Freud as a Lamarckian (2021)

©Antti Talvitie, 2021
Freud: Wikimedia Commons / Max Halberstad / Public domain
Lamarck: Wikimedia Commons / Charles Thévenin /  Public domain

Freud as a Lamarckian

Antti Talvitie (aptalvitie(at)gmail.com)

ABSTRACT

 Memories, the writings of Freud, concepts about transgenerational heritance, neurobiology and (epi)genetics, and their therapeutic uses motivated this paper.  These issues go back to Freud’s 1895 groundbreaking paper Project for Scientific Psychology [Project] judiciously annotated by Freud’s translator James Strachey in 1954. 

After reviewing the relevant theory and evidence, as well as the exogenous and endogenous forces that impinge on the psyche, it is asserted that not only are neurobiological factors heritable, but so are behaviors and traditions communicated non-verbally in cultural communities.  It is determined that Freud was a Lamarckian, as Ferenczi and Freud recognized in the 1910s, and others did later.  For Freud “… heritage of human beings comprises … memory traces … of earlier generations, [thus] the compass as well as the importance of the archaic heritage would be significantly extended”.

Extant genetic and neurobiological research and therapies –referenced in the paper— are contested because of narrowness and for ignoring the psycho-physical (natural science) basis of psychoanalysis.  New in the paper is evidence from “natural experiments” and from support recent neuroscientific and epigenetic research of Freud’s neurone model and its hypotheses.  A psy-biometric modelling approach is proposed to analyse the complex interplay of factors in phenotype and genotype expressions.

The paper concludes with a discussion of Project’s three biological rules of neuronal behavior, which together with “memory traces of earlier generations”, pose challenges in the universal homogenizing trends in cultures. “When [Project] emerged some fifty years later”, notes Strachey, “the ideas contained in it [had] persisted, and eventually blossomed out into the theories of psychoanalysis” and was later judged “a Rosetta Stone for those who wish to make connections between neurology and psychology”.

Keywords: Freud, Lamarck, psychoanalysis, neurobiology, transgenerational heritage

FULL PAPER, Pdf, 717 KB, 26 Pages