Freud's concept of drive or instinct (Trieb) has been widely acknowledged as one of psychoanalysis' most fundamental concepts. However, its meaning is still a matter of controversy. It was originally defined by Freud in a biological or quasi-biological sense, but its reception in many different post-Freudian traditions has often tended to reject this early epistemological affiliation. One sign of this theoretical reorientation has been to refuse the translation of Trieb as "instinct" and to favor instead the neologism "pulsion", which has French origins and became common in the psychoanalytic literature written in many neo-Latin languages, including Portuguese. The objective of this paper is to criticize this trend. For that, the main arguments usually presented against a biological view of Freud's Trieb are discussed, namely: 1) the terminological alternative between the German words Trieb and Instinkt and how these terms are employed by Freud; 2) Freud's critique of the reduction of human sexuality to the reproductive function; 3) the concept of Todestrieb (death instinct or death drive), formulated by Freud around 1920 and central in the last stage of his thought. It is argued that these formulations do not preclude a biological interpretation of the concept of Trieb. Such interpretation, in turn, opens the way for dialogue between psychoanalysis and biology, a dialogue which was also emphatically and explicitly supported by Freud. Some hypotheses in the field of neo-Darwinian evolutionary biology and sociobiology are discussed and it is argued that they are compatible, if not convergent, with Freud's views. The first part of the paper was an introduction to this issue and also approached the problem of the relationship between sexuality and reproduction in psychoanalysis and biology. This second part is dedicated to the problem of aggression and self-destructiveness in these two fields of knowledge.
Freud; Psychoanalysis; Metapsychology; Instinct; Drive; Biology; Death; Sexuality