You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Do we not safely assume that in his Three Essays, Freud (1905) was being dismissive when referring to his contemporaries who searched for explanations of the ‘characteristics and reactions of the adult in the “individual's ancestors” rather than in the “individual's childhood”’ (p. 173)? Yet, between 1906 and 1913, reflections upon the history of man emerged as an important topic of discussion in the circle of the early psychoanalysts. How are we to understand this resort to phylogenesis other than by invoking the Zeitgeist?
Paradoxically, the publication of the Three Essays spurred phylogenetic speculation in psychoanalysis. Was this speculation generated by the introduction of the concept of sexual drive [sexual Trieb], which mainstream anthropologists deemed the product of instinct? Or was this speculation generated rather because of Freud's specific references to cultural history in the Three Essays? The fact remains that, when Freud sent Bleuler his Three Essays, the latter responded: ‘Moreover, I'm missing the link between the new discovery [Freud's sexual theory] and the phylogenetic teleology. To understand fully such a thing, one should be able to measure more or less its link with the “goal” of the organization’ (Marinelli & Mayer, 2002, p. 146).
At about the same time as Bleuler's comment, Paul Federn in an October 1906 meeting of the Wednesday Psychological Society may have been the first to attempt an appeal to phylogenesis in his criticism of Rank's lecture on incest: ‘He misses a historical (phylogenetic) development of incest in the primeval and in the individual family …’ (Federn & Nunberg, 1962, p. 9).