Freud as an 'Evolutionary Psychiatrist' and the Foundations of a Freudian Philosophy

Abstract

Freud's philosophical anthropology is in fact little more than an amplified psychiatry. For Freud, the human being is in essence a sick animal. In this paper, I discuss the possibility of founding this "anthropological turn" on evolutionary biology. On the one hand, it is shown that Freud's own attempted "evolutionary psychiatry" failed because of his very limited knowledge of Darwinism and his awe for Haeckel and Lamarck. On the other hand, I argue that more recent attempts to reconcile psychoanalysis and evolutionary biology do not always provide a solid biological foundation for the Freudian philosophical project, despite the fact that they are—from a Darwinian point of view—tenable. This is so because, generally speaking, these theories consider psychopathologies either as adaptations or as accidental disorders, and not as inevitable but dysfunctional parts of human nature, like Freud did.

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