Homo Homini Lupus 1

Homo Homini Lupus

Robert L. Fisher
York University

Definition of Aggression

Any discussion of aggression implies a stance on the question of human nature. The three
main possibilities had already been enunciated in ancient China. (The translations are taken from
Faurot,1995, p. 69.) Xun Zi (Hsün Tzu) (about 300-237 BC) said, “Human nature is ugly; anything
good in it is artificial. Now human nature is such that from birth we love advantage (or profit).
Following this [tendency] gives rise to strife and competition, and causes an end to deference and
humility. From birth we are jealous and hateful...From birth we have the desires of ear and eye, the
love of sounds and beauty. If we follow these desires, lust and disorder will arise, and decorum,
righteousness, civility and reason will perish...Thus if we follow human nature and go along with
human feelings, starting from strife, we will inevitably go against civility, throw reason into
confusion, and return to violence.” This view shares much in common with Freud’s pessimistic
estimate of human nature and the unavoidable conflict between civilization and natural man. In
Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud (1994, p. 39), in regard to the Golden Rule, wrote:

Not merely is this stranger [my neighbor] on the whole not worthy of my love, but, to be
honest, I must confess he has more claim to my hostility, even to my hatred. He does not show
me the slightest consideration. if it will do him any good, he has no hesitation in injuring me,
never even asking himself whether the amount of advantage he gains by it bears any
proportion to the amount of wrong done to me. What is more...if he can merely get a little
pleasure out of it, he thinks nothing of jeering at me, insulting me, slandering me, showing his
power over me; and the more secure he feels himself, or the more helpless I am, with so much
more certainty can I expect this behavior from him towards me.

Just as Xun Zi saw the remedy in education (“we must make use of the transforming power of
teachers and laws”), Melanie Klein, a close adherent of Freudian doctrine and an analyst who wrote
extensively of the infant’s terrifyingly intense destructive fantasies, stated that “[w]e are ready to
believe that what would now seem a Utopian state of things may well come true in those distant days
when, as I hope, child-analysis will become as much a part of every person’s upbringing as school
education is now” (Klein, 1950, pp. 276-277).
The second view was summarized by Gao Zi (fourth century BC): “Human nature is like
flowing water: if you lead it eastward it flows east; if you lead it westward it flows west. The way that
human nature cannot be categorized as [intrinsically] good or not good, is just like the way that water
cannot be categorized as [intrinsically] flowing eastward or westward.” The neutrality of human
nature is also an Adlerian assumption: the emphasis is on what individuals make of their biological
inheritance and social environment.
The third appraisal was put forth by Mencius (about 370-290 BC), the famous successor of
Confucius: “The goodness of human nature is like the tendency of water to flow downward. There are
no people who are not good, just as there is no water that does not flow downward. Now if you slap
at water and splash it, you can make it go higher than your head, and if you force it along, you can
 Homo Homini Lupus 2

make it go up a mountain. But how is this the nature of water? It does this because you force it to. The
way you can make people do things that are not good is just like this.” Mencius pointed out that
anyone will feel pity if he sees a child suddenly fall into a well. People should extend their love
beyond the immediate family circle. In the West these ideas would accord with those of the Utopians.
As late as 1930, Adler entertained a vision of a future Utopia: “Neither do we mean existing society,
but an ideal society yet to be developed, which comprises all men, all filled by the common striving
for protection” (Ansbacher & Ansbacher, 1979, p. 40).
In the dying days of the millennium, with its Zeitgeist of cynicism and tabloidized media, it is
most difficult to look back on the twentieth century without feeling that Xun Zi has been vindicated,
especially in regard to aggression and self-destruction. Our century has encompassed at least five
organized attempts at genocide: the Ottoman Turks’ forced march of perhaps as many as a million
Armenians into the Syrian desert in 1917; the near-extermination of European Jewry, in addition to
masses of Gypsies and Poles, in the Nazi death camps during World War II -- the most successful
application of the efficiencies of modern industrial technology to mass murder; the million or so who
perished horribly in the killing fields of Cambodia -- perhaps the most primitive of genocides, relying
as it did on forced labor on short rations and, to economize on ammunition, on ax-handles and rifle
butts; the mass eviction and slaughter of Bosnian Muslims by the Serbs, and various
counter-slaughters, coining the term “ethnic cleansing,” implying that the victims were filth rather
than human beings; and most recently, the million, perhaps more, Tutsis hacked to death by their
Hutu neighbors in Rwanda, the worst in a hundred years of such massacres in the two overcrowded
central African republics of Rwanda and Burundi. Another genocide, cultural as well as human, has
been underway for decades in Tibet, where the Chinese occupiers have all but destroyed Buddhist
culture, imported large numbers of Chinese settlers, and roamed the countryside with mobile medical
units forcing Tibetan women to undergo abortions.
To these can be added the horrors of Stalin’s gulags and Mao’s slave labor camps
(euphemistically referred to as “reform through labor”, echoing the motto over the gates of
Auschwitz, “Arbeit macht frei”). Nine million died in the First World War, and another 50 million
died as a result, directly or indirectly, of the Second World War. Neuman (1987, p. 17) goes so far as
to say that “Historically, more people were killed in the last hundred years than have existed from the
beginnings of mankind up to the last century.” Hamlet’s soliloquy in the Renaissance spirit seems
utterly remote from our times, even ironic:

What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form, in
moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a
god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of anumals! (Act II, scene ii, line 316).

This gloomy litany of mayhem may, if one uses a broader definition, be only one side of
aggression. Rycroft (1995, p. 5) defines aggression as a:

“Hypothetical force, instinct, or principle...frequently regarded as antithetical to sex or libido,

in which case it is being used to refer to destructive drives. Even when being used as a
synonym for destructiveness, controversy exists as to whether it is a primary drive, i.e.
whether there is an aggressive, destructive instinct, or whether it is a reaction to frustration.
Opinion also differs as to whether it is an instinct with its own aims or whether it provides the
 Homo Homini Lupus 3

energy to enable the ego to overcome obstacles in the way of satisfying other drives. The
almost universal tendency to equate aggression with hate, destructiveness, and sadism runs
counter to both its etymology (ad-gradior: I move towards) and to its traditional meaning of
dynamism, self-assertiveness, expansiveness, drive. The psychoanalytic usage derives from
Freud’s later writings, in which he conceived of aggression as a derivative of the death
instinct.

In other words, aggression can be conceived of as a bipolar entity, with one pole representing
violence and destruction, while the opposite pole is that which provides for self-assertiveness,
self-preservation, and the urge to explore the environment and seek stimulation. As Winnicott (1958,
p. 204) put it, “At origin, aggressiveness is almost synonymous with activity.” This definition is the
one that Adler moved toward, using the term aggression rarely, although it was he, not Freud, who
had introduced the concept of the aggressive drive in his 1908 paper, “The aggression drive in life and
in neurosis” (Ansbacher & Ansbacher, 1956, p. 267). In an unpublished English manuscript titled
“Individual psychology and psychoanalysis” (1930), Adler gave a broad definition to aggression:
“The aggression drive had been meant as an attitude towards life and its external demands. I
understood from much experience and evidence that this attitude towards life comprises all
movements and forms, including all symptoms” (Ansbacher & Ansbacher 1979, p. 210, fn. 5). In
Adler’s system, aggression was subsumed under the larger concept of striving for overcoming and
represented the form striving takes when social interest is low or lacking. In regard to symptoms,
Adler realized that aggression may cloak its real nature in safeguarding mechanisms such as
depreciation (disparaging others to elevate oneself), accusation, self-accusation, and guilt (the woman
who by confessing a long-forgotten affair to her husband succeeded in hurting him, using truth as a
weapon). In fact, we “cannot ignore the heavily-veiled aggressive or vindictive element in most
neuroses” (Ansbacher & Ansbacher, 1956, pp. 267-273).

Aggression and Biology

The old notion of aggression, based on the “hydraulic model” (itself based ultimately on the
analogy of the steam engine), according to which aggression, like sex, was a drive that built up
tension and had to be periodically discharged, has been “repudiated by all modern theorists” (Storr,
1991, p. 7). Nevertheless, if behavior is to be seen as a unity, its biological as well as psychological
and social aspects must be taken into account. Essentially, an aggressive drive exists in humans as in
other animals to enhance survival in a hostile world: aggression is required for self-preservation and
for competition for food, sex, and territory. It also enables the organism to explore it environment.
Storr (1968, p. 11) states that “there exists a physiological mechanism which, when stimulated, gives
rise both to subjective feelings of anger and also to physical changes which prepare the body for
fighting. This mechanism is easily set off, and, like other emotional responses, it is stereotyped and,
in this sense, ‘instinctive’.” As Storr (1968, p. 12) points out, as early as 1915 W. B. Cannon in his
book Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear and Rage, described the physiological characteristics of
anger in mammals: increased pulse rate and blood pressure, increased peripheral blood circulation,
and rise in blood glucose -- all to enhance “efficiency in physical struggle.” These impulses originate
in the hypothalamus, but are always under the inhibitory control of the neocortex. In fact, the
neocortex, in response to an external threat “such as a fist being shaken in the face,” can release the
 Homo Homini Lupus 4

hypothalamus from its inhibitory control and stimulate it to action, with the resultant physiological
changes persisting for some time, even after the threat has been removed.
Humans have inherited this system with special further adaptations that we share with other
animals that live in groups: the tendency to form hierarchies to diminish conflict, and obedience to a
dominant individual during times of threat from predators. To these can be added the human
imagination, which when combined with aggression provides a whole dimension in that man is the
only creature to engage in cruelty far beyond any reasonable purpose. Imagination and memory allow
for revenge and vindictive aggression. Imagination makes possible aggression over symbols. For
example, it could be argued that conflicts between Christians, Jews, and Muslims are warfare over
how to symbolize the supreme deity. It leads furthermore to the invention of weapons that can kill
from a distance, whether it be bullets or artillery, aerial bombardment, undersea torpedoes, or
intercontinental missiles. Such weapons, on the one hand, magnify the intensity of aggression to the
point where terms such as “mega-deaths” are invented; on the other hand, these weapons create a
psychological distance between combatants that precludes seeing the immediate results on the
victim’s body. In his famous book On Aggression, Konrad Lorenz (1966) wrote:

The deep, emotional layers of our personality simply do not register the fact that the crooking
of the fore-finger to release a shot tears the entrails of another man. No sane man would even
go rabbit-hunting for pleasure if the necessity of killing his prey with his natural weapons
brought home to him the full emotional realization of what he is actually doing ( p. 207).

A further biological consideration of aggression in man, also described by Lorenz (1966, p.

207), is the virtual lack of the inhibition against intraspecific aggression, that is, the mechanism that
prevents injuring or killing a member of one’s own species. This may be because man, unlike heavily
armed carnivores, is not provided with dangerous natural weapons like tusks and claws (Storr, 1991,
p. 113).
As mentioned above, the formation of hierarchies in social animals, including man, is
adaptive because it lessens aggressive interactions and promotes cooperation (Storr, 1991, p. 105).
Obedience is adaptive because in time of crisis the entire group has to be mobilized quickly to
facilitate flight. Obedience to authority underlies human society as well, and is particularly noticeable
in time of war. In this regard the experiments of Stanley Milgram (1974) are particularly instructive.
Participants are told they are taking part in an experiment to investigate how punishment affects
learning. The “learner”, who is strapped into a chair, must learn pairs of words. When he makes a
mistake the participant is told to turn a dial on a generator that will deliver an electric shock to the
learner, each shock increasing in severity with each subsequent mistake. The dial is labeled “Slight
Shock”, “Danger”, and “Severe Shock.” In reality the generator is not attached to the learner, who is,
however, an actor instructed to react to the imaginary shocks, including “an agonized scream” at the
highest voltage. Sometimes the participant was told the learner had “a slight heart condition.” Despite
pleas by the learner to be released and that his heart was being affected, 26 of 40 subjects obeyed the
university psychologist and continued to the end to administer the maximum shock. Milgram (1974,
p. 188) concluded that this submergence of our humanity in obedience to an institutional structure “is
a fatal flaw nature has designed into us, and which in the long run gives our species only a modest
chance of survival.”
One last point about the biological endowment in the human species for aggression involves
 Homo Homini Lupus 5

conclusions drawn from the observation of higher primates and humans. Chance (1988, p. 2)
postulates two mental modes of functioning. The first, called agonic, is an “inbred security system” in
which we are focused on self-security, our membership in the group, rank, hierarchy, convention, and
the maintenance of good order. This mode “engages information processing systems that are
specifically designed to attend, recognize, and respond to potential threats to our physical self, status,
and social presentation.” In the second mental mode, the hedonic, members are free to form personal
relationships offering mutual support, with “free rein to intelligence, our creativity, and the creation
of systems of order in our thoughts and in our social relations.” Attention, now freed from concerns
of self-protection, “can explore and integrate many new domains.” The significance of this
inheritance is that human beings, despite their yearnings for Utopia (pure hedonic mode), will never
be exempt from competition and strife, that inequality can never be completely abolished (though
hopefully reduced). This is part of the human condition: competition between individuals can never
be utterly eradicated “because it is based upon a deeply rooted ‘aggressive’ component of human
nature which is the need for self-preservation and self affirmation” (Storr, 1991, p. 23).
Self-affirmation, under the terms “anonymity and deindividuation” (fig. 1), is listed by Bailey (1987)
as one of the external elicitors of phylogenetic regression (see below).
Perhaps the most fundamental reason that aggression, in its broadest sense of destructiveness,
assertiveness, and the need for stimulation, is an integral part of human nature is the triune structure
of the brain: the reptilian brain, the mammalian brain (limbic system), and the neocortex. As a general
principle, evolution builds on pre-existing structures rather than developing entirely new ones to meet
an adaptive need. Just as a fin may eventually evolve into an arm or leg, so has the human brain built
on more primitive structures, which in turn comprise our biological inheritance. For example,
investigation has revealed neural circuits involving the mouth and genitals which lie side by side
through the length of the brain stem. “Activity in one spills over into the other, and both may be
elicited in angry, combative responses. We can therefore see here a close tie-in of oral and sexual
functions in aggression” (MacLean, 1987, p. 37). This connection was seen in the vicious biting
attacks of Ted Bundy on his victims (Bailey, 1987, p. 51). The interaction among the members of the
triune structure of the brain is responsible for the fluctuation between regression and progression.
According to the phylogenetic regression-progression model (Bailey, 1987), the regression end of the
continuum refers to more animalistic behavior and progression to more distinctively human behavior.
Thus, humanity, culture and rationality may be lost, within seconds, under the stress of severe threat,
provocation, or alcohol or drug ingestion. The triune brain structure recapitulates Collier’s (1963,
1964) trilevel theory of consciousness. As Bailey (1987, p. 54) points out, for most of the last 100,000
years man has been a hunter-gather, with civilization only gradually developing over the past 10,000
years. This lends support to Freud’s view of man’s conflict with civilization. The theory of
phylogenetic regression also agrees with Freud’s stress on the regressive nature of drives (see Gay,
1988, p. 399), for, as one of Bailey’s (1987) principles states, it “is easier and usually more
pleasurable to phylogenetically regress than progress” (p. 52).
On the other hand, MacClean (1987) shows how one of the most recent developments in
brain evolution, the tie-up of the limbic system with the prefrontal cortex (fig. 2), allows the
prefrontal cortex to look inward to obtain the insight required for identifying with another individual,
hence the rise of empathy and altruism in humanity (p. 40). This supports Adler’s view that human
beings are social and empathic by nature, that social interest is an inborn tendency in people.
 Homo Homini Lupus 6

The History of Aggression in Freudian Theory

Following Buss (1961, pp. 184-186), the history of Freud’s view of aggression can be divided
into three stages:

a) Emphasis on libido and psychosexual development, with aggression relegated to a minor role.
With the development of teeth, the child’s biting of objects, including the mother’s breast,
show oral-sadistic impulses. The anal stage is the peak of aggression, with its frequency and
intensity of urges to hurt and dominate others. The Oedipal stage leads to death wishes against
the hated rival.
Sadism is first to appear, then later masochism as the inversion of outwardly directed
aggressive impulses.

b) Exploration of ego instincts and nonlibidinal urges. He is no longer concerned with the source of
instincts, but rather their aim, which is generally self-preservation, whose major component is
aggression. Aggression is transferred from aspects of libido to part of the ego instincts. Freud
believed aggressive urges could occur in the absence of sexual conflict: “The ego hates,
abhors and pursues with intent to destroy all objects which are for it a source of painful
feelings, without taking into account whether they mean to it frustration of sexual satisfaction
or gratification of the needs of self-preservation...[T]he true prototypes of the hate relation are
derived not from sexual life, but from the struggle of the ego for self-preservation and
self-maintenance” (Freud, 1925, vol. 4, p. 81). Thus aggression is reactive in nature. Its
sources were not biological but rather in the self-preservative tendency of the ego.

c) Evidently profoundly affected by the destructiveness of World War I, Freud included aggression in
a typical psychoanalytic polarity: life instinct (Eros) versus death instinct (Thanatos). The
stronger the death instinct, the greater the need to direct aggression outward against objects
and people. Whatever aggression is not turned outward is turned inward against the self. The
sexual instinct derives from the life instinct, including self-preservation. The destructive
instinct derives from the death instinct.

Rycroft (1995, p. 31) notes that the death instinct concept postulates a wish to dissolve, annihilate
oneself, while the destructive instinct concept implies a wish to kill others.
Storr (1968, p. 5) calls the death instinct theory “one of the stranger by-ways of thought, and
the majority of psychologists have never accepted it.” The most prominent psychoanalyst to accept
the death instinct was Melanie Klein, who saw aggression as a projection of the individual’s own
innate self-destructive drive (Rycroft 1995, p. 31). To understand how the death instinct was arrived
at, it is necessary to know that Freud considered the ultimate aim of the human mental apparatus was
to return the organism to a state in which all tension had been eliminated. This is regression to the
state of the fetus in the womb, from which the baby was traumatically removed into the world of
overwhelming stimulation. Further, all organic life has inherent in it an urge to return to an earlier
stage of things, namely the inorganic state that preceded life. “The aim of all life is death,” Freud said
in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920).
Aggression, as alluded to in c) above, derives from the redirection of the death instinct away
 Homo Homini Lupus 7

from the ego toward the external world, thus providing “the ego with the satisfaction of its vital needs
and with control over nature” (Freud, 1966, vol. 21, p. 121). Just as Eros combines cells into
organisms of ever greater complexity, it also unites individuals in families, races, peoples and nations,
while Thanatos, working through the destructive instinct, is the enemy of civilization, seeking to
undo the works of man. “This is what all life essentially consists of, and the evolution of civilization
may therefore be simply described as the struggle for life of the human species. And this is the battle
of the giants that our nurse-maids try to appease with their lullaby about Heaven” (Freud, 1966, vol.
21, p. 122).
The death instinct has been criticized on two main grounds (Storr, 1991, p. 20): the first is that
not all stimuli are disturbances the organism wants to get rid of -- in fact, solitary confinement with its
minimal contact is considered a severe punishment; the second is that the death instinct runs counter
to biological common sense, dying being due to “wear and tear rather than any innate drive towards
death.”
Freud distinguished the death drive (Todestrieb) from aggression: the former is a silent drive
working to reduce the organism to inorganic matter; the latter is “showy,” its symptoms drowning out
the quiet action of the death drive. In this way Freud allowed his followers, if they wished, to
uncouple the death drive from aggression, thus to accept an aggression drive, with all its familiar
clinical manifestations, while rejecting the greater vision of a struggle between Eros and Thanatos
(Gay, 1988, p. 402). To be fair, Freud wrote in 1937 that this Manichaean vision was not a matter of
optimism or pessimism, but rather that “the collaboration and the conflict between both primal
drives...explain the colorful variety of life’s phenomena...”. Furthermore, in a letter to Earnest Jones
in 1935, Freud stated, “Naturally, all this is groping speculation, until one has something better” (Gay,
1988, p. 402).
As is discussed below, the contorted history of the aggression drive in psychoanalytic thought
provided an issue that led to the final split between Adler and Freud.
There has come to light in the last few decades an indispensable biological mechanism that to
some degree, at least on the cellular level, vindicates Freud’s death instinct. Apoptosis (in Greek,
literally, “dropping off”, as a petal from a flower), or programmed cell death, is a process in which
cells self-destruct for the welfare of the organism as a whole. Thus, the program which sets in motion
a chain of biochemical events that systematically destroys the cell is triggered when the cell becomes
a threat to the health of surrounding cells, for example, when the cell suffers severe genetic damage
by disease or is traumatized or deprived of oxygen. A genetically altered cell containing viruses is
halted from spreading the disease by apoptosis. It would appear that the failure of apoptosis is one
reason for the lethality of cancer, while in ischemic heart attacks and strokes there is excessive
apoptosis. The lens of the eye consists of apoptotic cells that have replaced their innards with clear
protein crystallin; our skin is on a 21-day cycle in which cells migrate to the surface and die; another
obvious example is the cells of the uterine wall that are sloughed off in menstruation. (For a more
detailed discussion, see Duke, Ojcius, & Young, 1996, pp. 80-87.)
Freud also saw a role for aggression in the dynamics of depression. Civilization controls
aggression by means of introjection, that is, “by incorporating a substantial amount of aggression
within the ego of the individual, thus turning aggression away from the external world against the
self” (Storr, 1989, p. 54), hence the super-ego’s store of aggression, manifested in guilt, self-reproach,
self-hatred and self-punishment. The more aggression that is given up, the more charged the
super-ego becomes with aggression (Freud, vol. 21, p. 129). Loss of a loved one, rejection or
 Homo Homini Lupus 8

abandonment lead to self-reproach in the depressed person, but in reality this is inwardly directed
reproach (aggression) against the lost object: “You are a worthless person who does not deserve to
live, because you have left me” (Storr, 1989, 55). In “Mourning and melancholia” (1917), Freud
wrote, “Just as mourning impels the ego to give up the object by declaring the object to be dead and
offering the ego the inducement of continuing to live, so does each single struggle of ambivalence
loosen the fixation of the ego to the object by disparaging it, denigrating it and even as it were killing
it” (p. 257). As Stepansky (1977) puts it, aggression is “now seen as a therapeutic prerogative of the
ego” (p. 151).

The History of Aggression in Adlerian Theory

Even in his 1908 article on the aggression drive, Adler had in mind a much broader
conception of aggression than destructiveness. It was first of all a drive not restricted to any one organ
or organ system, rather it dominates all aspects of motor behavior, expressing itself in pure form as
fighting and cruelty; in a modified form in sports and war; and when turned against the self, as
masochism and exaggerated submissiveness (Buss, 1961, p. 191). The aggressive drive can be
channeled into fantasy, as in the case of an artist or a poet. One thinks of Picasso’s powerful painting
of the Fascist air raid on the town of Guernica. The aggressive drive may be channeled into
occupation, producing a criminal, a revolutionary hero, or a police officer. Through reaction
formation, it may be converted into culturally acceptable behavior such as charitableness, sympathy
and altruism. Adler pointed out that aggression when turned against others can be seen directly in
temper tantrums, hysterics, epilepsy, paranoia; when directed inward it manifests itself as
hypochondria, hysterical pain, accident neurosis, ideas of reference and persecution, self-mutilation,
and suicide. Furthermore, aggression turned against the self (“inverted aggression”) produces anxiety
and creates physical symptoms such as tremors, blushing, palpitations, sweating, and vomiting.
Adler in the same article viewed the aggression drive as a “connective energy net” (Stepansky,
1977, p. 113), that is, as not as a drive proper but what Adler termed “the subordinated dynamic
force” that directs the “confluence” of instincts (one for each organ). Aggression belongs to “a
superordinated psychological field connecting the drives” (Ansbacher & Ansbacher, 1956, p. 34),
depriving the primary drives of their autonomy (p. 37). The fact that the “unfinished excitation enters
this field when one of the primary drives is prevented from satisfaction” (Ansbacher & Ansbacher,
1956, p. 34) indicates that aggression arises from frustration, its strength being proportional to the
demands of the environment and its goal being fixed by the satisfaction of the primary goals, by
culture, and by adaptation. Thus, aggression is primarily reactive, as for example, in the hostility of a
frustrated child, and its overt manifestation is determined by both biology and external conditions in
society.
The aggression drive is broadly defined: it “directs attention, interests, sensation, perception,
memory, phantasy, production, and reproduction into paths of pure or altered aggression” (Ansbacher
& Ansbacher, 1956, p. 35). It is important to note that Adler’s formulation of the aggressive drive,
with its many manifestations and its final expression being shaped by the body and society, shows his
holistic outlook, and that his superordinated drive gave more autonomy to the self, in contrast to
Freud’s independent drives and depleted ego (Ansbacher & Ansbacher, 1956, p. 37). Fifteen years
later when Freud did accept the aggressive drive, under the guise of the death instinct, the self was
still conflicted by the polarity of love and hate (p. 37).
 Homo Homini Lupus 9

In his paper on compulsion neurosis (1931) Adler referred to his original 1908 paper on
aggression: “I soon realized that I was not dealing with a[n aggression] drive, but with a partly
conscious, partly irrational attitude towards the tasks which life imposes; and I gradually arrived at an
understanding of the social element in personality, the extent of which is always determined by the
individual’s opinion of the facts and the difficulties of life” (quoted in Ansbacher & Ansbacher, 1956,
p. 38). Here it is evident how much Adler subordinates drive to social considerations and how
significant is the factor of the individual’s creativity.
In time the aggression drive evolved in Adler’s thinking into a pathological form of striving
for overcoming, to which it was subordinated. Hence aggression is a form of striving that lacks social
interest. Stepansky (1977, p. 114) reports that Adler in his article “Über neurotische Disposition”
(1909) explained that aggressive release is a normal activity of every organ, but when an organ is
inferior the associated aggression is displaced to general behavior and released in usually
counterproductive, antisocial ways. This pathological vulnerability he called “psychic
oversensitivity.” By 1910 Adler had coined the term “masculine protest,” to refer to the aggression
drive, the superordinated dynamic force directing the confluence of drives. In The Neurotic
Constitution (1912), Adler proposed that sadism and hate, rather than arising from an innate
aggression drive, are more traits developed to gain a sense of superiority by degrading others. In fact,
aggression is generally a coping response to feelings of inferiority. Finally, in “Repression and the
masculine protest” (1911), Adler dissociated masculine protest from the notion of an aggression drive:
“from the standpoint of drive life..., culture is the constant factor, drive satisfaction depends on social
institutions and economic conditions, and drives are consequently consigned to the status of mere
direction-giving means...to initiate future satisfactions” (Stepansky, 1977, p. 124).
In time as well, Freud went from assigning aggression a minor role to promoting it to a major
ego instinct on a par with libido, that is, the death instinct, which was seen as a basic biological
tendency. Adler, by contrast, started off with a biologically based aggression drive then moved rather
soon to demote it to being reactive, non-instinctual, and relatively minor. Adler has been quoted as
saying, “I enriched psychoanalysis by the aggressive drive. I gladly make them a present of it”
(Ansbacher & Ansbacher, 1956, p. 38). There are further ironies. Stepansky (1977) observes that
Adler was actually more willing to subsume aggression to the pleasure principle than Freud had been
in 1905 in either Three Essays on the Theory of Sex, or in Jokes and Their Relation to the
Unconscious.
Starting with Nietzsche’s will to power, Adler developed the aggression drive, which then
became the masculine protest, then the striving for superiority, and ultimately the striving for
perfection. The aggression drive was also at the core of the split between Adler and Freud, despite
Freud’s eventual adoption, perhaps as a result of the horrors of the First World War (Hoffman, 1994,
p. 61), of the aggression drive in the death instinct. Freud, for example in his History of the
Psychoanalytic Movement, quite inaccurately and unfairly, criticized Adler for making the aggression
drive the central focus of psychology (Stepansky, 1977). The reasons for Freud’s vehement attack,
including accusations of neurosis and paranoia (Stepansky, 1977, pp. 131-132), have been variously
discussed. First is Freud’s personality; Breuer wrote in letter that “Freud is a man given to absolute
and exclusive formulations: this is a psychical need which, in my opinion, leads to excessive
generalization” (quoted in Storr, 1989, p. 8). Then there is Freud’s great emotional investment as
leader and founder of the psychoanalytic movement. He feared that Adler’s ideas might weaken the
movement when it was seen by outsiders to be riven with conflict. Moreover, Freud had struggled
 Homo Homini Lupus 10

hard to gain acceptance of the centrality of sexuality in human behavior, only to see it threatened from
the inside by Adler’s psychology that deemphasized the importance of sex (Stepansky, 1977, p. 137).
Perhaps most telling is Freud’s (1966) own account of his reaction to the concept of the aggression
instinct: “I remember my own defensive attitude when the idea of an instinct of destruction first
emerged in psychoanalytic literature and how long it took before I became receptive to it” (vol. 4, p.
120).

Summary

Freudian theory has concentrated on the drives and emotions, on the cause and etiology of
mental illness. From its origins in the examination of the neuroses of the upper class Viennese,
psychoanalysis built an all-encompassing vision of the human condition resting upon the battle of the
giants, Eros and Thanatos (Storr, 1989, p. 53). Adler chose to concentrate on the purpose and goals
of human behavior, to stress the individual’s creativity. Both theories have received support from
recent advances in biology. Freud’s concept of a self-destructive instinct in man and other organisms
has received support on the cellular level, while his notion of the inherent incompatibility and conflict
between “natural man and civilization” is borne out by structure of the triune brain, particularly the
dichotomy between the reptilolimbic system and the neocortex. To some extent his pessimism about
the human condition is reflected in the ease and alacrity with which an individual can regress to
animalistic behavior, according to the phylogenetic theory of regression. Biology, on the other hand,
has supported the inborn nature of human empathy, as shown by the most recent evolutionary stage
of brain development in which the prefrontal lobes look inward to the limbic system. This supports
Mencius’s comment about the feeling of pity that naturally arises when one sees a child fall into a
well. It also supports Adler’s contention that social interest is central to human nature and, in the final
analysis, most curative of what ails the spirit. The ardor of Adler’s socialism cooled with time, in fact
as early as 1919 he blasted bolshevism as “the enforcement of socialism by violence” and “a Hercules
who strangles not the snakes but his own mother. What a useless expenditure of spirit, strength, and
human blood!” (Hoffman, 1994, p. 113). Perhaps his belief in human perfectability was an example
of his following Vaihinger’s philosophy of “as if.” There is certainly no harm in striving to
approximate Utopia as much as is humanly possible. But Adler’s emphasis on our fundamental social
nature has received great support from primatology and the observations of hierarchies, their purpose,
and the modes of mental functioning they entail.
Regrettable, though typically human, was the inability of the three great visionaries, Freud,
Adler, Jung, to cooperate on a grand synthesis of their views. Jung, with his long experience with
schizophrenics and the deep disturbances of psychosis, had the farthest-ranging, most sweeping
theory of man’s place in nature, including the world of the spirit. Freud gave us always
thought-provoking explanations of our deepest inner workings, the why of our often contradictory
and self-defeating behavior. Adler supplied perhaps the most obvious but most overlooked reality of
the human condition, our need for each other for survival and fulfillment.
 Homo Homini Lupus 11

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