existence of a primary 'destructive
instinct', it would have to be shown that destructive behaviour regularly
occurs without external provocation, as hunger and the sex-drive make
themselves felt regardless of the absence of external stimuli. To quote
Karen Horney (once an eminent, but critical psychoanalyst): [4]
Freud's assumption implies that the ultimate motivation for hostility
or destructiveness lies in the impulse to destroy. Thus he turns into
its opposite our belief that we destroy in order to live: we live
in order to destroy. We should not shrink from recognizing error,
even in an age-old conviction, if new insight teaches us to see it
differently, but this is not the case here. If we want to injure or to
kill, we do so because we are or feel endangered, humiliated, abused;
because we are or feel rejected or treated unjustly; because we are
or feel interfered with in wishes which are of vital importance to us.
It was, after all, Freud himself who taught us to seek out in apparently
wanton, unprovoked acts of destructiveness, by disturbed children or
adults, the hidden motive -- which usually turns out to be a feeling
of being rejected, jealousy, or hurt pride. In other words, cruelty
and destructiveness are to be regarded as pathological extremes of the
self-assertive tendency when frustrated or provoked beyond a critical
limit -- without requiring the gratuitous postulate of a death-instinct,
for which there is not a trace of evidence anywhere in biology.
Turning once more to the other aspect of Freud's Thanatos, the outstanding
characteristic of living substance is, as already mentioned, that it seems
to ignore the Second Law of Thermodynamics, instead of dissipating its
energy into the environment, the living animal extracts energy from it,
eats environment, drinks environment, burrows and builds in environment,
sucks information out of noise and meaning out of chaotic stimuli.
'Neither senescence nor natural death are necessary, inevitable
consequences of life,' as Pearl summed it up [5] ; the
protozoa are potentially immortal; they reproduce by simple fission,
'leaving behind in the process nothing corresponding to a corpse'. In
many primitive, multicellular animals senescence and natural death are
absent; they reproduce by fission or budding, again without leaving any
dead residue behind. 'Natural death is biologically a relatively new
thing' [6] ; it is the cumulative effect of some, as yet little
understood, deficiency in the metabolism of cells in complex organisms
-- an epiphenomenon due to imperfect integration, and not a basic law
of nature.
Thus Freud's primary drives, sexuality and the death-wish, cannot claim
universal validity; both are based on biological novelties which appear
only on a relatively high level of evolution: sex as a new departure
from asexual reproduction and sometimes (as in certain flatworms)
alternating with it; death as a consequence of imperfections arising
with growing complexity. In the theory proposed here there is no place
for a 'destructive instinct' in organisms; nor for regarding sexuality
as the only integrative force in human or animal society. Eros
and Thanatos are relatively late arrivals on the stage of evolution;
a host of creatures which multiply by fission (or budding) are ignorant
of both. In our view, sexuality is a specific manifestation of the
integrative tendency, aggressiveness an extreme form of the self-assertive
tendency ; while Janus appears as the symbol of the two irreducible
properties of living matter: wholeness and partness, and their precarious
equilibrium in the hierarchies of nature.
To say it once more, this generalized schema is not based on metaphysical
assumptions but built in, as it were, into the architecture of complex
systems -- physical, biological or social -- as a necessary precondition
of the coherence and stability of their multilevelled assemblies
of holons. Not by chance did Heisenberg call his autobiographical
account
instinct', it would have to be shown that destructive behaviour regularly
occurs without external provocation, as hunger and the sex-drive make
themselves felt regardless of the absence of external stimuli. To quote
Karen Horney (once an eminent, but critical psychoanalyst): [4]
Freud's assumption implies that the ultimate motivation for hostility
or destructiveness lies in the impulse to destroy. Thus he turns into
its opposite our belief that we destroy in order to live: we live
in order to destroy. We should not shrink from recognizing error,
even in an age-old conviction, if new insight teaches us to see it
differently, but this is not the case here. If we want to injure or to
kill, we do so because we are or feel endangered, humiliated, abused;
because we are or feel rejected or treated unjustly; because we are
or feel interfered with in wishes which are of vital importance to us.
It was, after all, Freud himself who taught us to seek out in apparently
wanton, unprovoked acts of destructiveness, by disturbed children or
adults, the hidden motive -- which usually turns out to be a feeling
of being rejected, jealousy, or hurt pride. In other words, cruelty
and destructiveness are to be regarded as pathological extremes of the
self-assertive tendency when frustrated or provoked beyond a critical
limit -- without requiring the gratuitous postulate of a death-instinct,
for which there is not a trace of evidence anywhere in biology.
Turning once more to the other aspect of Freud's Thanatos, the outstanding
characteristic of living substance is, as already mentioned, that it seems
to ignore the Second Law of Thermodynamics, instead of dissipating its
energy into the environment, the living animal extracts energy from it,
eats environment, drinks environment, burrows and builds in environment,
sucks information out of noise and meaning out of chaotic stimuli.
'Neither senescence nor natural death are necessary, inevitable
consequences of life,' as Pearl summed it up [5] ; the
protozoa are potentially immortal; they reproduce by simple fission,
'leaving behind in the process nothing corresponding to a corpse'. In
many primitive, multicellular animals senescence and natural death are
absent; they reproduce by fission or budding, again without leaving any
dead residue behind. 'Natural death is biologically a relatively new
thing' [6] ; it is the cumulative effect of some, as yet little
understood, deficiency in the metabolism of cells in complex organisms
-- an epiphenomenon due to imperfect integration, and not a basic law
of nature.
Thus Freud's primary drives, sexuality and the death-wish, cannot claim
universal validity; both are based on biological novelties which appear
only on a relatively high level of evolution: sex as a new departure
from asexual reproduction and sometimes (as in certain flatworms)
alternating with it; death as a consequence of imperfections arising
with growing complexity. In the theory proposed here there is no place
for a 'destructive instinct' in organisms; nor for regarding sexuality
as the only integrative force in human or animal society. Eros
and Thanatos are relatively late arrivals on the stage of evolution;
a host of creatures which multiply by fission (or budding) are ignorant
of both. In our view, sexuality is a specific manifestation of the
integrative tendency, aggressiveness an extreme form of the self-assertive
tendency ; while Janus appears as the symbol of the two irreducible
properties of living matter: wholeness and partness, and their precarious
equilibrium in the hierarchies of nature.
To say it once more, this generalized schema is not based on metaphysical
assumptions but built in, as it were, into the architecture of complex
systems -- physical, biological or social -- as a necessary precondition
of the coherence and stability of their multilevelled assemblies
of holons. Not by chance did Heisenberg call his autobiographical
account
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