I am not sure has been fully recognized. It seems to me that we have here two theories of how difficulties arise with aggression : primary and secondary theories, which somewhat parallel Freud’s primary and secondary theories of anxiety. It will be recalled that Freud offered different formulations of the origins of anxiety in the early and later phases of his career. His earlier model (Freud, 1894) was a more physiological, hydraulic one: he suggested that anxiety was the expression of undischarged sexual energy or libido. However, Freud (1926) later revised this view, and in his secondary theory came to see anxiety as the response of the ego to the threat of internal sexual o r aggressive drives. Although the primary theory of anxiety has largely been given up in favour of the secondary theory in relation to sexual drives, it looks as if we still covertly retain comparable primary and secondary theories in relation to aggression. Although I suggested this may not have been fully recognized before, recently I noted a comment by Mitchell (1986) that : ‘ Today the concept of actual neurosis has been replaced by the idea of psychosomatic illness’. She also drew attention to the final paragraph in Laplanche & Pontalis’s (1973) dictionary entry on actual neurosis: As a last point, it is worth noting that it is only the lack of satisfaction of the sexnulinstincts which is taken into consideration by Freud’s [theory of actual neurosis]. In attempting to understand the genesis of actual and psychosomatic symptoms, we should be well advised to pay some attention too to the suppression of aggressiveness (p. 11).
Other French psychoanalysts interested in psychosomatic disorder have made similar points, e.g. McDougall (1974):
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Freud’s belief that the actnal neuroses are brought about as a reaction to actual everyday tension, and in particular to the blockage of libidinal satisfactions, is closely related to certain modern conceptions of prychosomatic reactions, though today the notion of psychic ‘pressure ’ would lay equal emphasis on the blockage of aggressive impulses (p. 440).
This concept dies hard, even if it is incorrect. Freud (1940) still held it at the end of his life when he wrote: ‘Holding back aggressiveness is in general unhealthy and leads to illness’ (p. 150). Two recent editorial reviews (Biddle, 1989; Szabadi, 1988) suggesting the beneficial effects of exercise on anxiety and depression appear to have a similar message. The suggestion that we still covertly retain primary and secondary theories of aggression perhaps links with the ideas about primary and secondary aggression expressed in the previous section above. Could we say that undischarged aggression, ordinary healthy assertive aggression, may lead to psychosomatic disorder, rather as Freud’s first anxiety theory suggested, undischarged libido led to actual neurosis ? On the other hand, a conflict over hateful or destructive fantasies may lead to neurosis. Suicide and murder The last problem briefly considered is the relationship between suicide and murder. I have already in several places referred to suicide as aggression directed against the self. This is an old idea. As Winnicott (1950) said: ‘Murder and suicide are fundamentally the same thing’ (p. 204). This is an ancient link. In England, where murder is largely a domestic event, about a third of all murders are followed by the suicide of the murderer. As Storr (1968) wrote: The relation between aggression and depression may be further underlined by reference to D. J. West’s [1965]recent study Murder Followed by Suicide. Of every three murders committed in this country, one is followed by the suicide of the murderer. There could be no clearer demonstration of the truth of Freud’s hypothesis that aggression against others and aggression against the self are reciprocally related and to some extent interchangeable. As the author says: ‘The intimate connection between self-destructive and aggressive tendencies emerged clearly from the many incidents in which the offenders’ intentions wavered uncertainly between murder and suicide (P. 80).
Although suicide has been idealized at certain historical times, particularly in war, for a thousand years - from the time of St Augustine to the Renaissance - the view prevailed that both murder and suicide were a sin. Suicides could not be buried in consecrated ground. It remained a crime in the United Kingdom till 1961, and although many felt very uncomfortable about this law, it could be seen as a sort of public acknowledgement of the psychological truth that suicide and murder are very similar. In 1910 a discussion on suicide among schoolchildren was held in the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society (Alvarez, 1971). Adler talked about inferiority, revenge and antisocial aggression as contributory causes ; Stekel made his well-known remark ‘No-one kills himself who has never wanted to kill another - or at least wished the death of another.’ Freud, in 1910, was still resisting Adler’s views on aggression, and emphasizing the libido theory. As I have already quoted, he said in his brief concluding remarks to this discussion : ‘The vicissitudes undergone by the libido in
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that condition [i.e. melancholia] are totally unknown to us’ (Freud, 1910, p. 232). But then in 1917, in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ he said much the same as Stekel had been saying: We have long known, it is true, that no neurotic harbours thoughts of suicide which he has not turned back upon himself from murderous impulses against others (p. 252).
This, it must be remembered, was in the second phase of Freud’s dual instinct theories, when the suggested polarity was between narcissistic libido and object libido. This parallels the idea of an attack that may be on the self o r may be on others. And it relates to the rather over-neat idea, in Freud’s letter t o Marie Bonaparte (Jones, 1957), that, at the beginning of life, all love is directed inwards and slowly gets directed outwards ; whereas all aggression is first directed outwards and then gets directed inwards, towards the self. But I think I agree with Freud : that is rather an over-neat or ‘pretty ’ schematic speculation. There has been some epidemiological evidence, e.g. from Northern Ireland (Curran, Finlay & McGarry, 1988) of the inverse relationship between homicide and suicide. Kendell (1970) reviewed the relationship between aggression and depression and came to similar conclusions. Discussion In the earlier phase of psychoanalytic history, following the Darwinian influence, Freud emphasized conflicts over sexuality as the major drive. Later he gave the aggressive drive equal importance and would probably have embraced the findings of ethology. The emerging synthesis would be to accept aggression as a major drive which, in health, has more of the nature of an essential assertive life force than a death instinct, but when things go awry can be redirected destructively on the self and others. A few years ago it might have seemed appropriate to conclude with the remarks of Lorenz (1964) from a symposium on the Natural History of Aggression: There cannot be any doubt, in the opinion of any biologically minded scientist, that intraspecific aggression is, in Man, just as much of a spontaneous instinctive drive as in most other higher vertebrates. The beginning synthesis between the findings of ethology and psychoanalysis does not leave any doubt either, that what Sigmund Freud has called the ‘death drive’, is nothing else but the miscarrying of this instinct which, in itself, is as indispensable for survival as any other. In this symposium there has been a most satisfying agreement, on this point, between psychiatrists, psychoanalysts and ethologists (Lorenz, 1964, p. 49).
I have more recently been influenced by the book Aggression and War, edited by Groebel 8c Hinde (1989) which brings together a variety of views. They emphasize and cast doubt on the lingering belief in the instinctive inevitability of aggression, which in turn has been thought to lead inevitably to war. They regard this as a myth supported by Freud and Lorenz’s earlier hydraulic views of aggression which ignore the effects of learning and man’s creative capacities, both to wage war and to abolish it. War is not an inevitable human institution. Cannibalism, slavery and public executions have all at times been thought inevitable or desirable and yet abolished. Many contributors draw attention to the increased prevalence of aggression and crime in young men, particularly in the reproductive period, and especially in
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cultures where there is division of labour between the sexes. This is more marked either when fathers are more punitive or where fathers are absent so there is no male role model available (except that provided by TV). Several authors (Groebel & Hinde, 1989) suggest that aggressive crimes in young males are a defensive reaction against feminine identification. This brings us back to modern psychoanalytic views of sexual differentiation; and the task for boys of developing away from an identification with mother for which an acceptable male role model is necessary. Perhaps there is hope here that modern styles of parenting and role sharing will offer more acceptable models of adult male behaviour and reduce aggressive behaviour.
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