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In his book, Freud, Biologist of the Mind, the historian of science Frank Sulloway (1979) characterized Freud as a “crypto-biologist,” based upon his observation that much of Freud's evolving psychoanalytic theory was strongly influenced by conceptions of
evolutionary biology which were current in his time. In her careful and thoroughly documented study, Darwin's Influence on Freud, Lucille Ritvo conclusively demonstrates that the influence of evolutionary biology, Darwinian in particular, on Freud's thinking throughout his career was anything but cryptic. In an illuminating appendix to her book (p. 199), Ritvo cites no less than 20 explicit references to Darwin in Freud's published work, the earliest in a letter to his boyhood friend Eduard Silberstein dated September 9, 1875 (Freud, 1990, p. 128), and the last in Moses and Monotheism (Freud, 1939). In another appendix (p. 202), she lists the titles of seven of Darwin's works which she found in Freud's private library in Maresfield Gardens, among them German translations of On the Origin of Species, The Descent of Man, and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.
Ritvo's study is divided into two parts. Part I, which encompasses Freud's Gymnasium days from 1865 to 1873, surveys the various trends in evolutionary biology which had been conveyed to the German-speaking world by, among others, the ardent popularizer of Darwin, Ernst Haeckel, commonly credited with authorship of the controversial “biogenetic law,” “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” which was to play an important role in the formulation of Freud's future metapsychological speculations. Part II, which spans the years 1873-1882, the period of Freud's medical training at the University of Vienna, explores the influence of Darwinian lines of thought on Freud's most important teachers, Carl Claus, Ernst Wilhelm von Brücke, and Theodor H. Meynert. In both parts a strictly chronological treatment of the material is modified by frequent references to