You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
I had looked forward to reading this book because its title suggested a subject of some interest to me—the problem of how individuals internalize aspects of their culture. Psychoanalytic theory has developed in directions that permit psychoanalytic explorations of that question without resorting to an overly simplistic cultural perspective, in
which the assumption is made that the psyche simply mirrors the external world. However, when I turned to the book, my anticipation quickly changed to disappointment and, finally, to disbelief.
Granting that sociobiology has been justly attacked as guilty of reducing social phenomena to biological ones, Endleman suggests that psychoanalysis can bridge the two. Thus, his focus is not, as the title misleadingly suggests, the study of psyche and society; it is an attempt to outline the evolutionary biological underpinnings of psyche and to return to an appreciation of man as an animal. He wishes to offer a "reconstruction not only of the anatomical and physiological evolution of the species, but also of the behavioral and the psychological." This is all well and good, but it should be noted that Endleman is a professor of sociology and a practicing analyst and, therefore, not manifestly qualified to give an authoritative account of human evolution.
In his assumed role as evolutionist, Endleman throws aside methodological constraints implicit in both his parent disciplines. His arguments are presented in well-known ambiguous phrases—could have, must have, may have—and he engages in some truly amazing legerdemain. For example, he cites Goodall's report of a female chimp who, having finished her estrus, became jealous of a new female chimp who was getting too much attention, and began to show the pink swelling of estrus all over again. He interprets this as the female chimpanzee faking estrus receptivity. He goes on to propose the possibility that the smarter hominid female ancestors began extending estrus periods by severa