History of "Aggression" in Post-WW2 Psychoanalysis

"What Lorenz did find useful, however, was Freud's belatedly found conviction that aggression, like libido, was a drive. The difference was that Lorenz was eager to see the aggressive drive as life-preserving and life-enhancing ("in natural conditions it helps just as much as any other to ensure the survival of the individual and the species")" (126)"In correspondence with mentors and friends, Mitscherlich declared his disdain for Lorenz and his sense of intellectual superiority to him" (129)"The pivotal point here is that under the very specific circumstances of a culture only a quarter-century away from (what had been at the time an exceedingly popular) mass-murderous dictatorship, the claim seemed, to many people, not just wrong, but emphatically and menacingly so - even if not all commentators critical of Lorenz invoked the Holocaust, but rather pointed to current events unfolding in their present. Der Spiegel surmized at one point in 1972 that "The heatedness of the debate about this is most likely explained by the fact that people use the Freudian teaching of an inborn drive-potential in order to deduce a kind of legitimation of war" (136)""Cruelty as work" - so Mitscherlich's new formulation - was cruelty that was approved a collectivity, rather than arising from a private predilection; cruelty as work was characterized by an absence of subsequent remorse; cruelty as work almost always depended on the absolute helplessness of the victims; and cruelty as work was "asexually destructive." As Mitscherlich put it: "Cruelty as work knows no orgasm; instead it is about piece-rate labor, about managing one's daily allotment of tormenting and murdering ... the destruction-worker goes home in the evening like others do with the feeling of having had a busy day"" (140)"The Marquis de Sade's elaborate fantasies had attracted at best a handful of followers through the centuries. "Eichmann, by contrast, was of a different sort. He provided the killings the way one provides a supermarket with wares." Here Mitscherlich had offered by his most thoughtful comments yet on "cruelty as work" was the far more prevalent problem - and, in his view, the strongest evidence that the death drive was real" (140)I like the productive distinction between cruelty as (private) pleasure and cruelty as (collective) work. What I have a difficult time grasping is how this makes the "drive" real. What is "a drive" for psychoanalysis? I know there is debate as to whether Freud meant "drive" or "instinct" (thanks again Strachey!) which feeds into the understanding of "drive." How does the claim of drives affect our reading of "human" behavior? What analytical mileage does drive give us as a tool (thinking with Born's instrumentalism of psychoanalysis) for understanding collective activity?"Klein and her followers, by contrast, believed that early infanthood was dominated by unconscious phantasies (spelled "ph" to distinguish them from conscious fantasies)" (143)"Not until 1973, when it was announced that Lorenz would be winning the Nobel Prize jointly with his fellow Austrian Karl von Frisch and the Dutch-British Nikolaas Tinbergen for "their discoveries concerning 'organization and elicitation of individual and social behavior patterns'" in animals - were journalists spurred to investigate, and find, Lorenz's (initially vehemently denied) Nazi party affiliation, as well as nasty eugenicist remarks he had put in print in 1940 about the degeneration purportedly caused by domestication (of humans as well as of animals), and in which he had unabashedly called for "a sharper eradication of the less ethically valuable [eine noch scharfere Ausmerzung etisch Minderwertiger]" (148)I didn't know Lorenz held eugenicist views, but this makes sense to me given his "reading" of animal behavior and his later work on aggression. I'm wondering in what contexts does "drive" (like "instinct") carry an indexical relationship to Darwinian (and Spenserian and Galtonian) themes of survival and the struggle between "the strong" and "the weak" that make up the narrative frame of eugenicist storytelling.