I Have Landed

by Stephen Jay Gould

  These disparate incidents record the enormous influence upon popular culture of an evolutionary idea that ranks second only to natural selection itself for impact beyond biology. This theory held, mellifluously and perhaps with a tad of obfuscation in terminology, that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” or that an organism, during the course of its embryonic growth, passes through a series of stages representing adult ancestors in their proper historical order. The gill slits of a human embryo record our distant past as a fish, while our later embryonic tail (subsequently resorbed) represents the reptilian stage of our ancestry.

  Biology abandoned this idea some fifty years ago, for a variety of reasons chronicled in my book Ontogeny and Phylogeny (Harvard University Press, 1977), but not before the theory of recapitulation—to cite just three examples of its widespread practical influence—had served as the basis for an influential proposal that “born criminals” acted by necessity as the unfortunate result of a poor genetic shake as manifested by their retention of apish features successfully transcended in the ontogeny of normal people; buttressed a variety of racist claims by depicting adults in “primitive” cultures as analogs of Caucasian children in need of both discipline and domination; and structured the primary-school curricula of many cities by treating young children as equivalent to grown men and women of a simpler past.

  The theory of recapitulation also played a profound, but almost completely unrecognized, role in the formulation of one of the half-dozen most influential movements of the twentieth century: Freudian psychoanalysis. Although the legend surrounding Freud tends to downplay the continuity of his ideas with preexisting theories, and to view psychoanalysis as an abrupt and entirely novel contribution to human thought, Freud trained as a biologist in the heyday of evolution’s first discovery, and his theory sank several deep roots in the leading ideas of Darwin’s world. (See Frank J. Sulloway’s biography Freud, Biologist of the Mind [Basic Books, 1979], with its argument that nearly all creative geniuses become surrounded by a mythology of absolute originality.)

  The “threefold parallelism” of classical recapitulation theory in biology equated the child of an advanced species both with an adult ancestor and with adults of any “primitive” lineages that still survived (the human embryo with gill slits, for example, represents both an actual ancestral fish that lived some 300 million years ago and all surviving fishes as well; similarly, in a racist extension, white children might be compared both with fossils of adult Homo erectus and with modern adult Africans). Freud added a fourth parallel: the neurotic adult who, in important respects, represents a normal child, an adult ancestor, or a normal modern adult from a primitive culture. This fourth term for adult pathologies did not originate with Freud, but arose within many theories of the time—as in Lombroso’s notion of I’uomo delinquente (criminal man), and in various interpretations of neonatal deformity or mental retardation as the retention of an embryonic stage once normal in adult ancestors.

  Freud often expressed his convictions about recapitulation. He wrote in his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1916), “Each individual somehow recapitulates in an abbreviated form the entire development of the human race.” In a note penned in 1938, he evoked a graphic image for his fourth term: “With neurotics it is as though we were in a prehistoric landscape—for instance in the Jurassic. The great saurians are still running around; the horsetails grow as high as palms.”

  Moreover, these statements do not represent merely a passing fancy or a peripheral concern. Recapitulation occupied a central and pervasive place in Freud’s intellectual development. Early in his career, before he formulated the theory of psychosexual stages (anal, oral, and genital), he wrote to Wilhelm Fliess, his chief friend and collaborator, that sexual repression of olfactory stimuli represented our phyletic transition to upright posture: “Upright carriage was adopted, the nose was raised from the ground, and at the same time a number of what had formerly been interesting sensations connected with the earth became repellent” (letter of 1897). Freud based his later theory of psychosexual stages explicitly upon recapitulation: the anal and oral stages of childhood sexuality represent our quadrupedal past, when senses of taste, touch, and smell predominated. When we evolved upright posture, vision became our primary sense and reoriented sexual stimuli to the genital stage. Freud wrote in 1905 that oral and anal stages “almost seem as though they were harking back to early animal forms of life.”

  In his later career, Freud used recapitulation as the centerpiece for two major books. In Totem and Taboo (1913), subtitled Some Points of Agreement Between the Mental Life of Savages and Neurotics, Freud inferred a complex phyletic past from the existence of the Oedipus complex in modern children and its persistence in adult neurotics, and from the operation, in primitive cultures, of incest taboos and totemism (identification of a clan with a sacred animal that must be protected, but may be eaten once a year in a great totemic feast). Freud argued that early human society must have been organized as a patriarchal horde, ruled by a dominant father who excluded his sons from sexual contact with women of the clan. In frustration, the sons killed their domineering father, but then, in their guilt, could not possess the women (incest taboo). They expiated their remorse by identifying their slain father with a totemic animal, but celebrated their triumph by reenactment during the annual totemic feast. Modern children relive this act of primal parricide in the Oedipus complex. Freud’s last book, Moses and Monotheism (1939), reiterates the same theme in a particular context. Moses, Freud argues, was an Egyptian who cast his lot with the Jews. Eventually his adopted people killed him and, in their overwhelming guilt, recast him as a prophet of a single, all-powerful God, thus also creating the ethical ideals that lie at the heart of Judeo-Christian civilization.

  A new discovery, hailed as the most significant in many years by Freudian scholars, has now demonstrated an even more central role for recapitulation in Freud’s theory than anyone had ever imagined or been willing to allow—although, again, almost every commentator has missed the connection because Freud’s biological influences have been slighted by a taxonomy that locates him in another discipline, and because the eclipse of recapitulation has placed this formerly dominant theory outside the consciousness of most modern scholars. In 1915, in the shadow of war and as he began his sixtieth year, Freud labored with great enthusiasm on a book that would set forth the theoretical underpinnings of all his work—the “metapsychology,” as he called the project. He wrote twelve papers for his work, but later abandoned his plans for unknown reasons much discussed by scholars. Five of the twelve papers were eventually published (with Mourning and Melancholia as the best known), but the other seven were presumed lost or destroyed. In 1983, Ilse Grubrich-Simitis discovered a copy, in Freud’s hand, of the twelfth and most general paper. The document had resided in a trunk, formerly the property of Freud’s daughter Anna (who died in 1983), and otherwise filled with the papers of Freud’s Hungarian collaborator Sándor Ferenczi. Harvard University Press published this document in 1987 under the titled Phylogenetic Fantasy (translated by Axel and Peter T. Hoffer and edited and explicated by Dr. Grubrich-Simitis).

  The connection with Ferenczi reinforces the importance of recapitulation as a centerpiece of Freud’s psychological theory. Freud had been deeply hurt by the estrangement and opposition of his leading associates, Alfred Adler and Carl Jung. But Ferenczi remained loyal, and Freud strengthened both personal and intellectual ties with him during this time of stress. “You are now really the only one who still works beside me,” Freud wrote to Ferenczi on July 31, 1915. In preparing the metapsychological papers, Freud’s interchange with Ferenczi became so intense that these works might almost be viewed as a joint effort. The twelfth paper, the phylogenetic fantasy, survived only because Freud sent a draft to Ferenczi for his criticism. Ferenczi had received the most extensive biological training of all Freud’s associates, and no one else in the history of psychoanalysis maintained so strong a commitment to recapit
ulation. When Freud sent his phylogenetic fantasy to Ferenczi on July 12, 1915, he ended his letter by stating, “Your priority in all this is evident.”

  Ferenczi wrote a remarkable work titled Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality (1924), perhaps best known today in mild ridicule for claiming that much of human psychology records our unrecognized yearning to return to the comforting confines of the womb, “where there is no such painful disharmony between ego and environment that characterizes existence in the external world.” By his own admission, Ferenczi wrote Thalassa “as an adherent of Haeckel’s recapitulation theory.”

  Ferenczi viewed sexual intercourse as an act of reversion toward a phyletic past in the tranquillity of a timeless ocean—a “thalassal regressive trend . . . striving towards the aquatic mode of existence abandoned in primeval time.” He interpreted the weariness of postcoital repose as symbolic of oceanic tranquillity. He also viewed the penis as a symbolic fish, so to speak, reaching toward the womb of the primeval ocean. Moreover, he pointed out, the fetus that arises from this union passes its embryonic life in an amniotic fluid, thus recalling the aquatic environment of our ancestors.

  Ferenczi tried to locate even earlier events in our modern psychic lives. He also likened the repose following coitus to a striving further back toward the ultimate tranquillity of a Precambrian world before the origin of life. Ferenczi viewed the full sequence of a human life—from the coitus of parents to the final death of their offspring—as a recapitulation of the gigantic tableau of our entire evolutionary past (Freud would not proceed nearly this far into such a realm of conflating possible symbol with reality). Coitus, in the repose that strives for death, represents the early earth before life, while impregnation recapitulates the dawn of life. The fetus, in the womb of its symbolic ocean, then passes through all ancestral stages from the primal amoeba to a fully formed human. Birth recapitulates the colonization of land by reptiles and amphibians, while the period of latency, following youthful sexuality and before full maturation, repeats the torpor induced by ice ages.

  With this recollection of human life during the ice ages, we can connect Ferenczi’s thoughts with Freud’s phylogenetic fantasy—for Freud, eschewing Ferenczi’s overblown, if colorful, inferences about an earlier past, begins with the glacial epoch in trying to reconstruct human history from current psychic life. The basis for Freud’s theory lay in his attempt to classify neuroses according to their order of appearance during human growth.

  Theories inevitably impose themselves upon our perceptions; no exclusive, objective, or obvious way exists for describing nature. Why should we classify neuroses primarily by their time of appearance? Neuroses might be described and ordered in a hundred other ways (by social effect, by common actions or structure, by emotional impacts upon the psyche, by chemical changes that might cause or accompany them). Freud’s decision stemmed directly from his commitment to an evolutionary explanation of neurosis—a scheme, moreover, that Freud chose to base upon the theory of recapitulation. In this view, sequential events of human history set the neuroses—for neurotic people become fixated at a stage of growth that normal people transcend. Since each stage of growth recapitulates a past episode in our evolutionary history, each neurosis fixates on a particular prehistoric stage in our ancestry. These behaviors may have been appropriate and adaptive then, but they now produce neuroses in our vastly different modern world. Therefore, if neuroses can be ordered by time of appearance, we will obtain a guide to their evolutionary meaning (and causation) as a series of major events in our phyletic history. Freud wrote to Ferenczi on July 12,1915, “What are now neuroses were once phases of human conditions.” In the Phylogenetic Fantasy, Freud asserts that “the neuroses must also bear witness to the history of the mental development of mankind.”

  Freud begins by acknowledging that his own theory of psychosexual stages, combined with Ferenczi’s speculations, may capture some truly distant aspects of phylogeny by their appearance in the development of very young children. For the phylogenetic fantasy, however, he confines himself to more definite (and less symbolic) parts of history that lie recorded in two sets of neuroses developing later in growth—the transference neuroses and the narcissistic neuroses of his terminology. As the centerpiece of the phylogenetic fantasy, Freud orders these neuroses in six successive stages: the three transference neuroses (anxiety hysteria, conversion hysteria, and obsessional neurosis), followed by the three narcissistic neuroses (dementia praecox [schizophrenia], paranoia, and melancholia-mania [depression]).

  There exists a series to which one can attach various far-reaching ideas. It originates when one arranges the . . . neuroses . . . according to the point in time at which they customarily appear in the life of the individual. . . . Anxiety hysteria . . . is the earliest, closely followed by conversion hysteria (from about the fourth year); somewhat later in prepuberty (9–10) obsessional neuroses appear in children. The narcissistic neuroses are absent in childhood. Of these, dementia praecox in classic form is an illness of the puberty years, paranoia approaches the mature years, and melancholia-mania the same time period, otherwise not specifiable.

  Freud interprets the transference neuroses as recapitulations of behaviors that we developed to cope with difficulties of human life during the ice ages: “The temptation is very great to recognize in the three dispositions to anxiety hysteria, conversion hysteria, and obsessional neurosis regressions to phases that the whole human race had to go through at some time from the beginning to the end of the Ice Age, so that at that time all human beings were the way only some of them are today.” Anxiety hysteria represents our first reaction to these difficult times: “Mankind, under the influence of the privations that the encroaching Ice Age imposed upon it, has become generally anxious. The hitherto predominantly friendly outside word, which bestowed every satisfaction, transformed itself into a mass of threatening perils.”

  In these parlous times, large populations could not be supported, and limits to procreation became necessary. In a process adaptive for the time, humans learned to redirect their libidinal urges to other objects, and thereby to limit reproduction. The same behavior today, expressed as a phyletic memory, has become inappropriate and therefore represents the second neurosis—conversion hysteria: “It became a social obligation to limit reproduction. Perverse satisfactions that did not lead to the propagation of children avoided this prohibition. . . . The whole situation obviously corresponds to the conditions of conversion hysteria.”

  The third neurosis, obsession, records our mastery over these difficult conditions of the Ice Age. We needed to devote enormous resources of energy and thought to ordering our lives and overcoming the hostilities of the environment. This same intensely directed energy may now be expressed neurotically in obsessions to follow rules and to focus on meaningless details. This behavior, once so necessary, now “leaves as compulsion, only the impulses that have been displaced to trivialities.”

  Freud then locates the narcissistic neuroses of later life in the subsequent, postglacial events of human history that he had already identified in Totem and Taboo. Schizophrenia records the father’s revenge as he castrates his challenging sons:

  We may imagine the effect of castration in that primeval time as an extinguishing of the libido and a standstill in individual development. Such a state seems to be recapitulated by dementia praecox which . . . leads to giving up every love-object, degeneration of all sublimations, and return to auto-erotism. The youthful individual behaves as though he had undergone castration.

  (In Totem and Taboo, Freud had only charged the father with expelling his sons from the clan; now he opts for the harsher punishment of castration. Commentators have attributed this change to Freud’s own anger at his “sons” Adler and Jung for their break with his theories, and their foundation of rival schools. By castration, Freud could preclude the possibility of their future success. I am not much attracted to psychoanalytic speculations of this genre. Freud was, of course, not unaware that a c
harge of castration posed difficulty for his evolutionary explanation—for the mutilated sons could leave no offspring to remember the event in heredity. Freud speculates that younger sons were spared, thanks to the mother’s intercession; these sons lived to reproduce but were psychically scarred by the fate that had befallen their brothers.)

  The next neurosis, paranoia, records the struggle of exiled sons against the homosexual inclinations that must inevitably arise within their bonded and exiled group: “It is very possible that the long-sought hereditary disposition of homosexuality can be glimpsed in the inheritance of this phase of the human condition. . . . Paranoia tries to ward off homosexuality, which was the basis for the organization of brothers, and in so doing must drive the victim out of society and destroy his social sublimations.”

  The last neurosis of depression then records the murder of the father by his triumphant sons. The extreme swings in mood of the manic-depressive record both the exultation and the guilt of parricide: “Triumph over his death, then mourning over the fact they all still revered him as a model.”

  From our current standpoint, these speculations seem so farfetched that we may be tempted simply to dismiss them as absurd, even though they emanate from such a distinguished source. Freud’s claims are, to be sure, quite wrong, based on knowledge gained in the past half-century. (In particular, Freud’s theory is fatally and falsely Eurocentric. Human evolution was not shaped near the ice sheets of northern Europe, but in Africa. We can also cite no reason for supposing that European Neanderthals, who were probably not our ancestors in any case, suffered unduly during glacial times with their abundant game for hunting. Finally, we can offer not a shred of evidence that human social organizations once matched Freud’s notion of a domineering father who castrated his sons and drove them away—an awfully precarious way to assure one’s Darwinian patrimony.)