Introduction

The longstanding suspicion by European psychoanalysts that the "native Americans" were revisionists impelled a particular history when the German-speaking analysts arrived during the 1930s. Edward Bibring was among the number of Viennese analysts settling in America. Bibring's paper is about the stages of instinct theory in the course of the development of psychoanalysis. Bibring points to Sigmund Freud's "Civilization and its discontents", to describe the instinct of aggression, and to assign it independence from the libido and from the ego-instincts. The classical version sticks more closely to the biological impulse and energic quantity, whereas Susan Isaacs' Kleinian notion diverts attention to the narrative, qualitative aspects as instinct is experienced. The central point of that critique was that Isaacs' exposition, claiming that there was constant mental activity at this most primitive level of phantasy, ruled out regression if the unconscious is permanently regressed at this primary level.