Abstract
Freud originally tried to ground psychoanalysis in the principles of evolutionary biology as Freud was quite familiar with Darwin’s work (Makari 2008, p. 111). Unfortunately, some of those principles proved erroneous such as Lamarck’s belief in the inheritance of acquired characteristics, Haeckel’s idea that ontogeny must recapitulate phylogeny, and the assumption that natural selection selects groups rather than individuals (Nesse and Lloyd 1992). In addition, Freudian thought has frequently been charged with excessive biological reductionism and determinism that tends to minimize the ways in which human personality functioning is socially constructed (Cushman 1996). Freud’s attempts at reconstructing the prehistorical evolution of the human mind, as in Totem and Taboo (Freud 1912–1913), have been characterized as “phylogenetic fantasies” (Freud 1915/1987). As a consequence, evolutionary thinking in psychoanalysis has gone out of fashion with some notable exceptions (Slavin and Kriegman 1992). Nevertheless, concepts such as psychological adaptation and psychological homeostasis that utilize ideas originally derived from biology are routinely employed in the psychoanalytic literature without much reflection on the status of those ideas in contemporary evolutionary thinking.
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Josephs, L. (2011). Neurotic Self-Deception as a Reproductive Strategy. In: Piers, C. (eds) Personality and Psychopathology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-6214-0_9
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