Instinct Theory

12 Key excerpts on "Instinct Theory"

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  Psychology and Politics

  • W. H. R. Rivers(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  II INSTINCT IN RELATION TO SOCIETY F OR the purpose of this lecture I propose to define instinct very briefly as “inherited disposition to behaviour.” In so far as the behaviour of a human being is determined by dispositions which he has brought into the world with him as part of his psychical and mental make-up, so far shall I regard this behaviour as instinctive, and in so far as it is determined by his experience in relation to his environment, so far shall I regard the behaviour as otherwise determined, or non-instinctive. The usual contrast made is between instinctive and intelligent behaviour, but I have made no reference to intelligence in the preceding definition because I do not want to commit myself to the position that instinctive and intelligent behaviour are mutually exclusive. It seems possible, if not probable, that we shall find ourselves sooner or later driven to the position that intelligent behaviour, or, to use a more abstract term, intelligence, may, in some cases at any rate, be determined by inheritance, in which case we should have to classify instincts into intelligent and non-intelligent. It seems to me far more likely, however, that we shall not follow this course, but shall be driven to give up the whole attempt to distinguish between instinct and intelligence and shall adopt a new classification with a new nomenclature. In my book on Instinct and the Unconscious I have made a beginning in this direction, and have distinguished between protopathic and epicritic instincts or forms of instinctive behaviour, making the presence or absence of discrimination and gradation the distinguishing marks of the two. I am not absolutely wedded to these terms, which have been taken from the physiology of sensation, and am quite prepared to accept other terms or even other distinctions, if better can be found

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  Psychology and Politics

  And other Essays

  • W H R Rivers(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  INSTINCT IN RELATION TO SOCIETY II INSTINCT IN RELATION TO SOCIETY F OR the purpose of this lecture I propose to define instinct very briefly as “inherited disposition to behaviour.” In so far as the behaviour of a human being is determined by dispositions which he has brought into the world with him as part of his psychical and mental make-up, so far shall I regard this behaviour as instinctive, and in so far as it is determined by his experience in relation to his environment, so far shall I regard the behaviour as otherwise determined, or non-instinctive. The usual contrast made is between instinctive and intelligent behaviour, but I have made no reference to intelligence in the preceding definition because I do not want to commit myself to the position that instinctive and intelligent behaviour are mutually exclusive. It seems possible, if not probable, that we shall find ourselves sooner or later driven to the position that intelligent behaviour, or, to use a more abstract term, intelligence, may, in some cases at any rate, be determined by inheritance, in which case we should have to classify instincts into intelligent and non-intelligent. It seems to me far more likely, however, that we shall not follow this course, but shall be driven to give up the whole attempt to distinguish between instinct and intelligence and shall adopt a new classification with a new nomenclature. In my book on Instinct and the Unconscious I have made a beginning in this direction, and have distinguished between protopathic and epicritic instincts or forms of instinctive behaviour, making the presence or absence of discrimination and gradation the distinguishing marks of the two. I am not absolutely wedded to these terms, which have been taken from the physiology of sensation, and am quite prepared to accept other terms or even other distinctions, if better can be found

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  Problems in Psychopathology

  • T.W. Mitchell(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Some writers regard as instinctive every form of co-ordinated bodily movement which needs little or no practice for its accurate execution, the co-ordination being innately determined. Others restrict the instincts to purposive actions which are accurately performed without any previous experience or learning. Others, again, confine the term to the impulses towards satisfaction of fundamental needs of the organism, such as self-preservation and reproduction. One of the most noteworthy contributions to the problems of instinct, in recent years, is that which is found in the writings of Professor McDougall, and the sense in which he uses the term is perhaps that in which it is used by the majority of psychologists in this country. He defines an instinct as “an innate disposition which determines the organism to perceive (to pay attention to) any object of a certain class, and to experience in its presence a certain emotional excitement and an impulse to action which finds expression in a specific mode of behaviour in relation to that object”. 1 That is to say, all instinctual activity has three sides : a sensory or perceptual side, an emotional or affective side, and a motor or executive side. Some object is perceived or some situation arises which excites the instinct-disposition, and this excitement is accompanied by some specific emotion and by a felt impulse to act in some specific way. The specific form of behaviour is sometimes regarded as the essential part, but the accompanying emotional experience is inseparably connected with the problem of instinct. Dr. McDougall describes fourteen human instincts, the activity of each of which is accompanied by a specific form of emotional excitement. For example, the instinct of escape or flight is accompanied by the emotion of fear, the instinct of combat by the emotion of anger, the instinct of repulsion by the emotion of disgust

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  Educational Psychology

  • L.S. Vygotsky(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • CRC Press

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 5

  THE INSTINCTS AS THE SUBJECT, MECHANISM, AND MEANS OF EDUCATION

  I nstinctive activity in man and in animals has always appeared to observers as something clandestine and mysterious. Until recently, it had remained the most obscure and unexplained of all features in the psychology of man and the animals. Why this question has remained obscure and unexplained is due, above all, to the very obscurity of instinctive activity.

  We encounter the instincts at the lowest levels of life as well as at the highest, and, strange as it may seem, not only do we not notice their evolution and progressive development, but, quite the contrary, are able to establish beyond all reasonable doubt that purely instinctive behavior is incomparably more perfected among the lower animals than among the higher. In man, the instincts are virtually never expressed in pure form, but always manifest themselves as constituent elements of a more complex unity, and therefore function always in highly discrete fashion, as if a concealed well spring at the base of all the explicit mechanisms of behavior.

  As to the nature of the instincts and their classification, science still has no answer. From earliest times, there have been researchers who have insistently held to the view that the instincts as such, as special forms of behavior, do not exist at all. Others, on the contrary, have seen in the instincts something special, something not fully reducible to anything else, a kind of special class of reactions in man and in animals.

  One researcher has remarked quite correctly that we call instinct everything we do not understand. And, truly, in common word usage, the term, “instinct,” is applied to all those cases when we cannot discern the most immediate and genuine cause of our deeds.

  It is easiest to explain the nature of the instincts by comparing them with an ordinary reflex. There is the belief that the instincts constitute only complex or serial reflexes. However, as we saw above, there exists a whole series of distinctions between instincts and reflexes. Bekhterev suggested that the instincts could be thought of as complex organic reflexes, and that they could be placed in a class of their own consisting of the simple and unconditional reflexes. This also means essentially acknowledging the instincts as constituting a special class of reactions that exist independently.

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  Psychology and its Bearing on Education

  • C.W. Valentine(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter VAre there Human Instincts? the Innate Bases of Conduct and ‘Drives’

  In our last chapter we saw the need to trace some fundamental motives in man’s conduct. We discussed conation and its relation to feeling tone, but we are left with the question ‘Why should man desire to do certain things or strive in certain directions rather than others?’ Is he driven to them by inborn tendencies? Among psychologists there is a general agreement that man does possess some impulses or tendencies of an instinctive type (or at least some strong innate ‘urges’ or ‘drives’) even if they cannot be labelled ‘instincts’ in the sense which some biologists understand that term. To a considerable extent indeed the discussion as to whether man possesses instincts turns upon the meaning which we attach to the word instinct, and it may be well to discuss some of these meanings first.

  Certainly one common usage of the word ‘instinctive’ should never be followed: for example, when a man, wounded in the right hand, says that shaving with the left hand was very hard at first, but that now he does it ‘instinctively’. Here it is equivalent to ‘from habit’ or ‘mechanically’; it is certainly not instinctive in any proper meaning of the word.

  What is an instinct? What the biologist usually understands by an instinct we may best show by an illustration from the animal world; for all are agreed, biologists and psychologists, that instincts are most easily observed in animals, where they are least obscured and modified by higher mental processes. Of course we cannot assume that because instincts are present in animals, they are therefore to be found in man; but some familiarity with instincts in the animal world will help us at least to look out for similar inborn tendencies in man, and we may reasonably expect some resemblance if we agree that man is a product of evolution in the animal world.

  An excellent example of instinct is that of the Mason wasp. The wasp makes her nest (like a little cave) in a mud bank and there deposits her eggs. She brings to the nest caterpillars which she has stung so that they die or are at least paralysed; then she seals up her nest, and when the eggs are hatched into grubs they find a good supply of food in storage. Now this action of the wasp takes place efficiently the first time it is performed. The mother wasp has never seen it done before, and there is no experience to show her the value of the storage of the food. Here we see the two main principles of the biological conception of instinct: first, an innate impulse to act in a certain way, fulfilling some biological purpose; second, an innate mechanism for efficient acting which is not dependent upon experience.

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  Psychology And Education

  • Robert Morris Ogden(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter II Original Forms of Behavior

  § 5.The Nature of Instinct

  We found nursing to be an original mode of behavior which, in the normal infant, achieves a high degree of perfection within a very short time after birth. Behavior of this type is commonly described as instinctive. Broadly speaking, an instinct is any complex adjustive behavior that does not require to be first learned before it can be employed. In other words, an instinct is a dynamic pattern which is more or less perfect the first time it is tried.

  But instinct has other characteristics, the most important one being, perhaps, that which Lloyd Morgan describes as “persistency with varied effort.” Within the general range of its dynamic pattern an instinct may employ the most varied efforts in seeking its end; and it will persist in these efforts until either the end has been attained, or exhaustion, or some strong counter-attraction, supervenes. From all of which it appears that no mere inventory of separate acts, with or without a definite serial order, is adequate to describe an instinct. An organism is confronted by a situation which makes an original appeal, as the touching of the cheeks or chin of an infant, or even the lips in sleep. The response which ensues is somehow suited to the mode of stimulation; but it is also controlled, in large degree, by internal conditions, such as those of hunger or satiety.

  So we may say that certain original types of appeal are accompanied by certain original modes of response. The details of the response vary more or less with the detailed nature of the appeal, the response being as a whole conditioned by the present state of the organism, which also determines the persistency of the act and the varied efforts made in carrying it out. It is impossible to phrase a just statement of this process without a somewhat erroneous implication of successive conditions and events. In truth, however, the temporal sequence of events is far less significant than the total pattern with its inclosure of beginning and end. If conditions permit one to arouse an instinct in more than one way, the pattern comes full-fledged into existence, as has been instanced by the pursed lips and swallowing which Watson reports of infants in their sleep when the corners of the mouth are lightly touched, whereas sucking ordinarily takes place after the nipple has been introduced into the mouth.

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  Basic Psychoanalytic Concepts on the Theory of Instincts

  • Humberto Nagera, Humberto Nagera(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  THE DEVELOPMENT OF FREUD’S Instinct Theory, 1894–1939 I. INTRODUCTION AND DEFINITION

  Freud’s efforts to understand the nature of the forces participating in mental conflict arose out of his clinical experience with neurotic, and later psychotic patients (see Concept: Conflict). The development of his clinical understanding, and of the theoretical postulates by means of which he sought to order and explain normal and pathological processes in mental life, are therefore determined by the clinical material available to him at any given time. He sought to construct theoretical models of the mind, the mental apparatus, and the processes operating within it, and to distinguish and order the internal and external stimuli which impinge upon the mental apparatus, setting its processes in motion. By far the most important of these stimuli are the instincts.

  Freud’s definition of instincts approached the subject from two aspects: their nature and composition, and their effects upon the mental apparatus, e.g.:

  ‘By an “instinct” is provisionally to be understood the psychical representative of an endosomatic, continuously flowing source of stimulation, as contrasted with a “stimulus”, which is set up by single excitations coming from without. The concept of instinct is thus one of those lying on the frontier between the mental and the physical. The simplest and likeliest assumption as to the nature of instincts would seem to be that in itself an instinct is without quality, and, so far as mental life in concerned, is only to be regarded as a measure of the demand made upon the mind for work. What distinguishes the instincts from one another and endows them with specific qualities is their relation to their somatic sources and to their aims. The source of an instinct is a process of excitation occurring in an organ and the immediate aim of the instinct lies in the removal of this organic stimulus.’1

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  The Origin Of Species

  • Charles Darwin(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Big Cheese Books

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 8 — Instinct

       

  Many instincts are so wonderful that their development will probably appear to the reader a difficulty sufficient to overthrow my whole theory. I may here premise that I have nothing to do with the origin of the mental powers, any more than I have with that of life itself. We are concerned only with the diversities of instinct and of the other mental faculties in animals of the same class.

  I will not attempt any definition of instinct. It would be easy to show that several distinct mental actions are commonly embraced by this term; but every one understands what is meant, when it is said that instinct impels the cuckoo to migrate and to lay her eggs in other birds’ nests. An action, which we ourselves require experience to enable us to perform, when performed by an animal, more especially by a very young one, without experience, and when performed by many individuals in the same way, without their knowing for what purpose it is performed, is usually said to be instinctive. But I could show that none of these characters are universal. A little dose of judgment or reason, as Pierre Huber expresses it, often comes into play, even with animals low in the scale of nature.

  Frederic Cuvier and several of the older metaphysicians have compared instinct with habit. This comparison gives, I think, an accurate notion of the frame of mind under which an instinctive action is performed, but not necessarily of its origin. How unconsciously many habitual actions are performed, indeed not rarely in direct opposition to our conscious will! Yet they may be modified by the will or reason. Habits easily become associated with other habits, with certain periods of time, and states of the body. When once acquired, they often remain constant throughout life. Several other points of resemblance between instincts and habits could be pointed out. As in repeating a well-known song, so in instincts, one action follows another by a sort of rhythm; if a person be interrupted in a song, or in repeating anything by rote, he is generally forced to go back to recover the habitual train of thought; so P. Huber found it was with a caterpillar, which makes a very complicated hammock; for if he took a caterpillar which had completed its hammock up to, say, the sixth stage of construction, and put it into a hammock completed up only to the third stage, the caterpillar simply reperformed the fourth, fifth, and sixth stages of construction. if, however, a caterpillar were taken out of a hammock made up, for instance, to the third stage, and were put into one finished up to the sixth stage, so that much of its work was already done for it, far from deriving any benefit from this, it was much embarrassed, and in order to complete its hammock, seemed forced to start from the third stage, where it had left off, and thus tried to complete the already finished work.

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  The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness

  • Erich Fromm(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Open Road Media

    (Publisher)

  Part I: Instinctivism, Behaviorism, Psychoanalysis 1.   The Instinctivists The Older Instinctivists I WILL FORGO PRESENTING here a history of Instinct Theory as the reader can find it in many textbooks. 1 This history began far back in philosophical thought, but as far as modern thought is concerned, it dates from the work of Charles Darwin. All post-Darwinian research on instincts has been based on Darwin’s theory of evolution. William James (1890), William McDougall (1913, 1932) and others have drawn up long lists in which each individual instinct was supposed to motivate corresponding kinds of behavior, such as James’s instincts of imitation, rivalry, pugnacity, sympathy, hunting, fear, acquisitiveness, kleptomania, constructiveness, play, curiosity, sociability, secretiveness, cleanliness, modesty, love, and jealousy—a strange mixture of universal human qualities and specific socially conditioned character traits. (J. J. McDermott, ed., 1967.) Although these lists of instincts appear today somewhat naive, the work of these instinctivists is highly sophisticated, rich in theoretical constructions, and still impressive by its level of theoretical thought; it is by no means dated. Thus, for instance, James simply was quite aware that there might be an element of learning even in the first performance of an instinct, and McDougall was not unaware of the molding influence of different experiences and cultural backgrounds. The instinctivism of the latter forms a bridge to Freud’s theory. As Fletcher has emphasized, McDougall did not identify instinct with a “motor mechanism” and a rigidly fixed motor response. For him the core of an instinct was a “propensity,” a “craving,” and this affective-connative core of each instinct “seems capable of functioning in relative independence of both the cognitive and the motor part of the total instinctive disposition.” (W

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  Discussions on Child Development

  Volume one

  • Barbel Inhelder, J. M. Tanner(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  SEVENTH DISCUSSION

  Psychoanalytic Instinct Theory

  BOWLBY :

  For my remarks I have selected out of the whole field of psychoanalysis the topic of instinct because I feel that instinct is the central core of psychoanalysis, and that the study of instinct distinguishes psychoanalysis from other branches of psychology, which commonly study other aspects of the human organism. Psychoanalysis regards a great deal of psychiatric illness as being due to a disorganization of instinctual life. I share that view, and I think that by looking at it that way we may prevent much mental illness.

  Freud made several attempts to formulate a theory of instinct. Both his main formulations were in terms of a dichotomy:

  (a) The sexual and the ego instincts (circa 1910).

  (b) The life and death instincts (circa 1920).

  A further important proposition was that the goal of the organism was to obtain pleasure and avoid pain. Freud himself did not feel very satisfied with his work in this field and in 1915 remarked that it would probably prove necessary for psychologists to look to biology for an adequate theory of instinct. As it happens, in the same paper he outlined a theory of instinct almost identical in principle with that of modern ethology. He conceived of instinct as having a source in somatic process, an impetus or force, an aim —that of ‘abolishing the condition of stimulation in the source of the instinct’—and an object , namely ‘that in and through which it can achieve its aim’.

  Psychoanalysts have varied a great deal in regard to which of Freud's theories they have adopted. In Great Britain, under the influence of MBLANIE KLEIN (1948), there has been an emphasis on the object-seeking nature of instinct. FAIRBAIRN (1952) has supported this view and afgued explicitly against the pleasure-pain theory.

  Freud also called attention to the fact that human beings are organisms which at times are driven by forces within themselves which they cannot easily control. We fall in love, we lose our tempers, we panic, we are possessed by forces which seem alien to ourselves; and, of course, there is the primitive theory of mental illness that people are possessed by a devil. It is these phenomena that I want to discuss and, just to give them a little more concreteness, I shall illustrate what I have in mind by referring to a couple of patients whom I have seen very recently. One is an adult of about forty, a woman with a severe degree of illness, tremendous phobias, great hatreds, deep depressions, who is subacutely murderous and suicidal. I have been treating her now for two and half years and her relations to me are characteristically ambivalent. I have experienced long sessions when she was shrieking at me for two or three hours without a break. There have been other occasions when her endearments have been on the same scale. I recall that when I came here in June last, on the one hand she was very sad that I should leave her, but, on the other hand, as she told me afterwards, she hoped I would drown myself in the lake—and she meant it. The thing that has struck me so particularly about her is that one day she can be friendly and cordial and we have what I call a sober session, and the next day she rants and raves at me as though we had never had any other relationship. Another feature about her is that she is terrified of friendly relations. She is ‘happy’ only when she is on angry terms with someone; her sense of stability is better when there is mutual anger. Obviously the problem is, why is she like this? My own view is that this is the result of the relations which she had with her mother when she was small, having been extremely unhappy and chaotic, but, naturally, I can't prove this. What one has now

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  An Introduction to Social Psychology

  • William McDougall(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Dover Publications

    (Publisher)

  Observation of animals of any one species shows that all members of the species seek and strive toward a limited number of goals of certain types, certain kinds of food and of shelter, their mates, the company of their fellows, certain geographical areas at certain seasons, escape to cover in presence of certain definable circumstances, dominance over their fellows, the welfare of their young, and so on. For any one species the kinds of goals sought are characteristic and specific ; and all members of the species seek these goals independently of example and of prior experience of attainment of them, though the course of action pursued in the course of striving towards the goal may vary much and may be profoundly modified by experience. We are justified, then, in inferring that each member of the species inherits the tendencies of the species to seek goals of these several types.

  Man also is a member of an animal species. And this species also has its natural goals, or its inborn tendencies to seek goals of certain types. This fact is not only indicated very clearly by any comparison of human with animal behaviour, but it is so obvious a fact that no psychologist of the least intelligence fails to recognise it, however inadequately, not even if he obstinately reduces their number to a minimum of three and dubs them the “prepotent reflexes” of sex, fear, and rage. Others write of “primary desires,” or of “dominant urges,” or of “unconditioned reflexes,” or of appetites, or of cravings, or of congenital drives, or of motor sets, or of inherited tendencies or propensities ; lastly, some, bolder than the rest, write of “so-called instincts.” For instincts are out of fashion just now with American psychologists ; and to write of instincts without some such qualification as “so-called” betrays a reckless indifference to fashion amounting almost to indecency. Yet the word “instinct” is too good to be lost to our science. Better than any other word it points to the facts and the problems with which I am here concerned.

  The hormic psychology imperatively requires recognition not only of instinctive action but of instincts. Primarily and traditionally the words “instinct” and “instinctive” point to those types of animal action which are complex activities of the whole organism ; which lead the creature to the attainment of one or other of the goals natural to the species ; which are in their general nature manifested by all members of the species under appropriate circumstances ; which exhibit nice adaptation to circumstances ; and which, though often suggesting intelligent appreciation of the end to be gained and the means to be adopted, yet owe little or nothing to the individual’s prior experience.hq

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  The Psychologist At Work

  An Introduction to Experimental Psychology

  • M R Harrower(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  We must now mention briefly that other type of action which, in the case of animals at least, is ‘ready made’at birth—such an action as the building of its nest by the robin in the particular ‘robin fashion’, the burying of nuts by the young squirrel, the pouncing on small moving objects of the kitten, and so on. That such actions are simply sequences or chains of reflexes, each set off by the preceding one, is the obvious claim of the Behaviourist, who is particularly on his guard against any suggestion of attributing consciousness to the animal’s performance when such a performance can be explained without it. While we must beware, it is true, of projecting our own ways of doing things into the animal world, nonetheless it is possible, using our non-mechanical concepts, to build up an explanation of instinctive action in other than purely automatic and mechanical terms. This we shall attempt to do at the end of the chapter.

  Much important work on instinctive behaviour has been done through observation of animals and insects in natural conditions rather than by experimentation proper, books have been written on the wasp and ant, for example, showing the amazingly complicated yet relatively uniform behaviour of these insects generation after generation. But there is another aspect of the concept of instinct, over and above these actions which ‘belong’ to the organism and which are achieved without imitation or practice, and that is the drive, power or energy behind these actions such that they will be completed in spite of difficulties, either natural or experimentally introduced. We may illustrate experimental work on these instinctive drives by asking the question “Which is the stronger of two such drives, that towards satisfying the animal’s hunger or that of sex?” Or, in the manner of the experimenter, “How much of an obstacle will be needed to thwart each of these drives respectively?”

  One pre-requisite for such an experiment would be an animal, a rat let us say, whose immediate previous existence had been controlled, that is, one that we know to be hungry and sexually excited. We may then put this animal in a box with two alternative exits, one leading him to a female rat, the other to food. We would put him in time and time again, removing him before he could satisfy either of these instinctive drives. We would answer our question in terms of the number of times that he chose one route rather than the other.

  Or we could put the rat on a small platform, on another part of which is either food, or a female rat in plain view, but to reach either of these objectives he must cross a mesh of wire from which he would receive an electric shock which can be made stronger and stronger. Here we can measure the amount of current necessary to deter him from reaching either the food or the female rat. Or we could adopt the method of counting the number of times, during a given interval, that he will cross the wire to reach either the food or the female, despite the shock he receives. Experiments of this kind have shown that the maternal drive appears to be the strongest, followed in order by thirst, hunger, sex, and curiosity.

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