The visceral drives

We have taken our examples from the analysis of the hunger drive, which serves as a sort of model for all the visceral drives, i.e., those which depend directly on varying visceral conditions. Under the visceral drives we may list hunger; thirst; excretory tensions; oxygen deprivation; vasomotor adjustment needs, arising in response to temperature extremes; sexual tension, deriving initially from gonad and other endocrine tensions; maternal tensions, due in some degree to endocrine and lactation tensions. All these drives are of course profoundly socialized, and all show some degree of periodicity in a form related to habit (e.g., the day's eating cycle). All of them can, of course, facilitate one another, the state of tension being greater when two or more are involved; and they may all fuse, the individual being unable to explain the peculiar quality of his feeling.

Just as some puppies are great eaters and others are mere lickers and tasters, so too in man individual differences in the hunger drive are well marked in the opening months of life. It would be absurd to insist that they are constant throughout his lifetime, but they are constant enough to worry doctors and parents. One child eats like a horse, the next like a canary. It is not all a question of metabolism, either; and it is certainly not a simple question of energy requirements. Some love to stuff; others nibble and run back to their games. So far as this is an abiding trait, it participates in structuring the child's world--and the adult's.

The maternal and the sexual call for special comment. In view of the fact that individual differences in maternal interest are usually large among the young females of a species, it would be reasonable to ask whether this holds for mankind. Noting that some of his patients had always been thrilled by babies--had gone out of their way to be "baby-carriage peekers"--while others had had no interest in them, David Levy made a systematic quantitative comparison between lifelong expressions of maternal feeling on the one hand and endocrine data (such as length of menstrual flow) on the other. The positive results strongly suggest a constitutional factor. At the same time the great force of social sentiment regarding motherhood is brought home to the growing girl, its force and its form varying from community to community, from family to family; and it not only reinforces within her the primitive mothering impulses, but brings a wealth of feelings deriving from identification with her feminine role, her eager desire to be a mother and not just a person who is mothered --feelings elaborated from the depths of her being and not just an expression of the narrowly maternal as one might find it in animal societies.

When it comes to the individual elaboration of all the feelings associated with sexuality, not even all of physiology, or of psychoanalysis, or of literature, can do justice to the subtlety of the problem. As if this were not complicated enough, the primitive outgoing responses to other persons, and to animals, to flowers, to sunsets, to a thousand lovely things, may become fused with the erotic (in a form varying with cultural emphasis), so that one has the infinite richness or tenderness of romantic love; or these aesthetic or cosmic cravings may be arbitrarily set in opposition to the erotic, so that one devotes oneself to a "higher," and feels that he must reject a "lower" love. So accustomed are we to this sharp cleavage between complex and overlapping forms of experience that we respond warmly to Bourdillon's words that "The light of the whole world dies when love is done" and to Wilder's suggestion that "love is the meaning of life," though Bourdillon is thinking about the love of man and woman, while this is the one kind of love that Wilder does not allow to fulfill itself.