be a conformist, to deprecate oneself, to boast, to murder, to suffer pain.
These so-called needs, it must be emphasized, are held by their advocates to be innate and universal to the human
species.
A desire or a wish is not the equivalent of a need. The fact that a great many men may desire a thing, does not
prove that it represents a need inherent in human nature. Needs must be objectively demonstrable. This should be
obvious. But there are few facts that have been more recklessly ignored by most psychologists.
Perhaps the most remarkable "need" ever posited by a psychologist is the one propounded by Sigmund Freud in his
theory of the "death instinct."^1 According to Freud, human behavior is to be understood in terms of instincts—
specifically, the life instinct and the death instinct. The latter is the more powerful, says Freud, since all men
eventually do die. These instincts, he claims, represent innate biological needs; man has a biological need to
experience pain and to perish; in every cell of man's body there is a ''will to die," an urge to "return" to an inorganic
condition, to "reestablish a state of things which was disturbed by the emergence of life."^2
This theory represents the extreme of what can happen when psychologists permit themselves to speculate about
needs while ignoring the context in which the concept arises and the standard by which needs are to be established.
A need is that which an organism requires for its survival; the consequence of frustrating a need is pain and/or
death; the postulate of a death instinct, of a need to die, of a need to experience pain, is literally meaningless. It is
only on the premise of life as the goal that the concept of a biological need can be meaningful. The concept of a
need to die—like the concept of a square circle—is a contradiction in terms.
If man fails to fulfill his actual needs, nature threatens him with pain and death—but what does nature threaten him
with if he fails to fulfill his alleged need to suffer and die?
To move from the observation that all living things die to the conclusion that there exists within every cell of man's
body a "will to die," is grotesque anthropomorphism. And to speak of an organism's urge to "return" to an inorganic
condition, "to re-establish a