The Impact of Darwin on Freud

As a formative influence on Freud, Darwin is alluded to by several authors (Brosin, 1960); (Jones, 1953); (Nunberg, 1962); (Rapaport, 1960); (Veith, 1960) and by Freud himself (1925 [1924]). For Freud, Darwin was 'the great Darwin' (Freud, 1901, p. 148), (1915-1917, p. 76). Freud referred directly to Darwin and his work more than twenty times and always very positively (cf., Ritvo, 1963); these references range from Freud's earliest psychoanalytic writings in Studies on Hysteria (Breuer and Freud, 1893-1895, pp. 91, 181) to his last completed book, Moses and Monotheism (Freud, 1939, pp. 66-67, 80, 130-131). He took with him to London nine volumes of Darwin—some in English, some in German—which he had acquired between 1875 and 1883.1

Biology in the era when it was being revolutionalized by Darwin's work was originally the field of Freud's earliest scientific interest; when he left it, he continued to base his work on it, even assuming that 'for the psychical field, the biological field does in fact play the part of the underlying bedrock' (Freud, 1937, p. 252). Of the five metapsychological viewpoints, the genetic, or Darwinian (cf., Rapaport, 1960, p. 22), has always been present in Freud's writings, albeit never explicitly; the most recent, the adaptive, is also indebted to Darwin. Nevertheless, the influence of Freud's early interest in Darwin and of his training in evolutionary biology has not been examined in the same historical detail as have, for example, the influences