ABSTRACT
The behaviourist opposition to the drive concept, recently expressed, for example, by Morgan (1979b), is difficult to understand. The conception of primary drives or biological engines which the author shortly going to put forward is not to be confused with the notion of disembodied forces or energies, nor is it merely an intervening variable summarising relationships between input variables. Such as deprivation and reinforcement schedules on the one hand and output variables such as strength and frequency of correlated responses on the other. Sigmund Freud's metapsychology, though unfinished, was the one great systematic attempt in modern psychology to outline a deterministic, physiologically based theory of motivation and extend it to embrace all of human behaviour, bodily and mental. The one motivational theory in dynamic psychology which offered a solution to these problems was Freud’s formulation of his instinctual drive concept, defined as an innate physiological driving mechanism with preformed consummatory behaviours: his specific actions.
