Implications of an Evolutionary Metapsychology for Clinical Psychoanalysis

The term “evolutionary metapsychology” is somewhat misleading, as it is widely acknowledged that evolutionary theory has been extensively used as a paradigm upon which much of Freudian psychoanalytic metapsychology has been built (Grubrich-Simitis, 1987; Sulloway, 1979). This view is reaffirmed with the recent discovery of the lost manuscript of Freud's 12th metapsychological paper (Freud, 1915b). There have also been many authors since who have contributed to psychoanalytic metapsychology utilizing an evolutionary perspective, such as Hartmann (1939), Bowlby (1969, 1973, 1980), Peterfreund (1971), as well as others. Unfortunately, nearly all of these attempts have suffered from the same common misconceptions about evolutionary theory that also befell Freud. These misconceptions include beliefs in Lamarckian inheritance of acquired characteristics (Ritvo, 1964; Sulloway, 1979), Haeckel's dictum that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” (Gould, 1977), as well as group-selectionist ideas that natural selection serves to “preserve, benefit, or reproduce the species” (Williams, 1966). This is not to say that adopting this flawed evolutionary viewpoint has not been useful. Sulloway (1979) argues that it was precisely the adoption of an adaptive, functional viewpoint that enabled Freud to extend his theory beyond the boundaries of the limited neurophysiology of the time. However, because there are substantial differences as well as similarities between these views of evolution and modern revisions, psychoanalytic metapsychology based upon these common evolutionary misunderstandings is theoretically flawed.

It was not until recent revisions occurred in our theory of the evolution of social behavior that evolutionary theory possessed the