Since my retirement 10 years ago, Ape Mind, Old Mind, New Mind has been a work in progress. The basic ideas arose from my knowledge of the internal experience of the major mental illnesses directly imparted to me by thousands of my patients in 35 years of practicing psychiatry. The “data” of these composite descriptions …
When one grasps the Darwinian dimension of psychoanalytic thinking, all the exquisite riches of a century of this creative thought about the inner dynamics of child development can viewed as the effect of natural selection.
This alternative view of human nature is a deeper, richer, and far more noble narrative of our exclusively human legacy: that of an indomitable spirit possessed of a will for justice and sustained through the millennia by the bounty that it fosters.
A summery of the last chapter of book which chronicles the the deep evolution of the human spirit whose justice is in the process of reassuming the authority of human power.
It was with great excitement that I arrived at the University of Michigan in 1988 to attend a meeting to organize and initiate the Human Behavior and Evolution Society. The meeting was put together by psychiatrist, Randolph Nesse, whose goal was and remains to bring the Darwinian revolution not only to psychiatry but to medicine …
Since I had worked in prison as a young psychiatrist, and had observed the natural facility for communication between individuals within enslaved relationships, I was sure that the interactive human mind was the evolutionary result of the internalization of the relationship that defined the signature primate hierarchical social system—dominance and submission. As discussed in the …
For two decades, I was focused on the evolution of the strengthening of political alliances between dominant and submissive individuals seen in chimpanzees as the most likely cause of the powerful group bonding that I had from the very beginning determined was the hallmark of the hominid advantage. I had written so frequently about it …
In the first two blog-posts of the “Deep Evolution of Emotion” series, the attractive force of sex arrives on earth to forge the mother-infant bond for the purpose of the protection of the mother’s genetic investment in her offspring. The genes constructed for this purpose were “turned off” before entering the lonely struggle for adult …
Sex is intermittent with a beginning, middle and end. Sex first transformed into the continuous state of attachment in the mother-infant bond. In this process, the sexuality of mating was toned down, stripped of its aspect of consummation, and, thereby, the pleasure of increasing closeness was “stretched out” in time into a constant “feeling state.” …
In an earlier version of Apes, Ants, and Ancestors, I wrote the following mystical account of the evolution of emotion prior to the appearance of hominids. I had just finished a chapter on the glaring prominence of dominance and submission in prison life. “Let us fly out from the nested bondage within that prison through …
