The Dual Meaning of Repression and the Adaptive Design of the Human Psyche

Someone once commented to Talcott Parsons, the noted sociologist, that it was unfortunate that Freud had been so biological in his thinking. Parsons is reported to have quipped that “psychoanalysis is not too biological, it is not biological enough!” What did he really mean?

The great social theorist (who, incidentally, was analytically trained in Boston) did not, of course, mean that human psychological and social experience could or should be “reduced” to somatic or genetic variables. On the contrary, Parsons was a consummate “cultural determinist.” Yet he recognized that psychoanalysis needed not only a more accurate biological foundation than existed in the classical metapsychology, but, more significantly, it would benefit greatly from a different, broader biological emphasis, namely, one that focused on the functions and purposes of whole organisms in adaptation to a complex, interactive environment. This would correct the overemphasis in the classical psychoanalytic metapsychology on the inner workings of universal, intra-psychic mechanisms operating outside of a larger adaptive context (Parsons, 1963).

The aim of this essay is to show what might happen if—using the conceptual tools of contemporary evolutionary biology—such a broader, functional, biological perspective were brought to bear upon the concept of repression, and then, by extension, upon an issue that is arguably the main point of controversy in current psychoanalytic thought, namely, the “paradigmatic clash” between the classical tradition of drive theory (including its Kleinian versions and ego psychological revisions) on the one hand, and the