Is it reasonable to conclude that aggression is an inevitable and Essay

Is it reasonable to conclude that aggression is an inevitable and inescapable part of our lives Discuss with reference to psychological theory and research - Essay Example (cited in Angell and Banks, 1984, p. 115) This argument follows the line of thinking that men, left to their natural state, will be at each other’s throats, and life will be nasty, brutish and short. For Hobbes, this constant conflict stemmed from the nature of man which is characterized by selfishness, greed and a perpetual concern with satisfying his own desires. Religion reinforces this thought as it emphasizes that the aggressive nature of man is a consequence of his falling from divine grace in the Garden of Eden. It was St. Augustine who explored this aspect immensely, taking particular note on man’s capacity for mayhem and slaughter. On psychological perspective, there are numerous theories that seek to explain the incidence – the origins and triggers – of human aggression. Foremost of these are the instinct theories, which treat aggression as one of the human instincts or that innate tendency to behave in a certain way. Freud, for one, argued that we are born with two opposing instincts: the life instinct and the death instinct; and that the latter leads us to be aggressive. (Cashman, 1999, p. 15) For Freud, aggressiveness is linked to how life instinct counters death instinct and that the drive created by the conflict of these instincts is channeled away from the self and toward others. Overt aggression is hence an outcome of internal aggressive drives and that a person drives satisfaction by releasing or venting it to other people. (Zillmann, 1979, p. 116) Freudian analogy places the release of aggression drives as a human need though not necessarily overt aggression or aggression towards other people. Another psychological school which believes that aggression is part of human nature is ethology or the study of the animal behavior. In the ethological perspective, humans evolved with a fighting instinct and that it occurred through