The article analyzes the concept of instinct [Trieb] and discusses some of the epistemological implications to the status of psychoanalysis. Such implications would be directly related to 1) the demarcation of a field of study, the psychoanalytic field itself, 2) the nature of the phenomena that inhabit the land so marked, and which therefore has to do 3) with the epistemological status of psychoanalysis as a scientific and autonomous discipline, including independent of other psychologies. The analysis is focused on the meaning of the instinct as a psychical representative of the stimuli that comes from inside the body, in order to highlight the main erogenous nature of psychic reality.
instinct; trieb; psychical reality; metapsychology