Freud believed that human behaviour was governed by deep, internal forces he called drives (Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 1905; Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 1920). These drives, like libido and the death instinct, were imagined as permanent pressures operating beneath consciousness, demanding expression.
Observing persistent patterns of desire, conflict, and inhibition, Freud concluded that they must be caused by unconscious, intrinsic forces.
He conceptualised drives as instinctual, unquenchable sources of psychic pressure — arising from biological needs and demands — and saw motivations not as discrete events, but as surface expressions of deeper forces.
Unfortunately, this misunderstanding shaped the rest of his psychological model.
The mistake was simple but profound.
Persistence and repetition were treated as evidence of deep, unconscious internal forces, rather than recognised for what they actually are: the emergent and cyclic results of changing conditions.
In this sense, there is no need to posit a sex drive. Sexual motivations arise naturally when the right conditions exist.
There is no need to posit a death drive. Destructive motivations appear when certain internal or external circumstances converge.
What looks like a continuous inner force is, in truth, the repeated emergence of discrete instances of motivation whenever conditions favour it.
For Freud, persistence created the illusion of substance.
Motivations themselves are not mysterious. They are emergent properties, born of the convergence of desire, ability, opportunity, and circumstance.
They are contingent, not permanent. They don’t sit inside us like stored energy waiting to break free.
They happen. They are events, not entities.
You can see this cyclic nature clearly in conscious acts such as eating, speaking, moving, and sex — each begins, continues and then resolves.vYou cannot eat or have sex endlessly. Every act follows a natural arc from inception to completion.
Motivation is the same.
It is not the expression of an unquenchable pressure, but a directed act emerging under the right conditions and completing itself when those conditions are spent.
The idea of a drive treats motivation as the product of intrinsic pressure, but motivation is better understood as emergent — rising with conditions, falling as they change — and cyclic, following the natural rhythms of life.
The sex drive is not a reservoir of energy, It is the frequent occurrence of sexual motivations when biological, psychological, and situational factors combine.
And when those conditions change, motivations may reduce, weaken, dissolve, or persist, depending on whether the conditions that support them remain.
There is nothing hidden, nothing stored. Only the presence or absence of real, living conditions.
If drives are no longer needed to explain motivation, then Freud’s structural model also falls with them.
The id, the ego, and the superego were created to manage the imagined conflict between permanent drives (The Ego and the Id, 1923). But if motivations emerge and dissolve with changing conditions, these structures become unnecessary.
We are not divided into warring intra-psychic compartments.
We are singular organisms, living through a shifting field of conditions and resultant motivations.
Freud saw repression as the process by which distressing thoughts and desires were kept from conscious awareness (Repression, 1915), and repression is certainly real.
But it is better understood not as evidence of hidden pressures, but as a motivational act — a vector of objection — arising when aversion leads to the unawareness of certain experiences, actions, or thoughts. It belongs to the ordinary dynamics of motivation, not to any deeper structural battle between parts of the mind.
Psychological disturbance, too, can be seen more cleanly. It’s the result of a clash between hidden forces, It is the product of motivational conflict, stagnation, inhibition, or distortion.
This view is simpler, sharper, and closer to observable reality.
Motivations are real.
Conditions are real.
Change is real.
Drives are not. They are abstractions, born from mistaking repetition for substance. Recognising this brings consequences that matter.
First, it restores the possibility of responsibility.
If behaviour is not controlled by hidden and perpetual forces but by emergent motivations, it can be influenced by altering the conditions from which those motivations arise.
Second, it clarifies human development. While early patterns of motivation, including repression, shape us, they don’t have to trap us.
We are shaped by the living field of circumstances and can change as those circumstances change.
Third, it avoids pathologising ordinary experience.
Conflicting motivations are not evidence of illness. They are the natural outcome of operating in a world of shifting and competing conditions.
In short:
- We don’t have a sex drive. You experience sexual motivations when the right biological and situational conditions align.
- We don’t have a death drive. You experience destructive motivations when aversive or despairing conditions arise.
- We don’t have an id or an ego. We experience a dynamic, living field of motivations, constantly emerging and dissolving.
Freud’s theories reflected a genuine attempt to map human experience, but they rested on a basic mistake: the assumption that persistence implies a permanent source.
There is nothing hidden beneath motivation.
There is only emergence.
The mind is not a container of stored drives.
It is a living system, constantly responding to the movement of life.
When we understand motivation as emergent and cyclic, we leave behind the myth of hidden forces.
We return to what is real.
Motivations are not hidden demons.
They are living responses to the open field of existence.
When conditions change, experience changes.
When we grasp this, real change becomes possible.
Rather than being trapped by unconscious forces, we are participants in an ongoing process of emergence — a process that can be understood, shaped, and directed.
Freud offered one of the first maps of the mind.
But now it is time to draw a more accurate one. One based not on hidden forces, but on the emergent realities of human motivation.
Until next time, take care.
Sean
Bibliography
Freud, S. (1905). Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. London: Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1915). Repression. In Collected Papers, Vol. IV. London: Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1920). Beyond the Pleasure Principle. London: Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1923). The Ego and the Id. London: Hogarth Press.
