The principle underlying the large number of concrete facts which he has
given is that besides the sexual instinct there are a large number of other
instincts--one of which is anger--which have a very important place and play
important parts in personality. Some of these instincts play not only as
important a part as the sexual instinct but even a more important part.
And, as Dr. Hall has said, the Freudian mechanisms can be applied to them
just as well and just as logically. If an analysis is fully carried out
along the directions of these instincts we find, according to my
observations, the same disturbances that we find from conflicts with the
sexual instinct and effected by the same mechanisms. Amongst these instincts
besides anger there is the parental instinct, containing, if we follow Mr.
McDougall's terminology, tender feeling or love. At any rate love is an
instinct entirely distinct from the sexual instinct. There are also the
instinct of self-assertion and, fully as important as any, that of
self-abasement. This last, according to my observations and interpretations
plays a very important part in many cases of psycho-neurosis and leads
through conflicts to the same disturbances of personality that one finds
brought about by conflicts between the other instincts. That love may be
something entirely separate and distinct from the sexual instinct is a view
which is generally recognized and accepted by psychological writers but
entirely ignored, as a rule, by Freudian writers. A criticism which I would
make of the work of the Freudians is that while they recognize these
instincts they do not give them their full value nor study them as
completely and thoroughly--nor do they carry their studies to the final
logical conclusion--as they do with the sexual instinct. So far as they may
do so they subordinate these instinctive emotions entirely to the sexual
instinct so that these latter simply make use of them. When the
psycho-neuroses are completely studied we will find the same repression of
the various instinctive dispositions and impulses to which I have referred
in the one case as in the other, and of ideas organized with these
disposition. We find the same conflicts and resulting disturbances. The
sexual instinct has no hegemony. To my mind each occupies precisely the
same position and may play the same part in personality.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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