more effectively than those who do not. Fortunately, most of us have a num-
ber of coping strategies in our repertoires. If one approach for dealing withan anxiety-provoking situation does not work, perhaps another one will.
PSYCHOANALYTIC CONC EPTS AND AGGRESSION
Suppose you are in the library late one night trying to read an article from aprofessional journal for one of your classes. You wade through the big wordsand jargon on the first few pages, hoping to make more sense of the writing
as it progresses. You come to what appears to be the main point of the arti-
cle, so you read each word slowly and carefully. Still, you don’ t get it. So
you read the last few paragraphs again. But again it doesn ’t make any sense.
You try once more, but still no luck. You ’re running out of time and pa-
tience. What do you feel like doing? Most people react to this kind of experi-
ence with a good amount of frustration. As a result, they might pound their
fists on the table or swear under their breath at the author. If they could,
they might throw the journal across the room. What these reactions illustrateis the commonly observed connection between frustration and aggression.
Few events in our lives command as much attention as those with an ele-
ment of aggression. From playground fights to muggings to war, attempts byone human to inflict pain on another have been among the most widely re-
searched human behaviors. Naturally, the psychoanalytic approach to per-
sonality has much to say about this topic. In fact, one of the first efforts toexplain the association between frustration and aggression can be found in
Freud ’s early writings. Freud initially proposed that aggression is the result
of frustrated libido. When our pleasure-seeking impulse is blocked, we experi-
ence a “primordial reaction ”to attack the obstacle. Naturally, our egos keep
us from assaulting anyone and everyone who spoils our fun. Therefore, Freud
argued, we often displace our aggression. Because we can ’t attack the police
officer who won ’t let us drive as fast as we want, we express the aggressive
impulse by yelling at employees, friends, or family members.
Freud later changed his views on the causes of aggression. After witnessing
the mass destruction of human life in World War I, he introduced the concept
of a death instinct, Thanatos. Freud claimed that we all have an instinctual de-
sire to destroy ourselves. But because a fully functioning ego does not allow
self-destruction, the instinct is turned outward toward others. However, it was
Freud ’s original position that later inspired researchers interested in the connec-
tion between frustration and aggression. In 1939, a team of psychologists mod-
ified Freud ’s earlier thoughts to create the frustration-aggression hypothesis
(Dollard, Doob, Miller, Mowrer, & Sears, 1939). Although many of these psy-chologists identified themselves more closely with behaviorism (Chapter 13),the psychoanalytic flavor of their theorizing is unmistakable.
The frustration-aggression hypothesis states that “aggression is always a
consequence of frustration …that the occurrence of aggressive behavior
always presupposes the existence of frustration and, contrariwise, that the
existence of frustration always leads to some form of aggression ”(p. 1, italics
added). One attractive feature of this hypothesis is its simplicity. Notice that“Men are not gentle
creatures who want
to be loved. They are,
on the contrary,
creatures amongwhose instinctualendowments [is] a
powerful share of
aggressiveness. ”
Sigmund FreudPsychoanalytic Concepts and Aggression 131