Instinct and Effort: The Dual Modes of Conation

Every time you pursue a goal – whether it is something you do out of sheer habit or something you push yourself toward despite exhaustion – you are demonstrating conation. Conation is the mental faculty that drives action: the psychological force sitting between knowing something and actually doing it. Psychologists have long recognized that not all motivated behavior looks the same. Some of it is automatic, rooted in biology and temperament. Some of it is deliberate, requiring conscious effort and willpower. Three major theorists – Erich Fromm, Henry Murray, and Raymond Cattell – each mapped this territory in a distinct way, and together they give us a rich, practical understanding of how conation actually works.

What conation is – and why it matters
Fromm’s productive orientation: channeling human power with purpose
Living in the “being” mode
Facing reality without a mask
Murray’s persistent effort: the act of willing
Intention, volition, and the act of willing
Conflict and the cost of willing
Cattell’s ergs: the instinctual roots of conation
What ergs are
Conditional modalities and the dynamic lattice
How these three theories fit together

What conation is – and why it matters

The word conation derives from the Latin conatus, broadly meaning “any natural tendency, impulse or directed effort.” Historically, conation was understood as the third pillar of the mind, alongside cognition (thinking) and affect (feeling). Where cognition compels, conation impels – it is what actually gets us moving. The Funk & Wagnalls Dictionary defined it as “the aspect of mental process directed by change and including impulse, desire, volition, and striving.” In plain terms: it is the psychological machinery that transforms intentions into actions.

This matters because understanding conation helps explain why two people with equal intelligence and equal desire can produce very different outcomes. The difference often lies in the mode of their conative functioning – whether their behavior is driven by deep-seated instinctual dispositions, by effortful willing, or by a combination of the two.

Fromm’s productive orientation: channeling human power with purpose

Erich Fromm (1900-1980) identified five character orientations in his 1947 work Man for Himself: receptive, exploitative, hoarding, marketing, and productive. The first four are unproductive – they represent ways people try to meet their needs through passive, manipulative, or surface-level strategies. The fifth, the productive orientation, is the only healthy one.

Living in the “being” mode

According to Oxford Reference, Fromm’s productive orientation denotes a character type manifesting the full use of one’s potential, independent thinking, respect for self and others, and genuine engagement with life. What sets it apart is its relationship to power. Fromm drew a clear line between the having mode – in which a person is defined by what they possess – and the being mode, in which a person is defined by what they actively do and create in the world. The productive person lives in the being mode. They are not driven by accumulation or approval; they bring something genuine forth from themselves.

The Latin root of the word “productive” is pro-ducere – to bring forth. Fromm scholars note that this etymology is key to his meaning: productive orientation always involves the person actively generating something from within – through thinking, feeling, and acting – rather than simply receiving or consuming. This is conation at its most values-driven.

Facing reality without a mask

According to Wikipedia’s overview of character orientation, Fromm occasionally referred to the productively oriented person as “the person without a mask” – someone who does not avoid freedom and responsibility. This person faces reality directly, engages with others authentically, and makes choices aligned with genuine human development rather than social performance. The four unproductive orientations, by contrast, share a tendency to relate to the world through distortion: hoarding, manipulation, passivity, or commodification of the self. For Fromm, shifting away from these patterns toward productive orientation is not automatic; it requires self-awareness and the deliberate exercise of conative effort.

Murray’s persistent effort: the act of willing

Where Fromm focused on the character structure that underlies conation, Henry Murray focused on its mechanics – what actually happens psychologically when a person strives toward a goal. Murray (1893-1988) was a Harvard psychologist best known for his theory of personology and for developing the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT). His concept of conation centers on the role of volition and persistent effort.

Intention, volition, and the act of willing

In his work Endeavors in Psychology, Murray used conation to denote each persistent effort – intention, volition, the act of willing – directed toward attaining a specific goal. He argued that conations derive their force from one or more needs and form long, integrated behavioral series. The intention provides the cognitive blueprint; volition is the act of committing to and enacting it. Without volition, intention remains inert.

Murray’s view of human nature was fundamentally optimistic: he believed that with creativity, imagination, and reason, people are capable of solving nearly any problem they face. Personality, in his framework, is not merely a product of the past – it is continually shaped by present events and future orientation. This forward-looking stance is central to his understanding of conation: people strive because they are oriented toward future goals, not just reacting to past conditioning.

Conflict and the cost of willing

Murray also understood that needs and environmental presses interact to create internal disequilibrium, which the person is then driven to reduce through behavior. But goal pursuit is rarely clean. The mind often contains multiple, sometimes competing goals – what we want, what others expect, what circumstances allow. Murray identified several conflict types that complicate conative effort: approach-approach conflicts (choosing between two desirable outcomes), avoidance-avoidance conflicts (choosing between two undesirable ones), and approach-avoidance conflicts (where a single goal carries both appeal and threat). Each type demands substantial effortful willing to resolve. This is where conation becomes most visible – in the deliberate, sometimes costly act of choosing a direction and persisting in it despite internal resistance.

Cattell’s ergs: the instinctual roots of conation

If Murray describes the effortful, deliberate side of conation, Raymond Cattell gives us the instinctual side. Cattell (1905-1998) was a British-American psychologist who used factor analysis to study personality with unusual rigor. Within his broader theory of dynamic traits, Cattell introduced the concept of the erg – and it is central to understanding the automatic, inborn mode of conation.

What ergs are

The word erg comes from the Greek ergon, meaning work or energy. Cattell defined an erg as an innate psychological and physical disposition – an inborn drive that permits its possessor to become reactive to certain classes of stimuli, experience a specific emotion in response to them, and pursue a course of action directed toward a particular goal. In simpler terms: ergs are the biological engines underneath motivated behavior. They are not chosen; they are constitutive – part of what a person is from birth.

Cattell’s factor-analytic research identified 11 ergs: anger, appeal, curiosity, disgust, gregariousness, hunger, protection, security, self-assertion, self-submission, and sex. These are not abstract categories – they are measurable, empirically derived patterns of drive that show up consistently across individuals. Cattell regarded ergs as the human equivalents of animal instinctual patterns – deepest-level drives that sit below attitudes and sentiments in the motivational hierarchy.

Conditional modalities and the dynamic lattice

In the late 1940s, Cattell proposed a system he called the dynamic lattice to map out how ergs, sentiments (learned motivational patterns), and attitudes are interconnected. This lattice captures the way that ergs funnel through learned experience to produce specific behaviors. The erg does not operate in isolation – it is always expressed through what Cattell called conditional modalities: the contextual conditions that determine how an innate disposition actually manifests.

Take the curiosity erg as an example. It is present in virtually everyone, but how it is expressed depends on prior learning, cultural norms, and situational cues. In one person it drives academic inquiry; in another, mechanical problem-solving; in a third, it may be suppressed by an environment that discouraged exploration. The erg itself remains constant – what changes is its conditioned form of expression. Cattell integrated these dynamic traits – ergs, sentiments, and attitudes – into a comprehensive model of motivation aimed at understanding behavior as a product of both innate drive and learned structure.

How these three theories fit together

Fromm, Murray, and Cattell are not saying the same thing – but they are describing different layers of the same phenomenon. Cattell’s ergs explain why we are motivated in the first place: we are born with biological dispositions that make certain goals feel compelling. Murray’s work explains how we translate that motivation into deliberate behavior: through intention, volition, and persistent effort in the face of conflict. Fromm’s productive orientation explains who we can become when that effort is aligned with authentic values rather than defensive or reactive patterns.

Together, they describe a dual mode of conation. One mode is instinctual – automatic, inborn, operating below conscious awareness. The other is effortful – deliberate, value-driven, requiring active exercise of will. Neither mode is superior. Healthy psychological functioning involves both: the energy of instinct providing the raw fuel, and the discipline of effort providing the direction.

This dual structure has real implications. In education, recognizing a student’s ergic drives – say, a strong curiosity erg or a self-assertion erg – can inform how learning environments are designed. In therapy, understanding whether a person’s struggles lie at the level of instinctual conflict (Cattell), effortful goal pursuit (Murray), or deeper orientation to power and authenticity (Fromm) can guide intervention. And for personal development, the framework suggests that growth is not about suppressing instinct – it is about cultivating the kind of deliberate, reality-facing effort that Fromm called productive, and directing it toward goals that genuinely matter.

What do you think? When you reflect on your own goal-directed behavior, can you identify moments where instinctual drives and deliberate effort pulled in different directions – and what determined which one won out? And do you think most people in everyday life are operating closer to Fromm’s productive orientation, or one of his unproductive ones?

References

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Table of Contents

What conation is – and why it matters 🔗

Fromm’s productive orientation: channeling human power with purpose 🔗

Living in the “being” mode 🔗

Facing reality without a mask 🔗

Murray’s persistent effort: the act of willing 🔗

Intention, volition, and the act of willing 🔗

Conflict and the cost of willing 🔗

Cattell’s ergs: the instinctual roots of conation 🔗

What ergs are 🔗

Conditional modalities and the dynamic lattice 🔗

How these three theories fit together 🔗