INSTINCT IN MAN

AN interesting contribution to the controversialsubject of instinct has been made by Ronald Fletcher,· who is Lecturer in Sociology at Bedford College, London. In a review of previous work in this fleld Fletcher makes special reference to William James, McDougall, Lloyd Morgan, Tinbergen and Freud. He points out that low in the animal scale emotion plays little or no part in contrast with behaviour in more highly developed organisms. Man alone is able to describehis experiences; hencethere are limits to comparisonbetweenhuman and animal psychology, if indeed animals can be said to have a psychology. Freudian theory comes, of course, under close scrutiny. Freud arbitrarily dismissedearlier work (except for a referenceto Le Bon) and set out on his own line of investigation; but he said that his system would have to be set on biological foundationssome day. It is not clear whether in the Freudian scheme ego and sex are to be regarded as primary or basic drives. Freud never fully worked out his theory of life and death instincts,which he addedlate in his investigations. Freud held that the ultimate aim in human behaviour was to achieve a kind of Nirvana, and that the function of the nervous system was to seek the extinction of all stimuli. Fletcher disagreeson the question of inheritance of the super-ego,which Freud suggestedarose from the killing of the father of the primitive horde and was then phylogenetically transmitted from one generation to another. A cultural transmission is not to be confused with an instinct in the generally acceptedsense. There is, therefore, no social instinct. Fletcher is specially concerned with the impact of instinctive drives upon social adaptations, and stressesthe importanceof the earliestaffective experienceswithin the family circle, to be followed in due courseby the influence of neighbourhoodand school. The early patterning of affective responses,to begin with on セィ・ instinctive level, has, in Fletcher's view, powerful mfluence over the processof education,as indeed Freud pointed out-educationnot only in the narrow scholastic sense,but in learning to be a useful and acceptablemem-