EGO AND INSTINCT
THE PSYCHOANALYTIC VIEW OF HUMAN NATURE-REVISED
(New York: Random House, 1969)

by Daniel Yankelovich and William Barrett

"At the heart of many of the great social issues of our day -- war and peace, the uses of technology, race and poverty, the revolt of youth and the aims of society -- lies the question of whether social engineering can re-make society and the individual to specification or whether an inherent human nature imposes its own forms, limits and demands." Everywhere we turn we find new expressions of what is emerging as the central philosophical conflict of our time: the scientific conception of man versus the existential. And nowhere do these two conceptions collide more directly than in contemporary psychoanalysis, thereby precipitating a crisis of fundamentals in that discipline. As a result, the authors contend, psychoanalysis suffers from a philosophical neurosis. In some ways, like the society at large, "psychoanalysis has one foot firmly planted in scientific (nineteenth-century) materialism and the other equally firmly in existentialism, which is at violent odds with the former and indeed was largely conceived in opposition to it." The present-day conflict revolves around, on the one side, a need for order, control, mastery and for institutions that maintain them, and on the other, a revolt in forms of individual freedom and initiative, the need to feel independent of the overpowerful complexes that hover over and surround us. Western man has become triply estranged -- from nature, from his fellow-man, and from himself. What is needed is a creative synthesis of two forces -- man's culture and Ego must be reconciled with his needs, Instinct. In another time of crisis, Freud challenged the very structures of society and human behavior. In this book, two brilliant thinkers, to lay the basis for a new way of thinking about ourselves -- on the most personal and deepest level -- set themselves the monumental task of relocating the Freudian discoveries about human nature and instinct firmly in the twentieth century. Professors Yankelovich and Barrett challenge Freud's philosophical conclusions (though not his clinical discoveries) in the light of later thinkers such as Erik Erikson, Konrad Lorenz, Jean Piaget and Claude Levi-Strauss. Freud's discoveries and his philosophy must be reassessed, and psychoanalysis (the science that has probed most deeply into private lives) must be reformed so that it can help us understand how society, human nature and individual freedom shape one another. Not only weighing the human sciences and psychoanalysis against scientific and clinical discoveries, but absorbing the humanist thinking of writers like Sartre and Camus, the authors doubt that "man is altogether plastic and can adapt himself to any rationalized system that has the public good at heart," and second, "that we can apply the same scientific techniques to the mastery of our social environment that we have to our physical environment." Ego and Instinct is a revolutionary book. This is the first time that such a weight of impressive scientific evidence has been mustered to the humanist's response to modern man's alienation from himself and from others.