Freud's and Our Paranoid Myth of “The Beast”

In The Uniqueness of Man, the distinguished biologist Sir Julian Huxley (1941) argued that now that the battle waged on behalf of Darwin by his grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley, had been won, we could afford to turn our attention to what a unique and truly bizarre kind of animal we are, both biologically and psychologically. It is my experience that, today, any mention of this line of thought, any stress on the discontinuity between humanity and the rest of nature, any emphasis upon our uniquely symbolic consciousness is likely to bring down on one's head a chorus of criticism of the supposed arrogant anthropocentrism entailed in any such claim and its blindness toward humanity's ecological destructiveness. Such critics generally don't seem to realize they themselves are now making the case for “the uniqueness of man”: the uniquely destructive consequences for both human beings and their ecosystems that follow from our relative freedom from the instinctual controls and biological determinants governing the behaviour of other species.

We seem reluctant to recognize the uniqueness of our destructiveness. We like to think of it as “inhuman” when, regrettably, it is one of the things most characteristically human about us. We engage in massive projection of this uniquely human destructiveness onto animals that, unlike us, mostly fight and kill to survive and protect their young, not to impose their favoured abstract ideologies upon one another, nor to amass great wealth while impoverishing others, nor to enjoy sadistic pleasure. The last requires the uniquely human capacity for empathy, by which I do not mean sympathy but the purely cognitive capacity for what George Mead (1934) called “taking the role of the other”—imagining oneself in the