The definition of instinct as an impetus that substitutes for reason entails a strange but familiar catachresis. The first entry for “Instinct” to appear in theOED,for instance, switches between the language of impulsivity and epistemology without seeming to find this vacillation unusual:

Instinct(instiᶇkt),sb. . . .

1. Instigation; impulse; prompting.Obs.

2. Innate impulse; natural or spontaneous tendency or inclination. Formerly applicable to the natural tendencies of inanimate things. In modern use associated with sense.

3.spec.An innate propensity in organized beings (esp. in the lower animals), varying with the species, and manifesting itself...

A sphex wasp attacks a cricket, paralyzing it and burying it with her grubs. When they finally hatch, these grubs will eat the cricket alive. Watching the wasp’s assault is a rapt George John Romanes, the most doctrinaire of Darwin’s followers and the author of a trilogy of texts on evolutionary theories of mind and behavior that Freud both read and annotated. But even though the sphex’s actions exhibit what he dubs “the most remarkable instinct in the animal kingdom,”¹ Romanes does not find this instinct to be noteworthy because of the miraculousness of the fact that the sphex knows...

In his famous polemic against private philanthropy and state welfare inMan Versus the State,Herbert Spencer deploys the language of instinct to voice the common claim that poverty is a fault of character: “there is no political economy,” he writes, “by which one can get golden conduct out of leaden instincts.”¹ In the alchemical scenario laid out by Spencer’s screed, readers are implicitly invited to imagine a lone political economist frantically stirring a pot of presumptively working-class instincts in a vigorous but fanciful attempt to conjure sparkling nuggets of behavioral propriety. The aspiration for political change resides here solely...

A text that undertakes a thorough perusal of late Victorian ethnological sources, Freud’sTotem and Taboo(1913) is unabashed in identifying “savages” as the instinctive analogues of European neurotics. By adapting the detailed descriptions of “savage” rules and customs that prevailed in nineteenth-century texts—and especially those about indigenous Australia—Totem and Taboomakes its famous argument that savage social organization and customary practice produce the simultaneous satisfaction and regulation of ambivalent unconscious wishes. But Freud’s reliance on Victorian ethnology as the source of evidence for savage instincts should strike any reader familiar with his archive as curious. Seldom, after...

In June 1909, the artist Marion Wallace Dunlop was arrested and incarcerated for stamping a passage from the Bill of Rights onto a wall in the House of Commons. Once in prison, she launched the first of what would become many suffragette hunger strikes, refusing food for ninety-one hours until prison officials, unsure how to proceed, opted to release her. Three months later, the Liberal government’s surprised uncertainty about what to do with hunger strikers had waned, and official displeasure over this new suffragette tactic had hardened into a pitiless resolve. That September, Home Secretary Herbert Gladstone ordered that hunger...

Like all the chapters in this book, this last chapter on the debate over the suffragette hunger strikes narrates a moment when instinct’s function as a substitute for reason crosses paths with the idea of instinct as a spur to action, making it evident that the two are not always easily commensurate. This chiasmus has everything to do with a liberalizing Britain in which self-conscious rationality was deemed necessary yet inadequate to proper cognition and agency. Each of the chapters in this book theorizes how instinct moves from one domain into another, often without forcing an outright contradiction into view....