Maggie's Farm

Vanderbilt researchers, studying mice, claim that aggression can be as emotionally rewarding as food or sex.

“We learned from these experiments that an individual will intentionally seek out an aggressive encounter solely because they experience a rewarding sensation from it,” Kennedy said. “This shows for the first time that aggression, on its own, is motivating, and that the well-known positive reinforcer dopamine plays a critical role.”

I cannot speak about mice, but every psychiatrist - and every person - knows that this is a fact for human beings. Freud, who thought harder about these things than most people, found it necessary to hypothesize a "death instinct": "an urge inherent in all organic life to restore an earlier state of things" (SE 18:36). It is a drive towards destruction. He could not make sense of human behavior and human thoughts without it.

Indeed, Freud mocked critics of that instinct theory as “…little children [who] do not like it when there is talk of the human inclination to ‘badness’…”.

The trick to a sane life is to keep all of these "instincts" on a tight-enough leash that they do not senselessly destroy one's life. Ideally, our conscience does that job for us, to help maintain our self-respect, if not the respect of others.