Freud’s Economic Hypothesis: Drives and Instincts
Freud’s Economic Hypothesis
The term “economic” refers to Freud’s hypothesis that posits the existence of an energy that increases, decreases, moves, or is released and distributed by the places that constitute the human psyche, activating their different processes. An example of this energy in Freud’s view was observed in abrupt changes that occur in the intensity of the impulses and experiences (love, desire, fear, etc.) in neurotics.
He speaks of instinctive impulse to refer to these innate, primordial forces that account for human behavior. In psychoanalytic practice, the term used to refer to these impulses is drive. Human instincts would consist of:
- The Source: A bodily organ or somatic area creates a drive through an active process. Psychology does not study the process itself, only its psychological manifestation. In the process of organizing drives, various sources give rise to different partial drives that will be integrated into one. The non-integrated drives are manifested in the adult subject as perversions, and are seen in an imaginary or type of behavior. In the case of sexual drives, its source is the erogenous zones. The source is definitely a state of excitement or tension of a body part.
- Impulse Imperative: It is the energy factor and driving force of variable intensity that pushes the body toward a welcome in a peremptory fashion, i.e., no possibility that the subject can prevent it, as would be expected if it were an external excitement. The peremptory is the very essence of drive and its character is mainly psychological and not biological.
- The End: Satisfaction in the sense of achieving the removal of excitation. Keep in mind that the order is not fixed in the drives, especially in the sexual type. There are also drives inhibited in order, that is, drives that are inhibited before reaching the goal they were going to or diverted from it.
- The Object: That by which it manages to drive satisfaction. The object is not fixed to the drives, especially sexual ones, and their range of possibilities is even wider than the ends.
Freud divided human instinctual drives into two categories:
- Instincts of Self or Conservation: These are those of individual self-preservation. The prototype would be starvation, not so much as a physical necessity, but as a psychological need.
- Sexual Drive: Speaking of sex should not be in a genital sense. What is at stake is a set of partial drives that originate from different somatic sources – erogenous zones – and seek satisfaction. This satisfaction is linked to images and fantasies, which means the organization can find an object and an end adapted to the physical and sociocultural.
After a review in 1920, a second theory of drives emerged, without negating the first but putting it in a new context. There are now two major drives:
- Eros or the Life Instincts: They tend to form and keep getting richer unifications. They are governed by the principle of linkage, which seeks to achieve new syntheses and associations between items and between subjects. To the extent that these drives are in the service of creativity, they are integrated under Eros.
- Thanatos or Death Instincts: Opposite to those of life, they tend to disengage and lead to living up to its inorganic state, reducing any tension to zero. It is governed by the nirvana principle. These drives tend to the destruction of the subject, and projected outward, manifest as aggressive impulses more or less destructive.