Book Essay: Modern Drive Theory

Driven to Survive

Driven to Survive is a collection of selected papers that are divided into sections: metapsychology and drive theory, the Oedipus complex, clinical applications, and musings. The first section is about Schmidt-Hellerau’s theory, and the next sections might be considered applications.

Driven to Survive is a psychoanalytic theory book about exactly what the title says it is—the drive for survival. We clearly want to survive. A survival drive seems obviously a basic part of human nature. Freud struggled with exactly where the drive to survive belongs in the pantheon of motivations. Schmidt-Hellerau has thought long and hard about this, devoting her first outstanding book (Schmidt-Hellerau, 1995/2001), reviewed by Greenstadt (2003), to an extended exposition of the drives, and the present book of her collected papers further investigates the topic. She’s writing to clarify Freud because drive theory, she feels, remains central to the Freudian theory of mind. Schmidt-Hellerau seeks to preserve drive psychology, as the central part of motivation and the basis for energy and for direction, as well as for a complete phenomenology of mind.

Schmidt-Hellerau anchors her work in early Freudian drive theory. She also shows how early Freudian drive theory is applicable to the objective phenomenology of mental experience, including psychopathology. Her examples are realistic, clinically descriptive, and very helpful. But Freudian drive theory has a number of problems. What are those problems and how does Schmidt-Hellerau address them?

What is a drive? This is what Freud (1915/1957) called the mental representation of the instincts. Instinct is biological, based in the brain. Drive is psychological, based in the mind. In the mind, drive has both an object and an aim. Once biological instinct enters the mind, it becomes represented and is psychological. We thus have the issues of the psychology of the drives.

But Freud felt drive was a border concept, and so does Schmidt-Hellerau. What is this border experience, and what does this border concept mean today within our psychoanalytic theory? After Engel (1977), we call it the biopsychosocial complexity of mental experience. Biological because of the urge, psychological because of the organization of the urge, and social because of the expression context of the urge. The social is one aspect informing the reality principle. The compromise of the biopsychosocial is what we call psychic reality. In that compromise is the compromise between drive and reality.

Once you have reality, you have the possibility of adaptation. The basis of adaptation is the drive to survive as it meets reality, including the social. As part of adaptation, there must be compromises for conflicts that complex motivational systems interacting with complex environments always generate. Schmidt-Hellerau does not disagree. In fact, she explicates it, providing us with a modern view compatible with all meta-psychologies because all meta-psychologies help patients with better adaptations.

If instinct or drive is motivation, is it the only form of motivation? Schmidt-Hellerau, whose native language is German, is helpfully able to show us that Freud, on occasion, used the term motivation for drive. Drive’s relationship to motivation is complex (Schafer, 1968). It isn’t just about discharge of the aim but also has to do with the object of the aim, and therefore both the self and the object (Jacobson, 1964). Now the psychology of drive becomes complicated just like the mind. Drive must be a plastic force applicable to many manifestations of aim and objects. It gives a broader meaning to Freud’s phrase, the vicissitudes of the drives. Freud agreed with this in his discussions of drive derivatives. His idea about character types is an example of his ideas about complex higher-order drive derivative organizations.

Schmidt-Hellerau understands that the drive to survive is so strong and so basic that it probably shouldn’t be thought of as a derivative of another drive. Freud struggled with this. He first saw it as a separate drive and called it the ego instinct. He later gave it to libido, an expanded concept of the sex drive, which included the investment in life and living. It was never clear whether libido was a derivative of sex or sex a derivative of libido. I think it started as the first and later became the second, which would make self-preservation a natural part of that. But sex in humans is much more multidetermined than only survival, and survival is much more basic than sex. If drive is basic to human motivation and if, before the structural model, it is the only motivation, then more than the sexual drive is needed to describe motivation. Then, inevitably, there will be conflicts between drive motivations. Conflict is a basic part of the Freudian model of the mind.

How do we account for aggression in the service of self-preservation and also its use for greed and selfishness, leading to destruction? If survival is mostly about assertion and assertion can be aggression, which can and at times has to be destructive, is it part of a death drive? Certainly, intense aggression and the driven, destructive hatred of humans can at times have drivelike qualities. This is one of the factors that caused Freud to posit a death drive. But if self-preservation is an aspect of the death drive, it limits self-preservation to greed and destruction, a doleful and simplistic view of human nature, tending to eliminate the good and the loving.

Winnicott wrestled with the necessity of destruction to create the new, but his destruction was aimed at the representation of the real object within the mind, not at the object in reality. For Winnicott (1969), destruction was a method of construction—changing the old and the ideal into the new and the real—aggression as construction. Aggression in the service of mastery and love versus aggression in the service of destruction and hate. In humans, it can be either or both. No matter where you assign the drive aspects of aggression, this is the issue: mastery love versus destruction hate. Will the use of aggression be constructive or destructive, or both?

This is what Schmidt-Hellerau ultimately says, which is a major advance in clarifying and modernizing Freud’s death drive theory. Schmidt-Hellerau chooses a related name, Lethe. She stays with a two-drive theory and posits two basic drives: Libido and Lethe. Libido is active and Lethe is passive. Libido is the sexual drive; Lethe is the self-preservation drive. Thus, Freud’s drive conflict model is preserved, as are the Freudian regulatory principles of constancy and pleasure and, most importantly, his homeostasis principle. The self-preservative drive is renamed as Lethe, for lethargic, instead of death drive, because it seeks homeostasis in the early Freudian sense of a stable, lowest energy state. Self-preservation is rendered as passive, based on a model of homeostasis within an energy system, which tries to preserve its structure with the least energy possible; using only the energy necessary to overcome entropy. Schmidt-Hellerau says:

It seems paradoxical to say the drive to survive is part of a death drive because we think experientially about self-preservation as the opposite of death, rather than thinking of it as an activity that shields against death. I stay with Freud’s notions of the Life Drive and its structured part, the Sexual Drive as well as the Death Drive and its structured part, the Preservative Drive. I keep the Freudian term for the energy of the Life/Sexual Drive as libido while introducing for the energy of the Death/Preservative Drive the notion lethe. I think the drives give the direction (libido and/or lethe) invested in an action or object representation and experienced/expressed in its emotions.

Thus it’s better to stay with the two drives’ antagonistic directions and functions, basically: enlivening and deadening. When the energies of the death drive, lethe, cathect the structures (memory traces) of the nursing interaction, then one “knows” (remembers) what needs to be done to survive, then these energies don’t rush further towards death. That’s why structuring the drives in the interaction with the object is so important. (Personal communication)

Why Lethe? Remember that Lethe is near the river Styx. Lethe’s waters are the waters of forgetfulness reminding us of Bion’s (1967) call for the analyst to eschew memories and desires, which is a state of mind. Creative adaptation for survival needs that state of mind. It also reminds us of the quiet states of infancy and the peaceful, passive curiosity as the infant lies on her back contemplating the turning mobile above her.

But where then are the drivelike qualities of intensity and motivated “driveness”? Where is the “driveness” in a peaceful state? This is one of the many paradoxes of drive theory when trying to describe basic motivational states. For Lethe, perhaps the drive is the seeking of that peaceful state. The peaceful state is motoric, not mental. Motor peace allows the mind to think and be creative. The neurological correlate may be the default mode network of the contemplative mental state. Why link it to the underworld? Passive curiosity has nothing to do with death.

Self-preservation requires adaptation, which requires alertness, and these are active; not the lowest energy level. Homeostasis refers to stability, not to the level of intensity. Stability of the ability to change and adapt is called allostasis. Self-preservation requires mental activity. Self-preservation is about life, not death, about activity, not passivity, about construction, not destruction, and about the love of life, not just the love of death.

When not asleep, the infant in her crib is not passive. She is curious, watching the mobile with interest and pleasure. Humans seek excitement and change. Excitement in change is part of the allostasis, not homeostasis, of human mental growth and development. It is central to adaptation. Schmidt-Hellerau understands all this. She does link peaceful Lethe to curiosity, exploration, adaptation, mastery, growth, and development.

Problem: Are all of the above just derivatives of drive activation? No. These are functions and include meanings. Functions and meanings are not just drives. The functions and meanings of drives are represented and develop structures in the mind that grow to include other motivations.

Once there is structure there is relative autonomy of those structures. Hartmann (1939/1958) said this in Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation, and Schmidt-Hellerau also says this in her major contributions to a modern Freudian drive theory and a modern psychoanalysis. She integrates drive theory with structural theory. This is because structures organize drives into complex meanings in their organization of complex affect experiences. Schmidt-Hellerau does use the term drive satisfaction, not just drive discharge, therefore accurately describing the drive situation in human beings rather than in other animals. Drive is now compatible with complex psychological motivation and meaning.

Structure doesn’t only mean the agencies. Structure means organizations of representations. Schmidt-Hellerau knows this and understands that a change in drive intensity will affect all structures, including changes in self-state, as well as changes in agencies. This is a crucial step in modernizing drive theory and in contemplating any consilience of theory. Freudian drive theory came with the idea of energy. Freud thought about energy in hydrodynamic, 19th-century physiological and physical terms. Strachey changed the word to cathexis (Auchincloss & Samberg, 2012). Cathexis is about the locus and quantity of directed attention and feelings.

As a descriptive metaphor, the idea of biological energy can be thought of mentally as intensity. Intensity is quantity. It is a crucial dimensional aspect of all motivation. It isn’t just about wanting. It’s about how strong the wanting is. Drive affects all motivation because it provides all motivation with intensity. The word energy might today be replaced by the word intensity. How much does one want what one wants? How much can the ego moderate, control, organize, synthesize, and satisfy the intensity of our wants? Drive is the economic factor. The French have a term for the resting state energy level of humans. It is élan vitale, a hard-to-define and hard-to-describe state of intensity of being. The problems with defining what mental energy is should not be used to deny that it is.

Does drive have its mental effect only with drive content or for all mental content? If this force is used for adaptation, does that empower, motivate, and guide the use of ego functions? Does it power development? This would especially apply to a drive to survive because survival via adaptation requires all of mental function and stimulates development. I think so and Schmidt-Hellerau does.

We see the need for some drive theory in psychoanalysis because the most basic experiences are inherent in the drive concept: sex and survival. Drive has not only these content aspects. Drive has a characteristic intensity aspect—quantity, which has its qualities, both a crucial part of meaning, hence, of motivation. Meanings are crucial to experience, to structure, to motivation, and to action. Every mental experience has an intensity and intensity is part of meaning. Intensity is a biological given. One name for this is drive. Since you cannot get away from it, you are left struggling with what to do with it. The issue here is the mental experience of the drives and their epistemology, not their biology.

Schmidt-Hellerau understands all of this, which is why her books are so important. It isn’t only her Freudian drive theory per se, it is her modern Freudian drive theory description of ubiquitous economic and biological motivation in human psychology. She sees drives as a crucial part of motivation.

If every drive manifestation aim has an object and a cathexis to that object, then drive inherently refers to the relationship to that object. Perhaps a modern word for such a relationship is attachment. Cathexis results in an attachment. An attachment is a type of cathexis. For a drive to be discharged to an object with an aim requires an attachment to the object. If the modern view of drive aim to an object is attachment, with sexual, aggressive, and survival aspects, then what we are talking about is the mental relationship of the biology of attachment and its different drive motivations.

If a drive has an aim and an object, then a person is motivated by drive meaning; not just by discharge but by satisfaction. Aim and object are complex. All motivations have different emotional meanings. Their synthesis gives satisfaction of meaning, not just of drives. Meaning is multidetermined. Meaning is a modern ego psychology view of motivation, what Schafer (1968) called wish. Motivation meaning is an ego synthesis. All motives are combinations of drives, of conflict and compromise, and object representations, with different quantities of intensity of meanings. Meaning and wish do not eliminate the phenomenon of the drives. It includes them, it requires them because no psychoanalyst can avoid the phenomenon of drive, even when the name changes and the concept broadens. There is an irreducible intensity and quality of quantity kernel in drive that is part not only of motivation but of meaning. Qualities are part of representation which in humans allows meaning (Eagle, 2024).

What are Schmidt-Hellerau’s truly brilliant answers to all these observations and arguments? Schmidt-Hellerau knows and allows for all this in her theory of the drives. She understands that once you have structure, you have structures of complex meanings that you can say are secondary to drive but are complex and often have relative independence of drive in the service of complex adaptations to self and to other, in wish and in reality. But relative autonomy of structures still includes the influence of the drives. This is basic to both of her books.

She solves the reductionist problems of drive theory by carefully describing drive complexity in humans and by having a complex model of drive. Schmidt-Hellerau does so in a sweeping stroke by separating levels of drive phenomenon. The most basic level is active versus passive, Libido versus Lethe. This allows, as Schmidt-Hellerau says, the positive and negative directionality of the two antagonistic drives. Negative directionality is why the word Lethe was chosen! Now the passive infant is not passive but peaceful, yet expectant, mentally active, and motorically quiet.

Schmidt-Hellerau goes on to say that the sexual and self-preservative drives are “two more specific drives issuing from the next hierarchical level of the model” (p. 87), introducing hierarchical drive complexity. Her complex heuristic model is compatible with complexly ambivalent aims and with complex, hierarchical mental structure. By separating levels of abstraction in drive phenomena in our theory, Schmidt-Hellerau preserves drive for both instinct and complex meaning. This complex drive model is appropriate to complex human mental experience. Schmidt-Hellerau applies this in a profound way, saying: “we should then have conceived a system of drives expandable to successive levels and backed up by a structural system also amenable to successive stages of differentiation” (p. 87). This drive theory is applicable to all meta-psychologies, and all psychoanalytic theories of different aspects of differentiation.

Schmidt-Hellerau can then deal with the issue of aggression, which I think she properly understands as an affect not a drive, which can serve the purpose of self-preservation, or sexuality, and of construction or/and destruction. Her survival drive can now be toward reality and adaptation, which is linked to the ego and to synthesis and adaptation of both emotional experience, reality experience, and their compromise in emotionally experienced psychic reality.

Life Drive & Death Drive, Libido & Lethe

The next book, Life Drive & Death Drive, Libido & Lethe, is Schmidt-Hellerau’s 1995 book now rewritten in 2024. It gives us her careful and thoughtful account of the development of Freudian theory. It is a most scholarly work and belongs on the reading list of all Freud courses. The book starts with an introduction, “Metapsychology—Superstructure or Foundation of Psychoanalysis?” discussing what metapsychology is. It covers the basic philosophical requirements of theory and its applications in psychoanalysis. This introduction alone is worth the price of the book. It shows us how we are to think about theory and, therefore, how to think about psychoanalytic theory. Many of our most argumentative debates stem from our careless thinking about theory. Those of us wishing to discuss psychoanalytic theory should be required to read this introduction first, so we know what we are talking about when we talk about theory. Part 1 of the book is “Foundations of the Freudian model, 1895 to 1905” and discusses general principles, including the quantitative aspect of the psychical apparatus. In doing so, Schmidt-Hellerau reminds us that Freud’s goal was to describe the mind: how it works, and how it is experienced. Part 2, titled “Elaboration of the Model,” discusses Freudian theory from 1910 to 1915, including issues of differentiation and integration. Schmidt-Hellerau delves into the mind-body question inherent in drives from the beginning of Freudian descriptions of mental structure. Part 3, “The Shape of the Model” discusses Freud’s writings from 1920 to 1925. In this section, Schmidt-Hellerau covers Freud’s final version of the drive theory and the definitive version of the structural theory. She describes the synthesis of her ideas about the drives and the ego. The concluding remarks are a wonderful synthesis of the issues. She then has an epilogue describing further developments in her elaboration of drive theory.

In the introduction and Chapter 2 of her 2018 book, and now elaborated in the 2024 version, Schmidt-Hellerau provides us with the foundational texts for modern drive theory and its integration in any coming meta-theory for psychoanalysis by demonstrating Freud’s complex theory about the mind. She shows us Freud’s theory about the complexity of drive, and the relationship of drive to structure, to the ego, to motivation, to quantity, to survival, to adaptation, to attachment, to aggression, to growth and development, and to state changes. All this is Schmidt-Hellerau’s achievement.

She shows that this integration is inherent in the development of Freudian theory. From the beginning, Freud was concerned with the entire mental apparatus. The current multisystem dissociation of our theory is not anti-Freudian, it is ignorant of Freud. It isn’t a refutation of Freud because Freud didn’t refute a multisystem, complex theory nor its elements of structure, hierarchies, relationships, self, and synthesis. His followers refuted it by focusing on and exaggerating specific aspects of the mental apparatus.

Schmidt-Hellerau is a very deep thinker who is brave and erudite enough to help us think about drives. She shows us her method very clearly and very thoroughly, step by step. She is a careful writer and a devoted scholar. It is a real pleasure to follow her thinking as she brings Freudian drive theory up to date and shows us its applicability to a modern, broader psychoanalytic theory. Schmidt-Hellerau helps us with the consilience of our psychoanalytic theory. What Schmidt-Hellerau has done is particularly needed at this time in the development of psychoanalytic theory and by those of us working toward its integration (Marcus, 2018). This is one of her major contributions.

I am proud for psychoanalysis that I have these books on my shelf. I will use them in teaching psychoanalytic candidates and graduate students in psychology, neuropsychoanalysis, philosophy, social science, and intellectual history. I will use the books in my writings on the consilience of psychoanalytic theory.

Congratulations and many thanks to Dr. Cordelia Schmidt-Hellerau!