Word: instinct
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Most powerful force which drives human beings, said Freud, is a primeval sex instinct, the libido. During childhood the libido is bound up with such experiences as eating, excreting and thumbsucking. In later years the libido may be transferred to another person (marriage), may remain grounded in childish sex play (perversion), or may overflow as artistic, literary, or musical creation (sublimation). In fact, said Freud, greatest source of creative work is the sex instinct...
Because they do not believe in the primacy of the Oedipus complex, a small group of analysts have seceded from the Freudian union. Some of them do not agree that men are bound by primeval, rigid instincts. Others hold that society inflicts more wounds upon personality than the sex instinct. For these rebels, orthodox Freudians, whose feelings run high, have nothing but contempt...
...Blend the wage scale with a profit-sharing differential and the same human being who was previously concentrating his attention on wages will discard the combative spirit-his self-preservation instinct previously centred only on a flat wage scale will cease...
...instincts and most of my intelligence incline me toward conservatism. I distrust any program which does not carefully take into account the nature of man. I believe that fundamental, biological inequality is a fact of nature. I also believe that the instinct to preserve society is one of the highest sublimations of the erotic instinct plus reason and intelligence. The democratic idea, of the value of every human soul and the right of every human being to protect his own interests in so far as they do not too drastically infringe upon the interests of others...
...best book because it is his clearest and most interesting, The Bridegroom Cometh "dramatizes [says Frank] in flesh and blood the loss of the religious instinct in modern American life, and both the need and the promise of its triumphant rebirth." It is really a sequel: all of Frank's writing is focused on the search for a new religion...