Freud - Complete Works (625 page)

   In other words, we need more
information on the origin of sexual reproduction and of the sexual
instincts in general. This is a problem which is calculated to
daunt an outsider and which the specialists themselves have not yet
been able to solve. We shall therefore give only the briefest
summary of whatever seems relevant to our line of thought from
among the many discordant assertions and opinions.

   One of these views deprives the
problem of reproduction of its mysterious fascination by
representing it as a part manifestation of growth. (Cf.
multiplication by fission, sprouting or gemmation.) The origin of
reproduction by sexually differentiated germ-cells might be
pictured along sober Darwinian lines by supposing that the
advantage of amphimixis, arrived at on some occasion by the chance
conjugation of two protista, was retained and further exploited in
later development.¹ On this view ‘sex’ would not
be anything very ancient; and the extra ordinarily violent
instincts whose aim it is to bring about sexual union would be
repeating something that had once occurred by chance and had since
become established as being advantageous.

   The question arises here, as in
the case of death, whether we do right in ascribing to protista
those characteristics alone which they actually exhibit, and
whether it is correct to assume that forces and processes which
become visible only in the higher organisms originated in those
organisms for the first time. The view of sexuality we have just
mentioned is of little help for our purposes. The objection may be
raised against it that it postulates the existence of life
instincts already operating in the simplest organisms; for
otherwise conjugation, which works counter to the course of life
and makes the task of ceasing to live more difficult, would not be
retained and elaborated but would be avoided. If, therefore, we are
not to abandon the hypothesis of death instincts, we must suppose
them to be associated from the very first with life instincts. But
it must be admitted that in that case we shall be working upon an
equation with two unknown quantities.

  
¹
Though Weismann (1892) denies this
advantage as well: ‘In no case does fertilization correspond
to a rejuvenescence or renewal of life, nor is its occurrence
necessary in order that life may endure: it is merely an
arrangement which renders possible the intermingling of two
different hereditary tendencies.’ He nevertheless believes
that an intermingling of this kind leads to an increase in the
variability of the organism concerned.

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3758

   Apart from this, science has so
little to tell us about the origin of sexuality that we can liken
the problem to a darkness into which not so much as a ray of a
hypothesis has penetrated. In quite a different region, it is true,
we
do
meet with such a hypothesis; but it is of so fantastic
a kind - a myth rather than a scientific explanation - that I
should not venture to produce it here, were it not that it fulfils
precisely the one condition whose fulfilment we desire. For it
traces the origin of an instinct to
a need to restore an earlier
state of things
.

   What I have in mind is, of
course, the theory which Plato put into the mouth of Aristophanes
in the
Symposium
, and which deals not only with the
origin
of the sexual instinct but also with the most
important of its variations in relation to its object. ‘The
original human nature was not like the present, but different. In
the first place, the sexes were originally three in number, not two
as they are now; there was man, woman, and the union of the two. .
. .’ Everything about these primaeval men was double: they
had four hands and four feet, two faces, two privy parts, and so
on. Eventually Zeus decided to cut these men in two, ‘like a
sorb-apple which is halved for pickling’. After the division
had been made, ‘the two parts of man, each desiring his other
half, came together, and threw their arms about one another eager
to grow into one’.¹

  
¹
I have to thank Professor Heinrich Gomperz,
of Vienna, for the following discussion on the origin of the
Platonic myth, which I give partly in his own words. It is to be
remarked that what is essentially the same theory is already to be
found in the Upanishads. For we find the following passage in the
Brihadâranyaka-upanishad
, 1, 4, 3, where the origin of
the world from the Atman (the Self or Ego) is described: ‘But
he felt no delight. Therefore a man who is lonely feels no delight.
He wished for a second. He was so large as man and wife together.
He then made this his Self to fall in two, and then arose husband
and wife Therefore Yagnavalkya said: "We two are thus (each of
us) like half a shell." Therefore the void which was there, is
filled by the wife.’

   The
Brihadâranyaka-upanishad
is the most ancient of all
the Upanishads and no competent authority dates it later than about
the year 800 B.C. In contradiction to the prevailing opinion, I
should hesitate to give an unqualified denial to the possibility of
Plato’s myth being derived, even if it were only indirectly,
from the Indian source, since a similar possibility cannot be
excluded in the case of the doctrine of transmigration. But even if
a derivation of this kind (through the Pythagoreans in the first
instance) were established, the significance of the coincidence
between the two trains of thought would scarcely be diminished. For
Plato would not have adopted a story of this kind which had somehow
reached him through some oriental tradition - to say nothing of
giving it so important a place - unless it had struck him as
containing an element of truth.

   In
a paper devoted to a systematic examination of this line of thought
before the time of Plato, Ziegler (1913) traces it back to
Babylonian origins.

Beyond The Pleasure Principle

3759

   Shall we follow the hint given us
by the poet-philosopher, and venture upon the hypothesis that
living substance at the time of its coming to life was torn apart
into small particles, which have ever since endeavoured to reunite
through the sexual instincts? that these instincts, in which the
chemical affinity of inanimate matter persisted, gradually
succeeded, as they developed through the kingdom of the protista,
in overcoming the difficulties put in the way of that endeavour by
an environment charged with dangerous stimuli - stimuli which
compelled them to form a protective cortical layer? that these
splintered fragments of living substance in this way attained a
multicellular condition and finally transferred the instinct for
reuniting, in the most highly concentrated form, to the germ-cells?
- But here, I think, the moment has come for breaking off.

   Not, however, without the
addition of a few words of critical reflection. It may be asked
whether and how far I am myself convinced of the truth of the
hypotheses that have been set out in these pages. My answer would
be that I am not convinced myself and that I do not seek to
persuade other people to believe in them. Or, more precisely, that
I do not know how far I believe in them. There is no reason, as it
seems to me, why the emotional factor of conviction should enter
into this question at all. It is surely possible to throw oneself
into a line of thought and to follow it wherever it leads out of
simple scientific curiosity, or, if the reader prefers, as an
advocatus diaboli
, who is not on that account himself sold
to the devil. I do not dispute the fact that the third step in the
theory of the instincts, which I have taken here, cannot lay claim
to the same degree of certainty as the two earlier ones - the
extension of the concept of sexuality and the hypothesis of
narcissism. These two innovations were a direct translation of
observation into theory and were no more open to sources of error
than is inevitable in all such cases. It is true that my assertion
of the regressive character of instincts also rests upon observed
material - namely on the facts of the compulsion to repeat. It may
be, however, that I have overestimated their significance. And in
any case it is impossible to pursue an idea of this kind except by
repeatedly combining factual material with what is purely
speculative and thus diverging widely from empirical observation.
The more frequently this is done in the course of constructing a
theory, the more untrustworthy, as we know, must be the final
result. But the degree of uncertainty is not assignable. One may
have made a lucky hit or one may have gone shamefully astray. I do
not think a large part is played by what is called
‘intuition’ in work of this kind. From what I have seen
of intuition, it seems to me to be the product of a kind of
intellectual impartiality. Unfortunately, however, people are
seldom impartial where ultimate things, the great problems of
science and life, are concerned. Each of us is governed in such
cases by deep-rooted internal prejudices, into whose hands our
speculation unwittingly plays. Since we have such good grounds for
being distrustful, our attitude towards the results of our own
deliberations cannot well be other than one of cool benevolence. I
hasten to add, however, that self-criticism such as this is far
from binding one to any special tolerance towards dissentient
opinions. It is perfectly legitimate to reject remorselessly
theories which are contradicted by the very first steps in the
analysis of observed facts, while yet being aware at the same time
that the validity of one’s own theory is only a provisional
one.

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   We need not feel greatly
disturbed in judging our speculation upon the life and death
instincts by the fact that so many bewildering and obscure
processes occur in it - such as one instinct being driven out by
another or an instinct turning from the ego to an object, and so
on. This is merely due to our being obliged to operate with the
scientific terms, that is to say with the figurative language,
peculiar to psychology (or, more precisely, to depth psychology).
We could not otherwise describe the processes in question at all,
and indeed we could not have become aware of them. The deficiencies
in our description would probably vanish if we were already in a
position to replace the psychological terms by physiological or
chemical ones. It is true that they too are only part of a
figurative language; but it is one with which we have long been
familiar and which is perhaps a simpler one as well.

   On the other hand it should be
made quite clear that the uncertainty of our speculation has been
greatly increased by the necessity for borrowing from the science
of biology. Biology is truly a land of unlimited possibilities. We
may expect it to give us the most surprising information and we
cannot guess what answers it will return in a few dozen years to
the questions we have put to it. They may be of a kind which will
blow away the whole of our artificial structure of hypotheses. If
so, it may be asked why I have embarked upon such a line of thought
as the present one, and in particular why I have decided to make it
public. Well - I cannot deny that some of the analogies,
correlations and connections which it contains seemed to me to
deserve consideration.¹

  
¹
I will add a few words to clarify our
terminology, which has undergone some development in the course of
the present work. We came to know what the ‘sexual
instincts’ were from their relation to the sexes and to the
reproductive function. We retained this name after we had been
obliged by the findings of psycho-analysis to connect them less
closely with reproduction. With the hypothesis of narcissistic
libido and the extension of the concept of libido to the individual
cells, the sexual instinct was transformed for us into Eros, which
seeks to force together and hold together the portions of living
substance. What are commonly called the sexual instincts are looked
upon by us as the part of Eros which is directed towards objects.
Our speculations have suggested that Eros operates from the
beginning of life and appears as a ‘life instinct’ in
opposition to the ‘death instinct’ which was brought
into being by the coming to life of inorganic substance. These
speculations seek to solve the riddle of life by supposing that
these two instincts were struggling with each other from the very
first. It is not so easy, perhaps, to follow the transformations
though which the concept of the ‘ego-instincts’ has
passed. To begin with we applied that name to all the instinctual
trends (of which we had no closer knowledge) which could be
distinguished from the sexual instincts directed towards an object;
and we opposed the ego-instincts to the sexual instincts of which
the libido is the manifestation. Subsequently we came to closer
grips with the analysis of the ego and recognized that a portion of
the ‘ego-instincts’ is also of a libidinal character
and has taken the subject’s own ego as its object. These
narcissistic self-preservative instincts had thenceforward to be
counted among the libidinal sexual instincts. The opposition
between the ego-instincts and the sexual instincts was transformed
into one between the ego-instincts and the object-instincts, both
of a libidinal nature. But in its place a fresh opposition appeared
between the libidinal (ego- and object-) instincts and others,
which must be presumed to be present in the ego and which may
perhaps actually be observed in the destructive instincts. Our
speculations have transformed this opposition into one between the
life instincts (Eros) and the death instincts.