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Other philosophers, such as Friedrich Nietzsche (1844- 1900), believed in a sexual instinct as a force operating in the human psyche, but it was Schopenhauer's ideas that influenced the thinking of Freud. Freud believed that the human psyche was a dynamic system comprised of conscious wishes, motivations, and actions, which were themselves influenced by unconscious desires and drives. Throughout his long career Freud would develop theories about how the unconscious relates to the conscious as well as how the unconscious is structured. He used these theories as the basis for treating patients suffering from various psychological disorders and symptoms. Early in his career, for example, Freud hypothesized that repressed sexual desires were the underlying cause of many psychological symptoms. As he studied female patients with hysteria--nervous tics, odd speech patterns, and anxieties--he determined that these symptoms were the effects of repressed sexual wishes.

But sexual wishes were, for Freud, different from a sexual instinct, which operated on an even deeper level. Freud understood the sexual instinct to be the force that compelled people to continue to live and mate and that pushed against such other instincts as the death instinct or the pleasure principle, which represented a desire for stillness or quiescence. This sexual instinct is much more than sexuality itself but is an intrinsic pressure to continue and seek disquiet. In terms of Freud's dynamic theories, the sexual instinct is the same as what he calls the libido, the energy that underwrites desire and drive.

According to Freud, in comparison with biological instincts, which have a specific chemical chain of cause and effect, sexual instinct is the idea of a psychic force without any specific object or aim. It exists between the body and the mind. Although the sexual instinct tends to link to one or another of the body's erogenous zones as a path for satisfaction, it can also gain satisfaction in a large number of ways with a wide variety of objects. The sexual instinct is thus fragmented and scattered and becomes organized only through an individual's fantasies and experiences.

In his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), Freud examined the various kinds of objects and aims through which the sexual instinct might work. In this theory the sexual instinct itself is undifferentiated--that is, it has no natural or inherent goal such as reproduction. Instead, the instinct is expressed through a number of different desires or aims that might fix on a variety of objects. Thus, for example, the sexual instinct works equally for an individual who wants oral sex with a male partner as it does for a male who wishes sexual intercourse with a female partner. It works as well for someone whose aim is masturbation as it does for someone whose aim is voyeurism, or watching others engaged in sexual activity.

In Freud's theory, however, this scattered sexual instinct is an intrinsic part of a developing human psyche. For Freud, small children evince a sexual instinct. Young childhood is the period during which the sexual instinct becomes associated with specific erogenous zones, aims, and types of objects. As individuals develop, the sexual instinct becomes increasingly linked to fantasies, including cultural ideas, that push the instinct in certain directions, such as reproductive sex or homosexuality. In Freud's theories, the sexual instinct also forms the material that is repressed by individuals. This means that very often individuals are not aware that the sexual instinct is the force behind certain decisions, wishes, or actions. It becomes evident, for example, in the famous Freudian slips, in which the mispronounced word generally refers to a sexual act or object.

Throughout an individual's life the sexual instinct, which Freud later calls Eros, works in a dynamic relationship with other primal forces, such as the death instinct, or the desire to stop. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) Freud mapped the ways these various forces interact to keep individuals going. He links the sexual instincts to an Eros and later to a life instinct, which includes both the desire to create life and the desire to survive. The desire to create life, or Eros, originally represented some primeval state of joinder. Citing Aristophanes's (c. 448-c. 388 BCE) story of early beings in Plato's (427-347 BCE) writing, Freud saw Eros as the desire to return to a primordial state in which all beings were joined to another being in couples--male to male, female to female, and male to female. In Freud's later work the sexual instinct is linked in this way to a desire to merge with another--not necessarily as an impulse toward reproduction, but as a desire to return to an earlier state of existence.

Bibliography:

Freud, Sigmund. (1905). Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 7, ed. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press.

Freud, Sigmund. (1920). Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 18, ed. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press.

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