Recent Advances in Evolutionary Psychology and Psychiatry

“Evolution provides the most general possible perspective from which to look at humans” (Glantz and Pearce, 1989, p. 3). “A ‘paradigm shift’ is under way, … which defines the basic components of human nature in terms of their evolutionary origins and their essential developmental needs” (Stevens and Price, 1996, p. ix).

This modern evolutionary viewpoint is far removed from the evolutionary framework used by Freud, for example, in his discussion of the Oedipus complex in “Totem and Taboo” (Freud, 1913). Modern biology has raised two main objections at Freud's evolutionary ideas, these are reviewed by Stephen Jay Gould in Ontogeny and Phylogeny (Gould, 1977). They concern (a) Lamarckian inheritance—the inheritance of acquired characteristics, and (b) recapitulationism—the notion, summed up by Haeckel's law, that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.

Instead, modern evolutionary biology could provide psychotherapy with a more appropriate framework. As Glantz and Pearce (1989, p. 3) go on to say, evolution can provide “a basis for the unification of psychotherapy.”

The credit for introducing modern evolutionary biology into the psychological field should certainly go to John Bowlby, who laid the foundation for attachment theory in his trilogy, which was published over a 12-year period spanning 1969-1980 (Bowlby, 1969, 1973, 1980). Shortly after the appearance of Bowlby's third volume, in an article I co-authored with my wife, I called attention in this Journal to the relevance of attachment theory for psychoanalysis (Bacciagaluppi and Bacciagaluppi Mazza, 1982). Other contributions from evolutionary biology were reviewed in a collection of articles that appeared in this Journal in 1990. More recently, while attachment theory has given rise to an impressive amount of empirical research that was also reviewed in this Journal (Bacciagaluppi, 1994), other innate behavioral tendencies have been defined, leading to a wider and more integrated framework.