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Countering the movement within psychoanalysis away from biology (as a reductionist, dehumanising remnant of the physicalist science of Freud's era), the authors of this book embark on an inquiry they characterise as unabashedly biological, 'explicitly grounded in Darwinian principles' (p. 2).
In this volume, whose ambitious scope is revealed in its sub-title, they endeavour to explore how an understanding of our archaic heritage can be relevant to depth psychology and therefore to our clinical work. They argue cogently that all psychoanalytic theories, even those which are supposedly non-biological, make at least silent, implicit assumptions of universal and invariant underlying structures that function as givens for their viewpoint (Freud's frankly biologically-based id concept, for example, or Kohut's pointedly non -biologically based principle of self organisation). The authors argue that each of the traditions of psychoanalytic thought has grasped its own piece of a complex and comprehensive ground-plan of human adaptive functioning, and tends to appropriate those segments of evolutionary theory that seem to bolster it. They believe the full development of this evolutionary ground-plan can replace these implicit, incomplete, and exploitative uses of evolutionary theory, and provide a basis for selecting and synthesising the truths offered by each of the traditions.
Early in the book the authors present their definition of such psychological deep structures, in a statement that also represents their credo: 'adaptive psychological deep structures—like the self, or introjects—are those universla, shared ways of processing experience that have been favored by "natural selection". That is, they have been shaped and retained as human capacities because, over millions of years, they allowed individuals to negotiate more successfully (though often unconsciously) the incredible complexities of the human social environment' (p. 10).
Embedded in that statement is a stric