primal instinct
What are primal instincts?
Gus Griffin, Master your instincts, master life
Answered Nov 23, 2015
I can add a little detail to Srikanth's insightful answer. The term "primal instincts" would include instincts thought to have first appeared in very early organisms. The Flight Instinct - whose emotional aspect is fear in its varying intensities - would probably be the earliest self-preservation instinct. It would have started as a simple contracting or moving away from non-survival stimulus and gradually evolved into all the ways that animals (and even plants) can react in terror today.
(Yes, most animals can experience extreme fear just like you or me, certainly anything possessing an endocrine system. The propaganda from hunters and fisherman that "they don't feel it in the same way" is a nonsense. Hunting and killing is a natural part of life: there's no need to bullshit about it.)
Also a crude form of "wanting" - which would take the form of impulsively taking or graspingwithout any awareness of consequences - would have been a very early development. This would be one of the reasons why criminal behaviour is often described as being actuated by primal instincts.
It's also logical to suppose that "taking" as an instinctive response would have evolved from the earlier procreative instinct. Hence a rapist "taking sex" could be said to be motivated by the one of the most primal instincts of all. Sex dates back to the appearance of eukaryotes some 1.6–2.1 billion years ago, so that's pretty primal.
The profilers on crime shows usually say that rape is motivated by a desire to dominate, not reproduce, but the instinct to have control over another organism evolved much later in the game - so, to be specific, I think unmoderated taking is the more likely culprit. Possibly some compulsive confusion or conflation of the Take Instinct with the Control Instinct is what causes this antisocial behaviour.
The Fight (attack;rage) Instinct looks similar to the Take Instinct though it would have evolved quite a bit later - but still hundreds of millions of years ago. Because it's also responsible for prompting reactions unacceptable to societal norms (violent reactions you get put in jail for), it would also be likely to be tagged a primal instinct. In other words, it was "early enough" and basic enough compared to more sophisticated reactions developed later.
Humans still possess most of the instincts of our evolutionary ancestors, but we have evolved other instincts (native reactions) which moderate these older reactions, making it more likely that we will react in primal ways only when this is appropriate to meet dire situations. But like any other human faculty, we don't always get it right. A cruel upbringing can make the whole world look dire - thus the habitual violent criminal is created.
Freud also had a theory about something he called a "primal instinct" that urged boys to want to kill Daddy or something like that - but I'll leave it to a psychoanalyst to enlighten you on that one.
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