Sigmund Freud alleged that most people’s ‘resistances’ to psychoanalysis
were ‘due to the fact the powerful human feelings are hurt by the subject-matter
of the theory’. Man’s narcissism, or self-love, had received a cosmological
blow from Copernicus; a biological blow from Darwin’s theory of descent;
and, said Freud immodestly – ‘probably the most wounding’ – a psychological
blow from psychoanalysis.

In publications and letters Freud referred to Darwin about 20 times,
generally with respect, but did not endorse the idea of natural selection.
However, other biological notions, many no longer considered true, were
crucial to Freud’s thinking. Frank J Sulloway (Freud: Biologist of the Mind),
among others, has suggested that only some of Freud’s theories derived from
clinical work; the rest were based upon bilogical and neuro-physiological
assumptions of his day. Lucille Ritvo’s book is another investigation into
the sources of 19th-century biology of Freud’s theories. To understand her
concerns requires an acquaintance with the issues her book addresses.

In published writings, Freud never mentioned Ernst Haeckel, the 19th-century
German biologist who alleged that an individual’s development repeats the
most important changes in form that its ancestors evolved during their much
longer development. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny was how Haeckel phrased
it, ‘ontogeny’ and ‘phylogeny’ being words that he had invented. Evidently
influenced by Haeckel, Freud believed that each person’s history from fetus
to adult recapitulates in brief the entire development of the human race.
Both libido and ego, Freud argued, ‘are at bottom heritages, abbreviated
recapitulations of the development which all mankind has passed through
from its primeval days .. ‘

In the case of physical recapitulations, Haeckel believed, the material
of early developmental stages reforms to make later stages, whereas in the
case of mental recapitulations, Freud said , ancient ‘repressed’ stages
do not disappear, but coexist with later ones. Freud thought that individual
libidinal development recapitulates stages of human civilisation. He believed
that he could reconstruct human prehistory from studying children, as well
as from observing neurotics.

He also thought that the mental lives of savages preserve ‘an early
stage of our own development’. He subtitled his 1913 book Totem and Taboo
‘Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics’.
Incest, taboos and totemism – the practice by a savage clan of worshipping
and protecing a sacred animal all year and eating it at an annual totemic
feast – commemorated, inferred Freud, a remarkable set of prehistoric events.

Once upon a time, so to speak, the original human group was a ‘primal’
horde ruled by a dominant father. That father had exclusive sexual rights
to all the women. One day his sons got together, killed him and ate him.
So guilty were they about their deed that subsequently they forbade themselves
sex with the woman of their clan. They displaced their feelings towards
their father onto a totem animal, worshipping it to represent it to commemorate
their original crime.

This ‘Just So’ story, Freud said, referred to a real event, not a fictitious
one. All present-day male descendants of primal horde lack conscious knowledge
of that event, but their unconscious minds have preserved it. Prohibitions
against killing one’s father (originally the primal father) and having sexual
relations with one’s mother (originally a female of one’s own clan), together
with unconscious wishes to break those prohibitions, comprise the Oedipal
complex.

This sounds as if Freud believed that life events produce changes in
individuals that subsequent generations can inherit. That acquired characteristics
can be inherited as a view generally attributed to Jean-Baptiste Lamarck,
the French biologist and evolutionist. (Lamarck believed in the inheritance
of acquired characteristics, but the belief neither started with him, nor
was it central to his evolutinary views.) Freud did believe in the inheritance
of acquired characteristics and explicitly espoused Lamarck. ‘Lamarck’s
theory of evolution’, he wrote in 1917, ‘coincides with the final outcome
of psychoanalytical thinking.’

Freud’s espousal of Lamarck, who represents outdated beliefs, has embarrassed
latter-day psychoanalysts. Freud did not believe in what modern biologists
call Darwinism; the view that natural selection primarily directs evolution;
that from a pool of random variations, it differentially preserves, generation
by generation, the best adapted individuals; and that these individuals
supply the raw material, not the direction, for evolution.

Ritvo, a historian of science and medicine, says her own psychoanalysis
relieved her ‘of such handicapping neurotic debris of infancy and childhood
and ambivalence, penis envy, and a too-strict superego’. She wishes to redeem
Freud’s reputation as a Darwinian. She quotes Freud as saying that, as a
medical student, Darwin’s theories had strongly attracted him. She found
eight books by Darwin in Freud’s library.

According to Ritvo, Freud said that if he had to name the 10 most significant
books, he would include Darwin’s Descent of Man. Ritvo points out that Freud
listed ‘the study of evolution’ as essential to ‘a scheme of training for
analysts’. She says that nowhere in Freud’s psychoanalytic writing did he
mention Lamarck.

Ritvo argues that throughout much of Freud’s life it was still respectable
to believe that acquired characteristics are inherited and, further, to
ascribe a purposefulness to living matter. She cites Darwin himself as believing
in the inheritance of acquired characteristics, and says that Freud may
have derived his views on the subject from reading Darwin.

Ritvo’s main contribution of her own Freud scholarship is her evidence
that Carl Claus, a zoologist, was an important teacher of Freud. A champion
of Darwin, Claus considered the inheritance of acquired characteristics
essential for creating the variations upon which natural selection operates.
After the dotting of i’s and crossing of t’s, it is indisputable that 19th-century
biological beliefs were basic to Freud’s thinking.

Morton Schatzman is a psychiatrist and science writer.

INTERPRETATIONS of a poem are in a prose that is verbose by comparison
with the verse. Similarly, symptoms of illness take longer to interpret
or explain than to recite, and longer still if they are emotional in origin.
That is because the ‘meaningfulness’ of an illness is embedded in biographical
events, and the links among these events, in the life of the ill person.

More books and articles are published about Charles Darwin than any
other biologist, living or dead, and five times more than about Freud, according
to an acquaintance of mine who has contributed both to Darwinian and Freudian
scholarship. Unlike many works on Darwin, however, this new biography concentrates
less on his scientific work and more on his personal life. In particular,
John Bowlby tries to answer why, for more than 30 years, Darwin suffered
ill health.

Darwin, in his Diary, had noted that at age 22, when the sailing of
the Beagle was delayed two months, he suffered an upset stomach (mainly
seasickness during two attempts to sail) and depression. In the last years
of his life, in his Autobiography, he said that before the sailing he had
been ‘troubled with palpitations and pain around the heart’ and had been
‘convinced’ he had heart disease.

He had not, however, consulted a doctor as he had ‘fully expected to
hear the verdict’ that he was unfit for the voyage, whereas he had ‘resolved
to go at all hazards’. Once the voyage actually began, his symptoms abated.
During the voyage, his health was generally good, and he was active and
energetic.

Some two years after the return of the Beagle, a few weeks before turning
30, Darwin married. During the ensuing year, he several times recorded being
‘unwell’. Something was wrong with his ‘stomach’, he said. Eleven months
after his marriage, and three days before his first child was born, he fell
into a languid state during which he ‘felt the smallest exertion most irksome’
and ‘had no spirits to do anything’; he also suffered ‘periodic vomiting’.

When in this state he could not work properly, and more than a year
after its onset wrote that he could ‘see scarcely anybody’. He was ‘in despair’
and expecting to pass his ‘whole life as a miserable useless valetudinarian’.
At about the age of 32, he began to look for a home outside London, hoping
that this might improve his health.

After moving, though, he found he had to limit his conversation with
scientific acquaintances, because the ‘excitement’ led to ‘violent shivering
and vomiting attacks’. He had ‘lost the power of becoming deeply attached
to anyone’. At 36, he wrote that he believed that for three years he ‘had
not had one whole day, or rather night’ without his stomach having been
‘greatly disordered’, that most days he had felt ‘great prostration of health’,
and that he believed many of his friends thought him ‘a hypochondriac’.

His symptoms exacerbated and remitted until about age 60, after which,
until his death at 73, his health was generally better. Besides these symptoms,
he also suffered, he wrote at 54, ‘dying sensations (or half faint)’, ‘ringing
in ears’, ‘treading on air and vision (focus and black dots)’. In his Autobiography,
he brooded about all the time he had lost in life through illness.

Darwin consulted in the course of his life many of the leading doctors
of his day, but none found an organic illness. What, then, was wrong with
him? Several authors have speculated about the reasons for Darwin’s ill
health. In Bowlby’s bibliography, I counted nine publications, including
one full-length book, devoted to the topic.

One explanation, put forward by Saul Adler, an Israeli parasitologist,
and championed by Peter Medawar, is that Darwin had Chagas’s disease. This
is an infectious disease, caused by a protozoan parasite that lives only
in the western hemisphere, and can produce chronic symptoms similar to Darwin’s.
The parasite responsible was not discovered until 27 years after Darwin’s
death, so such a diagnosis could not have been made in his lifetime.

Bowlby rejects this diagnosis, because Darwin was ill before the Beagle
sailed and, therefore, before possible exposure to the parasite.

Another explanation put forward is that Darwin’s illnesses were an illness,
that he was indeed a hypochrondriac. A further explanation, or group of
explanations, which Medawar made short and witty shrift of, are psychoanalytic.

Bowlby is a psychoanalyst, as well as a psychiatrist, but more than
most psychoanalysts he has researched the links between real events, especially
childhood events, and psychopathology. Now 83, Bowlby has been a towering
figure in English psychiatry. His biography of Darwin, in its breadth and
depth, as well as in its theme, is what one might expect from him – Bowlby’s
explanation is complex and does require a long book to expound. Reduced
to its essentials, it is this.

Darwin’s ill health was psychological in origin. His mother became seriously
ill within a few years of his birth and died when he was eight years old.
In Bowlby’s view, and there is considerable supporting evidence, Darwin
never properly grieved her death. This, Bowlby argues, made Darwin vulnerable
as an adult to real or threatened losses of family members, and Bowlby shows
how his adult symptoms can thus be explained.

Bowlby’s view here is consistent with recent research, some of which
he carried out himself, into the long-term effects of childhood bereavement.
Further, and again there is much evidence, Darwin had a difficult relationship
with his father in childhood and adolescence which, Bowlby believes, rendered
him vulnerable to criticism from emotionally important senior colleagues.

How, then, to explain Darwin’s specific symptoms? Here Bowlby exploits
the speculations of Douglas Hubble and George Pickering. Their view, and
his, is that Darwin suffered from the hyperventilation syndrome.

It is known that arousal of various sorts, including anxiety, can quicken
and deepen breathing; that overbreathing leads to excessive carbon-dioxide
loss; that this renders the blood alkaline; and that respiratory alkalosis,
as the state is called, can cause tenseness, faintness, dizziness, visual
disturbances, palpitations, chest pains and other symptoms. Hence, the hyperventilation
syndrome.

All symptoms, especially those of mental origin, are surrounded by dark
thoughts and worries. These worries in turn can aggravate anxieties, which
affect breathing and so on. The physiologic consequences of hyperventilation
are real. Yet current diagnostic disease classifications omit the hyperventilation
syndrome, because its signs and symptoms are indistinguishable from those
of an anxiety disorder.

Bowlby’s explanations are plausible, though whether Darwin’s vomiting
can be ascribed to hyperventilation seems questionable. If Darwin were alive,
and his doctor explained the symptoms in Bowlby’s terms, there would be
doubters as well as believers. As Darwin is dead, hypotheses cannot be tested.

Nevertheless, this is a major contribution to Darwin studies. We are
fortunate that Bowlby, like Darwin, opted for industrious, rather than idle,
retirement.

Morton Schatzman is an American psychiatrist working in London as a
psychotherapist.

STEPHEN Frosh is concerned with an interesting andimportant theme: how
human beings in the last hundred years or so have struggled to apply categories
of scientific understanding to their own minds. Frosh, a lecturer in psychology
at Birkbeck College, University of London, compares the outlook and findings
of psychoanalysts and of academic psychologists.

Academic psychology hasanswered satisfactorily, Frosh argues, questions
that are not so interesting. Psychoanalysis has answered questions that
are more interesting, but with unsatisfactory answers. Each discipline could
benefit from paying more attention to the other.

The two disciplines differ, says Frosh, in their methods and in the
degree to which they conform to or depart from the ethos of the natural
sciences. But a deeper division between them lies in their view of the nature
of that which they are studying. In particular, they have ‘a struggle over
the position of subjectivity in the scheme of things, and over the nature
of the human subject’. According to Frosh, academic psychology studies its
subjects, that is human beings, as if they were objects, and as if they
were lacking intentions, wishes and motives. By contrast, this is just the
area that psychoanalysis considers crucial for rendering human experience
and behaviour intelligible.

Academic psychologists have clearer ideas than psychoanalysts, are more
aware of the complexity and power of cognitive processes, and more stringent
methodologically. Frosh acknowledges that psychoanalysts collect their data
under special conditions that are impure from a scientific standpoint and
that they lack direct access to the hypothesised internal states and entities
that their theories require. Yet he believes they have much to teach academic
psychologists. That is because psychoanalysts deal with the meaning of actions,
with intentions and wishes, and with the relation between experience and
behaviour.

Among academic psychologists, cognitive psychologists study the mind,
as behavourists have not, but it is a particular view of the mind that they
study. They are interested in those mental processes which computer programs
can simulate. They believe that they understand a mental procedure when
they can model it. In this sense, says Frosh, cognitive psychology ‘asks
the same questions about people as one might ask about a car moving along
a road: it is interesting and informative to know how the various mechanical
elements in the car interact to make the motion possible; it is equally
interesting to know what operations the driver has to engage in to activate
these mechanics. . . But one might also want to know where the car was going
and why – what the meaning of the journey was.’

Frosh reviews critically some of the literature on childhood and development,
on language, on attitudes toward gender differences and on racist views.
In each case he examines the contributions of academic psychologists and
of psychoanalysts and shows that what each has to offer is important but,
on its own, incomplete.

However, he does not mention some fields of investigation that have
obeyed canons of scientific rigour and have also explored the nature of
subjectivity and of selfhood. One such area of research has been ‘split-brain’
research involving people (and animals) whose brains lack a corpus collosum,
the mass of fibres that connects the right and left cerebral hemispheres.
Similarly, the more sophisticated hypnosis research and some research into
cases of multiple personality have been scientific in method and also concerned
with the kinds of questions that Frosh considers important. These areas
of inquiry have great implications for the understanding of will, choice,
intention, responsibility and subjectivity – the very issues that Frosh
thinks academic psychology has not addressed adequately.

Morton Schatzman is a psychiatrist.

THE THESIS of this book can be stated simply: new scientific ideas originate
by a process like the evolution of a new biological adaptation. The first
step, says Dean Simonton, is the occurrence in a scientist’s mind of chance
mental events. These events, like the creation of variation in classic Darwinism,
happen randomly and fortuitously – blindly irrelevant to the task at hand.
The next step winnows out all the events, except those that are adaptive,
meaning those that are useful. The final step communicates to the scientific
community the selected mental events, which Simonton calls configurations,
thereby preserving them. Simonton names his thesis the ‘chance-configuration’
theory.

The theory seems plausible, but we cannot decide whether it is true.
Too little information is available about those presumed mental variations
or ‘mutations’ in scientists’ minds that are not pertinent to the problems
they dealt with. The history of science is the story of the ‘hits’, the
mental events that scored, not the ‘misses’.

In Scientific Genius, Simonton tries to show not so much that his theory
is true, as that it is consistent with much evidence, including opinions
of other authors. He quotes William James’s essay ‘Great Men, Great Thoughts
and the Environment’, written in 1880, which compares the environment of
the great man to a Darwinian environment. ‘The new conceptions, emotions,
and active tendencies which evolve,’ James wrote, ‘are originally produced
in the shape of random images, fancies, accidental outbirths of spontaneous
variation in the functional activity of the excessively unstable human brain,
which the outer environment simply confirms or refutes, adopts or rejects,
preserves or destroys – selects in short, just as it selects morphological
and social variations due to molecular accidents of an analogous sort.’

The bulk of Simonton’s book is a comprehensive and critical review of
the literature on scientific creativity. That literature is interesting
in its own right, apart from its relevance to Simonton’s theory. Here are
some nuggets. A distinguished scientist is more likely than an undistinguished
one to have a strong interest in scientific disciplines outside his or her
chosen speciality. Scientific distinction also correlates with what can
be called mavericity, the tendency to think and do the unexpected.

The citation rate, which is the number of times a scientist is cited
in the literature, is the single most accurate predictor of scientific distinction
as measured, for instance, by honours such as the Nobel prize. The average
citation rate per publication remains fairly constant from one scientist
to another; the ratio of ‘hits’ to ‘total shots’ varies little among scientists.
Citation rates tend to be stable: probably because the productivity rate
of authors tends to remain constant.

A scientist with a ‘Type A’ or ‘workaholic’ personality is likely to
get cited often. Surveys indicate that the most productive scientists receive
their degrees when young and start publishing when young, too. A distinguishing
characteristic of the most notable scientists is their immense productivity:
at the close of their careers Charles Darwin had 119 publications, Albert
Einstein had 248 and Francis Galton had 227, while Edison held 1093 patents
at the US Patent Office. One study found that Nobel laureates averaged 3.24
published papers a year, whereas a matched sample of scientists drawn from
American Men of Science published 1.48 papers a year, less than half as
many. The evidence seems to support Edison’s saying that ‘genius’ is 1 per
cent inspiration and 99 per cent perspiration.

The output in all scientific branches is elitist: a small proportion
of the total number of scientists account for most published contributions.
(The sociologist Robert K. Merton called this the Matthew effect: ‘Unto
every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from
him that have not shall be taken away even that which he hath’ Matthew 5:29.)
Posterity tends to regard highly scientists who gained fame in their lifetimes
and to consign to obscurity those who did not – Gregor Mendel being a noteworthy
exception.

Firstborn and only sons are found in the ranks of eminent scientists
in much larger proportions than can be accounted for by chance. Galton first
reported this in 1874 and other investigators have found this, too. Simonton
does not indicate whether the same might be true of daughters. A distinguished
researcher is far more likely to come from a middle-class or professional
family than from the labouring classes. As undergraduates, the academic
records of Fellows of the Royal Society had generally been poor and not
superior to those of scientists who were not Fellows. The prospects for
success in science seem to be increased by an apprenticeship under successful
scientists. Some evidence suggests that a successful scientist is likely
to have lost a parent at an early age. (As a psychiatrist familiar with
the literature on early orphanhood, I consider this suggestion surprising.)
So what of Simonton’s ‘chance-configuration’ theory? For many biological
organisms the greater the number of offspring produced, the more likely
that one or some offspring will survive. That quality and quantity of publications
are linked seems analogous to that biological situation. Perhaps the more
thoughts one has about a problem and the more varied they are (whatever
that means), the more likely one is to solve it.

Simonton’s theory is really a hypothesis about successful thinking generally,
not just about successful scientific thinking. The present state of knowledge
about successful thinking is still rudimentary. One characteristic of the
successful scientist that Simonton does not consider is a skill at choosing
the right sort of problem to work on. I believe that in this regard Simonton
himself has failed – despite listing 54 publications of his own between
1974 and 1988, a rate of 3.6 a year, which places him above the average
for a Nobel laureate. Yet, if a review of the literature on the characteristics
of successful scientists is what you seek, this book may be for you.

Morton Schatzman is a psychiatrist based in London.