Understanding Motivations

"When we analyze or diagnose or psychoanalyze people's motives (e.g. in politics or in reading a mystery novel or decoding some everyday remark), we are trying to puzzle out not just the tangle of emotions or interests that lie all on the same plane, but also the priority or hierarchy of different species of motive and interest:  cui bono? i.e. what element or organismic subsystem in his psyche ultimately benefited from his behavior or his ploy?  Differently put, the contents of experience and self-expression "differ" from one another not just qualitatively but also ordinally, in terms of their ranking or determinative power over one another."