Überlegungen zur Freud’schen Triebtheorie

In his 1915 essay “Drives and drive fates”, Sigmund Freud summarized the insights gained up to that point into the functioning of underlying forces in the psyche. This happened at a time when the dynamics of the course of instincts in animals had not yet been researched. This first happened in the context of ethology, the biological research of behavior, which the Dutch animal behavioral researcher Nikolaas Tinbergen summarized in his “Instinktlehre” (Theory of instincts), which appeared in 1966. Knowledge about the consequences of trauma was also still very incomplete at the time and was only more fully understood in the second half of the last century and even only first summarized in 1998 by Gottfried Fischer and Peter Riedesser. In retrospect, against the background of the current knowledge, it can be seen that the compulsive “drives” described by Freud are essentially trauma-related disorders from the Oedipal period, but also from the pre-Oedipal pre-linguistic period; however, genuine drives from primate heritage, such as hunger and thirst and also sexuality, can be experienced with satisfaction if they are not traumatized or distorted. This clarification has a systematic significance for psychoanalysis and its communication, because these contradictions in Freud’s drive theory, which can be reflected upon today, hindered and in some cases even blocked the communication of its very important insights. Another important aspect is that the term unconscious suggests that this is contents hidden in dark depths. These contents can, however, dominate consciousness more or less completely as can be observed in neurotic behavior and also in political ideologies. Unconscious simply means that it is not accessible to the reflexive consciousness.