One of the classic beefs of early psychology took place between Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Reich in the early 1930s.
Influenced by his work with traumatised soldiers during World War 1, Freud had published his influential paper Beyond the Pleasure Principle in 1920.
Prior to this, Freud’s model for understanding human behaviour relied on a principle known as Eros. Eros was the drive towards life. It animated our desire to be healthy, to stay safe, to have good relationships and to have sex - to procreate. Eros was the basis for another early concept of Freud’s - the Pleasure Principle.
The Pleasure Principle was Freud’s term for a child’s relationship to the objects it desires. As a child, we are unable to delay the gratification of impulses for things that we desire without becoming upset. However, as we get older, most of us learn the value of offsetting gratification. In Freudian terminology, we have grown out of the Pleasure Principle and are now ruled by the Reality Principle.
With World War 1 sweeping Europe, Freud began to recognise that the basis for the Pleasure Principle - Eros - was insufficiently strong a concept to explain the level of sheer destruction going on around him.
So he created the notion of Thanatos - a “death drive” that ran counter to Eros in the human psyche. Behaviours governed by Thanatos included aggression and the urge to compulsively repeat acts. Both Eros and Thanatos were now considered innate to human psychology. Each of us had a drive towards life and a drive towards death, forever competing within our own mind.
Freud’s model thus looked something like the upper part of the drawing below.
The city of Vienna, home to Sigmund Freud, was the birthplace of psychology. Freud’s school was vibrant and filled with many great, humanistic thinkers of the day. As the 1920s progressed, so members of this school came to recognise Wilhelm Reich as the man who would one day take on Freud’s mantle. His brilliance and his willingness to take a position marked him out as Freud’s obvious successor.
Reich’s work with clients in the 1920s finally resulted in him formulating four Character Types - Rigid, Masochist, Oral and Schizoid. The Masochist is nowadays typically called the Endurer. The Schizoid is often known as the Leaving Type.
In a 1932 paper on the Masochist (Endurer), Reich presents his notion that, actually, there is no death drive in the human psyche. Thanatos doesn’t exist. Rather, the Masochist (Endurer) character is responsible for the destruction previously attributed to Thanatos.
How can this be? The Endurer has had their natural outgoing spontaneity cut off as a reaction to harsh control from the parents when aged two. Their nervous system perceive a threat and it shut them down. They cannot express anger. They cannot take a position for themselves. They are terrified of standing up to any perceived authority. They exist inside a black hole forged by their nervous system in reaction to their childhood situation. Most of us, to some degree of other, have some component of the Endurer inside of us. It simply holds us back.
The only way that someone strong in the Endurer Type can get pleasure is through trying to drag others into their own pit of despair and powerlessness. Endurers inside a organisation will not confront team leaders directly, no matter what the issue. But they will take pleasure in finding anything that can hold the project up, or bring the project or its leader down. Our human need for pleasure is such that we will do this, if no other way forward appears to exist.
Reich’s interpretation of Freud’s “death drive” received nods of recognition and quiet admiration from other psychologists. It certainly seemed viable as a proposition. Freud did not oppose the paper’s publication in the journal of psychology of which he was head. Yet, he did not directly comment on Thanatos and the Endurer character either. And Reich’s paper sadly came to mark a parting of the ways between Reich and Freud.
Yet there remains a huge significance in Reich’s proposition. Thanatos was conceived of as an innate aspect of human psychology that will forever seek to bring civilisation down. Reich asserted that it was merely the result of parentally-induced childhood trauma - something that we can fix.
The Europe of a century ago was a society full of Endurer (Masochist) types. The society of a century’s time does not need to be so.
Read more about Reich in this New York Times article.
Vienna, prior to the folly of WW1, was the centre of a rich and diverse empire. After 1918 it was an empty shell with starvation threatening the poor. Freud's Thanatos seems to suggest the carnage of that war was the result of the soldiers' wish to throw themselves on the bayonets of the enemy. Reich (who fought in that war and lost his home in the part of the empire that became Poland) was a realist. I think you are absolutely right that the populations of Europe were Endurers, they had to be because their rulers were Rigid imperialist autocrats while the intellectual class, who were promoting some appropriate brew of nationalism, were Schizoid/Leavers. Of course the Endurers went off and died, it wasn't in their nature to confront their rulers...
Reich's version makes much more sense to me.