Chapter 13 Self Psychology from the Perspective of Evolutionary Biology: Toward a Biological Foundation for Self Psychology

Numerous attempts have been made to utilize paradigms external to psychoanalysis to provide insight into psychoanalytic concepts. One of the dangers of such cross-fertilization is that concepts from different paradigms that appear to be similar may in fact be fundamentally different and thus lead to greater confusion, which is then obfuscated by pseudo-insight. Given this caveat, this paper will attempt to apply the paradigm of the theory of evolution to psychoanalysis. The ongoing paradigmatic shift within psychoanalysis from ego psychology to self psychology (Ornstein, 1981; Stolorow, 1983; Joseph, 1985) can be profitably conceptualized utilizing the following approach.

Many analysts, especially self psychologists, have difficulty with an evolutionary/biological approach to psychoanalysis because it appears to be associated with a narrow usage of the term “biology.” “Biology” in the narrow sense conveys the somatic, the physiological, the biochemical—the study of the physical substrate of life phenomena. In this sense Kohut (1982) was correct in saying that psychoanalysis ought to be a psychology, true to the data obtained through