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Of late, some psychologists, influenced by—to take just a few examples—the findings of ethologists and psychobiologists, the startling discoveries of genetic research, the views of Noam Chomsky on language acquisition, and the writings of Hamilton, Trivers, Badcock, and others on adaptive behavior, have begun taking a harder look at the likely significance of Darwinism for their field of endeavor. In this group we find researchers such as Glantz and Pearce, Cosmides and Tooby, and Slavin and Kriegman, to name some of the more interesting.
Clyde Kluckhohn and Henry Murray, in their famous volume of 1953, Personality in Nature, Society, and Culture, wrote the following, to me, unforgettable, lines:
EVERY MAN is in certain respects
like all other men,
like some other men,
like no other man. (p. 53)
To this they added, “like other people, we students of personality are naturally disposed to be attracted by what is unusual, by the qualities which distinguish individuals, environments, and societies, and so to overlook the common heritage and lot of man” (p. 53).
In this vein, one might ask if we psychoanalysts, having become lost in our fascination for endless case presentations, all too often lose sight of the fact that we are dealing in our practices with the members of a single species—one that, like all other species, is the product of a long process of natural selection. Thus, valid questions can be raised not only about the nature of something we can