Talk:Instinct

"Instinct"

corresponds to a specific program of action for a species that is genetically transmitted (and theoretically independent of individual experience)

Lacan follows Freud in distinguishing the instincts from the drives, and criticizes those who obscure this distinction by using the same English word ("instinct") to translate both Freud's terms (Instinkt Trieb).

Jacques Lacan -- following Sigmund Freud -- distinguishes the instincts from the drives.

Lacan follows Freud in distinguishing the instincts from the drives.

--

"Instinct" is a biological concept and belongs to the study, field, of animal ethology, the psychology of animal behavior.

"Instinct" is a purely biological concept and belongs to the study of animal ethology.

Whereas animals are driven by instincts, which are relatively regid and invariable, and imply a direct relation to an object, human sexuality is a matter of drives, which are very variable and never attain their object.

Although Lacan uses the term "instinct" frequently in his early work, after 1950 he uses the word less frequently, preferring instead to reconceptualize the concept of instinct in terms of need.

--- From his earliest works, Lacan criticizes those who attempt to udnerstand human behavior purely in terms of instincts, arguing that this is to suppose a harmonious relation between man and the world, which does not in fact exist.

The concept of instinct supposes some kind of direct innact knowledge of the object which is of an almost moral character.

Against such ideas, Lacan insists thqat there is something inadequate about human biology, a feature which he indicates in the phrases 'vital insufficiency' (insuffisance vitale). and 'congenital insufficiency'.

This inadequacy, evident in the helplessness of the human baby, is compensated for by means of complexes.

the fact that human psychology is dominated by complexes (which are determined entirely by cultural and social factors) rather than by instincts, means that any explanation of human behavior that does not take social factors into account is useless.

References

A pre-lingual bodily impulse that drives our actions. Freud makes a distinction between instinct and the antithesis, conscious/unconscious; an instinct is pre-lingual and, so, can only be accessed by language, by an idea that represents the instinct. What is repressed is not properly the instinct itself but "the ideational presentation" of the instinct, which is just another way of saying that our deepest, primitive drives are beyond our ability to represent them. Psychoanalysis seeks to make sense of the unconscious, which is to some extent intelligible and, so, one step removed from instinct. According to Freud, there are two classes of instincts: 1) Eros or the sexual instincts, which he later saw as compatible with the self-preservative instincts; and 2) Thanatos or the death-instinct, a natural desire to "re-establish a state of things that was disturbed by the emergence of life" ("Ego and the Id" 709). The death-instinct, which he theorized, in part, as a response to World War I, allowed Freud to explain man's desire for murder and destruction.

--

1. An inborn pattern of behavior that is characteristic of a species and is often a response to specific environmental stimuli: the spawning instinct in salmon; altruistic instincts in social animals.
2. A powerful motivation or impulse.
3. An innate capability or aptitude:

Quotes

"The whole flux of our mental life and everything that finds expression in our thoughts are derivations and representatives of the multifarious instincts [drives] that are innate in our physical constitution."

"[T]he "instinct [drive]" appears to us as a concept 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, as a measure of the demand made upon the mind for work in consequence of its connection with the body."