Psychoanalytic Inquiry

doi: 10.1080/07351690.2014.964133pmid: N/A

Cutler, Susan E.; Brakel, Linda A.W.

doi: 10.1080/07351690.2014.968022pmid: N/A

In this article we investigate research on nonhuman animal cognition revealing the predominance of primary processes-like operations that are effective and adaptive from an evolutionary perspective. But first and from a different direction, we review a body of recently popular empirical work on human heuristics and biases that proposes System 1 and System 2 as a dual-process model of cognition and emotion; this without acknowledging Freud’s primary and secondary processes. Thus, we explore the parallels between primary process and System 1, as we evaluate the case for the evolutionary nature of primary process. We guide the reader through literature on animal cognition and that of System 1 biases and heuristics to provide the psychoanalytic reader with the opportunity to make important links to psychoanalytic concepts.

Modell, Arnold H.

doi: 10.1080/07351690.2014.968023pmid: N/A

Freud’s Lamarckian beliefs contributed to his theory of instincts, as well as his concepts regarding the unconscious primary process. Freud’s theory of the primary and secondary process is fundamentally biological, as he placed it within an evolutionary context and hypothesized that the two systems were distinguished by free and bound psychic energy. Freud’s distinction between the primary and secondary process is one of the few psychoanalytic theories that has been confirmed by science. We believe that Freud was correct in maintaining that the primary process is of earlier evolutionary origin than the secondary process. But Freud failed to recognize the distinction between primary-process thinking that occurs in dreams and that which occurs in the waking state. In the waking state, the primary process is not wish fulfilling, as Freud believed, but functions as an inference making tool utilizing metaphor and metonymy. As such, rapid, unconscious primary process thinking is at the heart of our survival.

Hobson, R. Peter

doi: 10.1080/07351690.2014.968024pmid: N/A

To understand how human beings come to have the mental faculties that they do, one would do well to consider the making of mind in at least two senses. First, an evolutionary perspective promises to specify what distinguishes Homo sapiens from nonhuman primate kin, and to set whatever is unique against a background of psychological abilities that we share with our ancestral relatives. Second, an account of individuals’ development from infancy onwards should enable one to see how humans’ species-specific biological endowment dovetails with what the environment provides to yield specifically human psychological capacities. In this article, I argue that to arrive at an overarching theoretical explanation, we should set the capacity to identify with the attitudes of other people at the very core of evolutionary and developmental accounts.

Launer, John

doi: 10.1080/07351690.2014.968026pmid: N/A

In this article, I first offer a summary of Darwin’s main ideas, especially relating to sex, and explain how these have been elaborated by more recent evolutionary scholars. I then give an account of the historical divergence between psychoanalysis and classical Darwinian thought, and describe how the early psychoanalyst Sabina Spielrein tried to counter this by addressing some biological themes in her work. Following a review of some contemporary attempts to bring psychoanalysis and evolutionary thought into alignment with each other, I make some suggestions regarding a view of sex and sexuality that would be sound in evolutionary terms while also being helpful in psychoanalytic ones.

Carlton, Lucyann; Shane, Estelle

doi: 10.1080/07351690.2014.968032pmid: N/A

In this article we consider Nobel Prize Winner Gerald Edelman’s remarkable contribution to the understanding of human evolution, and our own application of Edelman’s theory to a brain-based psychoanalytic perspective we have devised. Edelman’s paradigm setting out his theory of the evolution of mind, brain, and consciousness concerns not only mankind’s evolution over all of time, but also the evolution of each and every individual over and within his single lifetime. Edelman contends that human beings, as individuals, and not only as the taxonomic category from which they sprang, have a separate and distinct evolutionary history of their own, and it is especially from within Edelman’s theoretical assumptions about the evolution of the individual per se that our own psychoanalytic understanding of theory and practice derives.

Cortina, Mauricio; Liotti, Giovanni

doi: 10.1080/07351690.2014.968060pmid: N/A

A taxonomy of basic motivational systems (reptilian, mammalian, and neo-mammalian), that emerged in phases during the course of millions of years, is proposed. These different phases did not replace each other, but became reorganized in the brain at different hierarchical levels. It is argued that (a) humans are an ultracooperative species and (b) high degrees of cooperation put strong selective pressures toward the development of sophisticated forms of intersubjective communication. These two developments had cascading effects on human evolution, creating both the conditions upon which humans were able to understand intentions, gestures, emotions, and, ultimately, the minds of others, and the emergence of language and symbolic forms of cultural evolution. Possible evolutionary steps that led to this ultracooperative survival strategy and some of their genetic mechanism, with special emphasis on a multilevel model of selection, are described, and the implications for psychotherapy and psychoanalysis are explored.