What Is Instinct? Various Definitions Of This Concept
What is instinct? What remains of the animal instinct in us, human beings? Can we trust our instinct? And what does science say about all this?
There are many questions that we still ask ourselves today about a concept as complex and basic as instinct, which does not have the same meaning in popular psychology as it does for the followers of Freud or for current neuroscience. In this article we will see what are the main ways to understand and define this concept.
What is instinct? Various interpretations of this concept
There are several ways to conceive what instincts are. Below we will see the most notable ones.
The Darwinian instinct
We all learn the same definition of instinct during our school years: an innate, stereotyped and specific behavior that is triggered by certain types of stimuli and that continues until its consummation, even in the absence of the stimulation that caused it.
For Darwin, instincts were an essential part of the nature of every living being. It is instinct that allows survival the relationship with the environment and with the rest of the individuals of the same species.
The same instinct that drives bees to build geometric panels or that allows birds to migrate thousands of kilometers across the seas to return months later to their place of origin.
But what happens if we try to transfer the Darwinian instinct to human beings? Do we retain the same capacity as other animals? Sometimes, instincts such as reproduction or feeding seem to collide head-on with our ability to act with our own will.
Animal instinct vs human instinct
A priori, the most common explanation is that instinct is something inherited and innate, and that we are born with it. We can see this with many animals, including our favorite pets. Who hasn’t seen their dog salivate when giving it food? It seems evident that in the animal kingdom, instincts are preserved and fulfill their vital function.
However… what happens to human beings? Let’s take an example: the feeding instinct. This primary instinct allows all living beings to balance their needs for energy and rest. So far, good. But what happens, for example, with disorders such as anorexia or bulimia?
The human being is the only animal capable of defying the nature of his instincts. We are the only living beings that can act against the perpetuation of our own species. And this would also break the instinct par excellence, which is none other than the survival instinct.
However, it seems so There are another series of instincts, such as cooperation or religion (currently investigated) that they are characteristic of human beings and that they have helped us evolve as a species and become one of the most complex creatures of nature that exist.
Freud’s theory of instincts
Another approach to understanding a concept like instinct was used in his day Sigmund Freud, for whom instincts would be forms of specific tension of a supposed psychic energy with dynamic action, which express bodily needs and produce all the characteristic phenomena of life.
Instinct would therefore be a pressure that would produce the need for a reaction and that would compel it to be carried out. This approach perceives instinct more as a need than as a sensation or innate behavior that causes that need.
For Freud and the current of psychoanalysis that emerged from his theoretical approaches, mental phenomena and social activities would be determined by the constant need to reduce these tensions produced by instincts, which would constitute the driving impulse of human life and which are perceived as disruptive and unpleasant feelings.
This vision of instinct is, of course, an approach without any type of scientific basis, despite being very popular because it comes from a figure as controversial as Freud has always been.
Instinct in popular psychology
The concept of instinct has given rise to various interpretations of it in popular psychology. Let’s look at several of these conceptions.
Instinct as intuition
Although instinct and intuition are not the same, it is very common to use them in contexts in which the two concepts are intertwined. Instinct here understood as a way of knowing or acting based on feelings, sensations and motivations, whether bodily or cognitive, but which do not come from calm analysis, but rather seem to burst in suddenly.
Something similar happens with the maternal instinct: despite there being no scientific proof of its existence, the term has become popular to define a type of impulse that pushes a woman to feel motivation and love for a present or future offspring. Although motherhood is a desire that takes different forms in each woman and sometimes may never occur.
Maslow’s instinct
Abraham Maslow was an American psychologist and the leading exponent of humanistic psychology. Maslow believed that all human beings have essentially vital needs for the maintenance of health, including love or esteem.
Maslow began to popularize terms such as desire or motivation to symbolize these types of instincts or internal needs of each of us, stating that these “instinctoid” needs were a kind of genetically built instincts in all of us.
Weisinger’s modern instinct
Come the 21st century, the conception of the term instinct has changed quite a bit. The meaning has been reformulated and figures such as Hendrie Weisinger, clinical psychologist and author of the book The genius of instincthave tried to explain that instincts are not dark or primitive, nor something to be repressed.
According to Weisinger, human behavior is more intelligent than animal behavior because we have more instincts, and not the other way around. With them we would already have everything we need to improve our lives; That is, we would be “programmed” to succeed.
This psychologist also postulates that human beings have lost contact with their instincts and that, in most cases, they act against what they would drive them to do. According to him, we could improve all aspects of our lives by recovering our instincts and using them to our advantage.
Instinct and free will
The latest scientific research has challenged the knowledge we had until now about instincts, free will and human will. The studies conclude that We act before we think, driven by our instinct and our emotions.
It seems that the awareness of having made a decision comes when, in fact, we have already made it. And our decisions could be unconsciously predetermined seconds before our consciousness perceives them as if it had originated them in a premeditated way.
However, all is not lost. Our behaviors obey, to a large extent, the habits and customs that we have been acquiring throughout our lives. And free will does intervene here.
If, for example, a person decides to react aggressively every time his survival instinct feels attacked, and reaffirms this with his experiences, this person has applied his free will to anticipate his future aggressive responses to any attack. Therefore, this “premeditation” will have been conditioned by education and environment, but also by his capacity for personal choice.
