27 January: Harry Brickman, UCLA Dept. of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences

Innate Imprint: Motives, Meanings and Mechanisms in a Darwinian Neuro-Psychoanalysis

For over 100 years since Freud found it necessary to abandon a neurobiological basis for psychoanalysis in favor of a “pure” psychology, psychoanalytic theory has witnessed a cacophony of competing ideological voices. Most of them have captured important aspects of human subjectivity, with a general, but not exclusive, trend away from nativist toward increasing empiricist biases. A recent efflorescence of neurobiologically oriented papers and books in the analytic literature are calling for a closer approximation of analytic and biological outlooks, with a general acknowledgement that a vital bridging concept to more closely connect the two disciplines has yet to be identified. I am proposing that the findings of modern evolutionary biology and psychology can contribute significantly to such a bridging concept.