This essay synthesizes the place of biological evolutionism in the early history of psychoanalysis, and shows the implicit significance of German Darwinism in Sigmund Freud’s whole psychoanalytical works. In particular, Freud, together with Sándor Ferenczi (1873–1933), applied to mental disorders hypotheses inspired by August Pauly’s (1850–1914) psychological Lamarckism and Ernst Heckel (1834–1919) theory of recapitulation. Both of these theories rested upon the principle of inheritance of acquired characteristics, and were disproved by biological discoveries during the interwar period. However, despite these (...) scientific progresses, Freud never gave up his idea of inherited unconscious memories, and we try here to sketch out what would have cost him a renunciation to such outdated biological principles. Notwithstanding, Sigmund Freud was the first to elaborate on evolutionary causes of mental syndromes, which makes of him the forerunner of current neo-Darwinian psychopathology, with few continuators to date within the psychoanalytic field. Nowadays, the extended neo-Darwinian synthesis and affective neuroscience may pave the way for a rational Darwinian approach to human mental disorders, which would take into account the whole neurological and psychological evolution of species, and be centered on emotions and their vicissitudes. (shrink)

This article initially discusses reasons why Freud researchers turn to critical realism since this is what led me to compare causality in the two traditions in the first place. Three arguments on causality follow. First, it is argued that Freud's analyses of unconscious processes merit closer attention by critical realists, focusing on the relation between causal unconscious processes and rationality, and causal unconscious processes and social change. It may be objected that this does not concern the discussion of causality proper, (...) to which I would reply that what we consider to be causally efficacious ultimately is relevant to our conception of causality. The second argument, which is the centrepiece, outlines Freud's conception of causality, his idea of overdetermination and his treatment of motives and reasons as causes. His notions of causality are compared to those of critical realism. Freud's idea of retroactive causality is discussed in relation to delayed causality in critical realism and the idea of disembedded space-time components. Finally, Freud's concept of determinism and the related concepts of repetition and chance are discussed and compared to ubiquity determinism in critical realism and the distinctions between causal and non-causal correlations and necessary and accidental sequences of events. While the first argument concerns presuppositions for the discussion of causality in psychoanalysis and its relevance for critical realism, the third concerns implications and/or applications of the two views on causality. It is my contention that the second argument needs to be placed in context of the other two in order for the two conceptions of causality to be understood adequately and most revealingly compared. (shrink)

Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis and Carl Gustav Jung’s analytical psychology are different in many ways and some of their differences are extremely crucial. It is widely believed that one of the most obvious examples of this intellectual confrontation is the difference between Freud’s and Jung’s views on mythology. Proponents of this view believe that Jung was much more interested in mythological issues and his theory of myth became much deeper and more developed than Freud’s one. In particular, it is believed that (...) Freud focused exclusively on the individual’s psyche, while Jung allegedly reached the true origins of mythmaking in the collective unconscious, which is the sediment of the vast historical experience of mankind. The article shows that such statements do not reflect the real situation but just the point of view, which Jung began to spread after his break-up with Freud. In fact, the founder of psychoanalysis had a steady and deep interest in mythology. The manifestation of this interest was the formation of “psycho-analytics” of myth – a specific area of research, which in the early years of the psychoanalytic movement was joined by several first psychoanalysts, including Franz Riklin, Karl Abraham, Otto Rank, Ernest Jones, and Jung himself. It is essential that both Freud and Jung, before and after the break-up in 1913, have been and remain the supporters of the consideration of a man and culture through the prism of certain biological concepts of that time. Those are the principle of inheritance of acquired properties (Lamarckism) and the idea that ontogenesis recapitulates phylogeny (“biogenetic law”). Based on Lamarckian-biogenetic assumptions, both Freud and Jung saw the origins of mythology in the collective historical experience of mankind. The article demonstrates that the image of Oedipus and the associated motives of incest and parricide play almost the same role in Freud’s (and Freudian) model of mythmaking as the archetypes of the collective unconscious in Jung’s (and Jungian) concept of myth. (shrink)