Meeting of the New York Psychoanalytic Society

November 26, 1974. THE FALL OF MAN. (Abraham A. Brill Memorial Lecture). K. R. Eissler, M.D.

Confronting the 'anguished mood of desperation that has settled over the whole world', Dr. Eissler does not equivocate: 'Mankind's future is doomed'. In search of deeper explanations of man's failure, he looks to the biological matrix out of which man arose.

With the origin of life, the principle of strict invariance that governed the physical universe gave way to a momentous evolutionary innovation: structural differentiation. This, in turn, made possible a process of regulated variance by mutation, heredity, selection, etc. 'This state of regulated variance ended with anthropogenesis, when the organic evolution in man switched to cultural evolution, which is regulated by essentially different principles.' Dr. Eissler dates the 'fall of man'—the moment at which 'man stepped out of nature'—from the emergence of a new principle: unregulated variance. He ascribes this crucial shift to the 'fundamental innovation in the structure of the psychic apparatus that occurred with anthropogenesis … the breakdown of instincts as the main and exclusive organizer of animal behavior and their degradation to drives in human behavior'. He goes on to say: '… whereas the instinct programmed in the genetic structure of the animal determines not only its urges but also the ways in which these urges will be gratified, in man these ways are supplied by the ego'. In the absence of sufficient cortical mutations to enable man's ego to cope adaptively with these choices, the unregulated variance of cultural evolution has supplanted the harmoniously regulated variance of organic evolution.

Dr. Eissler illustrated some qualitative and quantitative distortions in the process of natural selection attendant to this evolutionary 'misstep'. He pointed out how destructive many cultural innovations heralded as progress have been. Though 'physically fittest is not culturally most fit, and vice vers