Psychoanalysis and Human Evolution

One of the many interests of Esther Menaker has been the evolutionary development of human psychic processes, as demonstrated in her joint work with her late husband, William Menaker, in the book Ego in Evolution (Menaker & Menaker, 1965). This topic is pursued from another angle in this paper, drawing upon recent work in anthropology that attempts to reconstruct the evolution of the human species based upon new fossil finds indicating beings transitional between earlier primates and Homo sapiens. Informing the study are the perspectives of modern psychoanalysis. The aim is to forge a psychoanalytic-anthropological reconstruction of human evolution that goes beyond both disciplines.*

This effort fits into the framework of the universalistic quality of psychoanalysis as a science, as a psychology, i.e. the exploration of what features and processes of human existence are universal to all of mankind. From its beginnings, psychoanalysis as a science — and this has been one of its major strengths — has been a psychology of universal human nature, applying to all members of the species Homo sapiens throughout all of the time span of its existence on earth and everywhere on the face of the globe where it appears. These are the features that transcend and overarch all the myriad differences in culture, from one society or epoch to another. This universalist approach does not deny cultural variation, but puts it in context: it is variation within a basic common pattern. Thus any adequate appraisal of cultural variation and its effects in variation in psychic functioning must have a baseline in an understanding of the universal features of the species. These features in turn are illuminated by evolutionary history, a reconstruction of which enables us to delineate the functional