What is best in Freud is his sensing of paradox of being a highly social animal: being at our core libidinous, rapacious, and generally selfish, yet having to live civilly with other human beings – having to reach our animal goals via a tortuous path of cooperation, compromise, and restraints. From this insight flows Freud’s most basic idea about the mind: it is a place of conflict between animal impulses and social reality.
One biological view of this sort of conflict comes from Paul D. MacLean. He calls human brain as a “triune” brain whose three basic parts recapitulate our evolution:
1. A reptilian core – the seat of our basic drives
2. Surrounded by a Paleomammalian brain – which endowed our ancestors with , among other things, affection for offsprings
3. Surrounded in turn by a neomammalian brain – This voluminous neomammalian brain brought abstract reasoning, language, and perhaps selective affection for people outside the family.
Like many neat models, this one may be misleadingly simple; but it nicely captures a critical feature of our evolutionary trajectory: from solitary to social, with the pursuit of food and sex becoming increasingly subtle and elaborate endeavors.
Freud’s “Id” – The beast in the basement – presumably grows out of reptilian brain, a product of pre-social evolutionary history. This “superego” – loosely speaking, the conscience - is a more recent invention. It is the source of the various kinds of inhibition and guilt designed to restrain the id in a genetically profitable manner; the superego prevents us, say, from harming siblings, or from neglecting our friends. The “ego” is the part in the middle. Its ultimate, if unconscious, goals are those of the id, yet it pursues them with long-term calculation, mindful of superego’s cautions and reprimands.
Congruence between the Freudian and Darwinian views of psychic conflict has been stressed by Randolph Nesse and the psychiatrist Alan T. Llyod. They see the conflict as a clash among competing advocacy groups, designed by evolution to yield sound guidance, much as tension among branches of government is designed to yield good governance. The basic conflict – the basic discourse – is “between selfish and altruistic motivations, between pleasure seeking and normative behavior, and between individual and group interests. The functions of the id match the first half of each of these pairs, while the functions of the ego/superego match the second half”.
All told, Freud’s scorecard is not bad: he has identified lots of mental dynamics that may have deep evolutionary roots. He rightly saw the mind as a place of turbulence, much of it subterranean. And, in a general way, he saw the source of turbulence: and animal of ultimately complete ruthlessness is born into a complex and inescapable social web.
But when he got less general than this, Freud’s diagnosis was sometimes misleading. He often depicted the tension at the center of human life as essentially between not self and society but self and civilization.
In reality, it has been a long, long time since nay of our ancestors enjoyed “no restrictions” on these “instincts”. Even chimpanzees must weigh their predatory impulses against the fact that another chimp can be a “potential helper”, as Freud put it, and thus may be profitably treated with restraint.
The point is that repression and unconscious mind are the products of millions of years of evolution and were well developed long before civilization further complicated mental life. The new paradigm allows us to think clearly about how these things were designed over those millions of years. The theories of kin selection, parent-offspring conflict, parental investment, reciprocal altruism, and status hierarchy tell us what kinds of self-deception are and aren’t likely to be favored by evolution. If present-day Freudians start taking these hints and recast their ideas accordingly, may be they can save Freud’s name from the eclipse it will probably suffer if task is left to Darwinians.
[Excerpt from the book The Moral Animal by Robert Wright.]
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Copy Right © All rights reserved - Samrat Kar
One biological view of this sort of conflict comes from Paul D. MacLean. He calls human brain as a “triune” brain whose three basic parts recapitulate our evolution:
1. A reptilian core – the seat of our basic drives
2. Surrounded by a Paleomammalian brain – which endowed our ancestors with , among other things, affection for offsprings
3. Surrounded in turn by a neomammalian brain – This voluminous neomammalian brain brought abstract reasoning, language, and perhaps selective affection for people outside the family.
Like many neat models, this one may be misleadingly simple; but it nicely captures a critical feature of our evolutionary trajectory: from solitary to social, with the pursuit of food and sex becoming increasingly subtle and elaborate endeavors.
Freud’s “Id” – The beast in the basement – presumably grows out of reptilian brain, a product of pre-social evolutionary history. This “superego” – loosely speaking, the conscience - is a more recent invention. It is the source of the various kinds of inhibition and guilt designed to restrain the id in a genetically profitable manner; the superego prevents us, say, from harming siblings, or from neglecting our friends. The “ego” is the part in the middle. Its ultimate, if unconscious, goals are those of the id, yet it pursues them with long-term calculation, mindful of superego’s cautions and reprimands.
Congruence between the Freudian and Darwinian views of psychic conflict has been stressed by Randolph Nesse and the psychiatrist Alan T. Llyod. They see the conflict as a clash among competing advocacy groups, designed by evolution to yield sound guidance, much as tension among branches of government is designed to yield good governance. The basic conflict – the basic discourse – is “between selfish and altruistic motivations, between pleasure seeking and normative behavior, and between individual and group interests. The functions of the id match the first half of each of these pairs, while the functions of the ego/superego match the second half”.
All told, Freud’s scorecard is not bad: he has identified lots of mental dynamics that may have deep evolutionary roots. He rightly saw the mind as a place of turbulence, much of it subterranean. And, in a general way, he saw the source of turbulence: and animal of ultimately complete ruthlessness is born into a complex and inescapable social web.
But when he got less general than this, Freud’s diagnosis was sometimes misleading. He often depicted the tension at the center of human life as essentially between not self and society but self and civilization.
In reality, it has been a long, long time since nay of our ancestors enjoyed “no restrictions” on these “instincts”. Even chimpanzees must weigh their predatory impulses against the fact that another chimp can be a “potential helper”, as Freud put it, and thus may be profitably treated with restraint.
The point is that repression and unconscious mind are the products of millions of years of evolution and were well developed long before civilization further complicated mental life. The new paradigm allows us to think clearly about how these things were designed over those millions of years. The theories of kin selection, parent-offspring conflict, parental investment, reciprocal altruism, and status hierarchy tell us what kinds of self-deception are and aren’t likely to be favored by evolution. If present-day Freudians start taking these hints and recast their ideas accordingly, may be they can save Freud’s name from the eclipse it will probably suffer if task is left to Darwinians.
[Excerpt from the book The Moral Animal by Robert Wright.]
______________________________________________
Copy Right © All rights reserved - Samrat Kar
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