I told A.I.: I thought we might cover human instinct. Where it resides in Freud, Jung, and Mark Solms. Then what status instinct possesses in evolutionary psychology. Then what price the psyche pays in blocking instincts.
"That’s a rich and layered itinerary, Gary—perfect terrain for mythic excavation and psychoanalytic spelunking. Let’s map it in four movements:
"🧠I. Instinct in Freud, Jung, and Solms
"Freud: Drives as Instinctual Forces
- Freud’s early metapsychology framed instincts (Triebe) as biological imperatives—libidinal and aggressive drives rooted in the body, pressing toward psychic expression.
- He distinguished between instinct (biological) and drive (psychological), with drives being the psychic representatives of somatic demands.
- The dual-drive theory (Eros and Thanatos) posited a tension between life-preserving and death-oriented instincts, often sublimated or repressed into culture, neurosis, or symptom formation."
"Jung: Archetypal Instincts
- Jung saw instincts as paired with archetypes—biological imperatives fused with inherited psychic patterns.
- Instincts were not just urges but mythic forces, embedded in the collective unconscious and expressed through symbolic behavior, dreams, and ritual.
- He emphasized the integration of instinctual energy into consciousness via individuation, warning against both repression and inflation."
"Mark Solms: Neuropsychoanalytic Reframing
- Solms reinterprets Freud’s drive theory through affective neuroscience, locating instincts in subcortical brain structures like the hypothalamus and brainstem.
- He argues that drives are affect-laden programs for survival—hunger, thirst, sex, attachment—each with a neurobiological substrate and subjective feeling tone.
- Solms bridges Freud’s instincts with modern neuroscience, showing how blocked drives manifest as affective disorders and how conscious awareness can modulate instinctual expression."
"🧬 II. Instinct in Evolutionary Psychology
- Evolutionary psychology treats instincts as adaptive heuristics—hardwired behavioral tendencies shaped by natural selection to solve recurrent survival problems.
- These include fear of predators, mate selection, kin altruism, and social bonding—often operating below conscious awareness.
- Instincts are seen as modular, domain-specific programs (e.g. cheater detection, threat response) that evolved to maximize reproductive fitness.
- The field often critiques Freudian theory for its lack of empirical grounding, but it shares Freud’s premise that behavior is not purely rational."
"🧨 III. The Cost of Blocking Instincts
"Suppressing or distorting instinctual expression can fracture the psyche in profound ways:
"Psychodynamic Consequences
- Repression of instinctual drives leads to symptom formation—anxiety, depression, compulsions, and somatization.
- Defense mechanisms like displacement, projection, and reaction formation emerge to manage forbidden urges."
"Neurobiological Fallout
- Suppressed instincts generate chronic stress, dysregulated affect, and impaired decision-making.
- The body carries the residue—muscle tension, autonomic dysregulation, and inflammatory responses."
"Existential and Mythic Costs
- Blocking instincts severs the link to authenticity, eros, and vitality.
- The psyche pays in disconnection from the Real, loss of symbolic resonance, and collapse of ritual containment.
- Jung would say the shadow grows monstrous when instinct is denied its rightful place in the dance of psyche and soul."
"Would you like to deepen this into a recursive framework—perhaps mapping instinct as a mythic voltage across these domains? Or explore how ritual, dreamwork, or somatic practice might restore instinctual flow?"
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/common-sense-science/202504/why-instincts-matter
https://www.psychmechanics.com/effects-of-suppressing-your-emotions/
https://www.simplypsychology.org/suppression-as-a-defense-mechanism.html
https://theconductsoflife.com/consequences-of-suppressing-your-instincts/
1. Define the shadow; 2) show us how it grows monstrous when it loses its rightful place; 3) what do you make of Solms' reversal of the location of the Id and the Ego, making the Id conscious and the Ego unconscious? 4) How does Janet's automatism interact with Solms' concept of the unconscious Ego?
