A General Context for a Concept of Mastery Motivation

What makes people want to go on with the effort required from life? Every epistemology of behavior must sooner or later cope with this basic question. The question is not so mysterious for nonhuman organisms, which presumably have built-in genetic programs instructing them to live as long as their physical machinery is able to function. But our species has a choice: With the development of consciousness, we have the ability to secondguess and occasionally override the instructions coded in our chromosomes. This evolutionary development has added a great deal of flexibility to the human repertoire of behaviors. But the freedom gained has its downside—too many possibilities can have a paralyzing effect on action (Schwartz, 2000). Among the options we are able to entertain is that of ending our lives; thus, as the existential philosophers remarked, the question of why one should not commit suicide is fundamental to the understanding of human life. In fact, most attempts at a general psychology also start with the assumption that human beings have a "need" or a "drive" for self-preservation, and that all other motivations, if not reducible to, are then at least based on such a need. For example Maslow's hierarchy assumes that survival takes precedence over all other considerations, and no other need becomes active until survival is reasonably assured. But where is this will to live located? Is it nothing but a variation of the survival instincts all living organisms share, chemically etched into our genes? The last try for a comprehensive human psychology, that of Sigmund Freud, posited Eros as the source of all behavior—a force akin to the elan vital of the French philosopher Henri Bergson (1931/1944) and to similar concepts of life energy proposed by a long list of thinkers going back to the beginnings of speculative thought.