Freud’s emphasis on sex and the id aligns with evolutionary theory. Life is molecular replication. Organisms are the vehicle for that process. That process requires survival (to replicate) and the bodily instincts service this need. These instincts are Freud’s id. Also, as Darwin argues, the individual does not survive without the group. While each group sets up its own rules, belief systems, and symbols, there’s an underlying (or overarching) need to be part of a group. Hence, the full suite of social instincts discussed by Darwin that make the individual attentive to group requirements. This is Freud’s superego and this id-versus-superego conflict is then mediated by ego. The id, driven by the pleasure principle, confronts social norms that, as the reality principle, restrain it. From both the perspective of Freud and Darwin, this self-versus-social dynamic lies at the heart of what it means to be human. (1)
Energy runs throughout Freud’s individual-group dynamics and their id-superego structure. This is Schopenhauer’s Will. For Freud, as for Schopenhauer, life’s energy is internally directed. (2) The energy expressed through instinctive structures is plastic, i.e., energy is tendency or disposition; except for hunger and thirst, it is not deterministic. With this plasticity, energy can readily move about and this is seen in Freud’s libido theory of the instincts. (3) This is the energy of the id, which includes sexual and the other instincts, that places the individual at odds with social rules that regulate instinctual expression. Yet, when repressed, id energy remains and expresses itself in various ways—anxiety (abnormal anxiety, neurosis), sublimation (transfers to other objects), dreams (including wish fulfillment), and Freudian slips.
Freud says that we turn our aggression on others to prevent self-aggression. “It really seems,” he writes, “as though it is necessary for us to destroy some other thing or person in order not to destroy ourselves, in order to guard against the impulsion to self-destruction.” We are aggressive beings. “The aggressive instincts, whose aim is destruction” stand in contrast with Eros, or love of life. (4) “The erotic instincts…seek to combine more and more living substance into every greater unities,” Freud writes, as opposed to the death instincts that seek “to do away with life” and “reestablish the inorganic state from which life evolved.” Freud goes on to say, intriguingly, that, “If it is true that…life once proceeded out of inorganic matter, then, according to our presumption, an instinct must have arisen which sought to do away with life once more and to reestablish the inorganic state.” That instinct or instincts are the aggressive instincts.
Freud has been criticized by scientists who see psychoanalysis as a bogus science. Freud, though, believed that truth must correspond to what is observed in the material world and, he states, “Psycho-analysis has a special right to speak for the scientific Weltanschauung….Its contribution to science lies precisely in having extended research to the mental field.” (5) He contrast his approach with the “three powers” that hold a non-scientific view of truth. Art is one but “it is harmless” and generally “it makes no attempt at invading the realm of reality.” Philosophy is another, but it is basically irrelevant as it “has no direct influence on the great mass of mankind; it is of interest to only a small number even of the top layer of intellectuals and is scarcely intelligible to anyone else.” Religion is the third area but this one is dangerous because “it is an immense power which has the strongest emotions of human beings at its service.”
This is a great series of Freud's essays.
(1) Freud opposes id to superego. I’d argue that Darwin’s social instincts are also part of the id as the need to be part of a group is every bit equivalent to the hunger, sex, and desire that we typically associate with the id. Seen this way, the superego lies within the id. This does not negate the conflict between self as id and the self as social being (superego), but it does lodge the self-social conflict within the id itself, as opposed to an external source that imposes itself on the id. The social need is instinctual and inside; it's why the self cares about what “society” thinks.
(2) This counters the perspective that the individual is a passive being who waits to be stimulated. “An instinct,” Freud writes, “is distinguished from a stimulus by the fact that it arises from sources of stimulation within the body, that it operates as a constant force and that the subject cannot avoid it by flight, as is possible with an external stimulus….We picture it as a certain quota of energy which presses in a particular direction.”
(3) Beyond specific, ad hoc instincts, Freud separates “two main instincts or classes of instincts or groups of instincts in accordance with the two great needs-hunger and love….the living individual organism is at the command of two intentions, self-preservation and the preservation of the species….what we are talking now is biological psychology....It was as representing this aspect of the subject that the ‘ego-instincts’ and the ‘sexual instincts’ were introduced into psycho-analysis.” Here, Freud seems to separate the energy of the id (self-preservation) with the energy of sex (preservation of the species). Yet elsewhere and in other commentary, the libido in Freudian theory involves all psychic energy, not just sexual energy, and this makes sense in terms of evolutionary theory: “id” energy and “libido” energy are integrally related as doing what needs to be done to survive is the evolutionary imperative for sexual replication to occur.
(4) “When it is put to you like this, you will scarcely regard it as a novelty,” Freud writes. “It looks like an attempt at a theoretical transfiguration of the commonplace opposition between loving and hating which coincides, perhaps, with the other polarity, of attraction and repulsion, which physics assumes in the inorganic world.” Freud then notes the strong cultural denial of the aggressive instincts. “To include it in the human constitution,” he states, “appears sacrilegious. It contradicts too many religious presumptions and social convention.”
(5) Freud adds to this: “It is not permissible to declare that science is one field of human mental activity and that religion and philosophy are others, at least its equal in value, and that science has no business to interfere with the other two: that they all have an equal claim to be true and that everyone is at liberty to choose from which he will draw his convictions and in which he will place his belief. A view of this kind is regarded as particularly superior, tolerant, broad-minded and free from illiberal prejudices. Unfortunately it is not tenable and shares all the pernicious features of an entirely unscientific Weltanschauung and is equivalent to one in practice. It is simply a fact that the truth cannot be tolerant, that it admits of no compromises or limitations, that research regards every sphere of human activity as belonging to it and that it must be relentlessly critical if any other power tries to take over any part of it.”