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As can be seen, the book is rather old and is not about, but instead of concern for, psychoanalysis, as can be seen below. I wrote a thorough presentation and critique of the book when it last year appeared in Swedish translation, and the Forum's editors thought that a critical review might be interesting for its readers. The review with its bibliography of references can be found at: lennartramberg.praktikertjanst.se.
Steven Pinker is a professor in cognitive psychology at Harvard University, USA, and has published many influential books, such as The language instinct and How the mind works. This book is written from the perspective of the 17th century philosopher Thomas Hobbes' tragic vision of man:
By nature of his instincts for self-preservation man is bound to be ruthlessly competitive. This leads to a life in violence and suspicion and eventually to the self destruction of the race and, would we say today, to our planet as well. Therefore there is an absolute need for a strong state governed by a strong and punishing leader, a godlike Leviathan.
We are existentially destined to be lonely, alternating between aggressiveness and the feeling of terror and persecution—in the tradition of psychoanalysis, we can see this worldview especially mirrored in late Freud, to whom the author pays some respect, in Klein's schizo-paranoid position, and in Peter Fonagy's (see Richard Alexander, 1989) evolutionary perspective on the development of our capacity for mentalization.
Pinker states that humanistic and psychological research in the last century shunned the results of genetic research and instead blindly adhered to three dogmas, or meta-theories:
We are born as blank slates upon which our environment imprints itself without any inborn tendency to select behaviour from the perspective of values. John Locke's concept of a tabula rasa, which he used in order to show that the feudalistic state and its hierarchy was not God-given, was in the last c