think—if he chooses to risk his life in senseless dangers, to close his eyes rather than open his mind at the sight of
any problem, to seek escape from the responsibility of reason in alcohol or drugs, to act in willfully stubborn
defiance of his own objective self-interest—he has no instinct that will force his mind to function, no instinct that
will compel him to value his life sufficiently to do the thinking and perform the actions which his life requires.
The flagrantly self-destructive practices in which so many men engage—and the suicidal course that characterizes
so much of human history—are an eloquent refutation and mockery of the claim that man has an instinct of self-
preservation.
Recognizing some of the difficulties which an alleged instinct of self-preservation presents, Freud sought a way out
of the dilemma by announcing that, in addition to possessing a life instinct, man also possesses a death instinct.
This theory has largely fallen into disrepute. But his fellow instinct theorists have no right to laugh at Freud. If one
is determined to account for human behavior by reference to instincts, and if (as virtually all instinct theorists do)
one holds that man has an instinct of self-preservation, one might well feel compelled to posit a counteracting death
instinct—in order to make men's actions explicable.
If such a thing as an "instinct" could exist, it would have to be some sort of innate, automatic knowledge, some sort
of frozen information inscribed in the nervous system at birth. Instinct theory thus amounts to a resurrection of the
doctrine of innate ideas, which has been thoroughly discredited by both philosophy and biology as a legacy of
mysticism.
The mythology of instinct is disastrous to scientific theory, because, by offering a pseudo-explanation, it halts
further inquiry and thus stands as an obstacle to a genuine understanding of the causes of human behavior. It should
be discarded as the last, dying convulsion of medieval demonology.
In place of recourse to such primitive constructs, motivational psychology requires an analysis of the implications
of the fact that man's biological distinction and basic tool of need-satisfaction is his rational faculty.