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.
Malcolm Slavin and Daniel Kriegman have been “absorbed and possessed” for some 25 years by “vexing questions … about whether psychoanalytic notions about the seemingly irrational, conflict-filled nature of the human mind could be reconciled with the Darwinian search for the fundamentally adaptive designs that govern all living creatures” (p. vii). They are knowledgeable and sophisticated psychoanalytic theorists eminently qualified to address such questions, experienced and insightful clinicians, and deeply informed students of modern evolutionary knowledge and theory. This book records their current thinking; their passionate quest for answers continues.
I take up three significant contributions this book makes to psychoanalytic thought: (a) Slavin and Kriegman's discussion of how evolutionary biology is relevant to psychoanalytic discourse, (b) their analysis of the underlying assumptions of two main psychoanalytic narratives—the classical and the relational—and their integration of these narratives into a new synthesis informed by evolutionary biology, and (c) their exploration of the hidden adaptive dimensions of familiar psychodynamic processes when these processes are viewed in an evolutionary context.
Does evolutionary biology have a legitimate and useful place in psychoanalytic discourse? If so, in what way, and with what qualifications? Slavin and Kriegman use evolutionary biology as an independent vantage point for examining biases in competing psychoanalytic theories. They discuss a number of issues that may arise in doing so. First, evolutionary theory has its own biases, limitations, and strengths. It offers insights based on millions of years of hominid (prehuman) and human history. These insights, however, are distant from individual human subjective experience. They are not based on deep study of the life experiences of single individuals. Therefore, the usefulness of evolutionary insights for psychoanalysis