IN THE CENTURIES before Freud, the great philosophers occasionally turned their attention to the determinants of behavior; but they did so from such different perspectives that it was hard to realize they were talking about the same thing. Descartes, with his theory of involuntary and voluntary behavior, postulated the concept of internal forces or drives within the human that interacted and often struggled with voluntary behavior; this model of mindless impulses in conflict with conscious thought is not far from current thinking about the genetic influence on behavior. Rousseau believed that man was born better than a blank slate; he was born good, self-reliant, and free, but had been corrupted by an evil society. Yes, humans had innate dispositions, said Rousseau, but they were no match for the world’s power to pervert.
In the nineteenth century, Schopenhauer, in his major work The World as Will and Idea, defined his concept of “will” as, among other things, a mysterious, self-generating force that drives the world. It was not a force imposed from without but something that existed in everyone. As a key statement put it, “The world as the thing in itself is a great will which does not know what it wants; for it does not know but merely wills, simply because it is a will and nothing else.” A geneticist, particularly one of the Richard Dawkins “selfish gene” school, could be forgiven for giving a genetic interpretation to Schopenhauer’s concept of an unthinking force that drives the world.
Prominent in the philosophical camp that leaned more toward external influences on behavior was John Locke, who argued that all knowledge, including behavior, was derived from observation of the external world, not from innate sources. John Stuart Mill elaborated on this view, claiming that sensation and experience were the elements that molded human nature. In these and other systems, behavior was something instilled into humans from the outside—from, you guessed it, the environment.
In spite of these somewhat fanciful stabs at understanding the engines of behavior, the subject of behavior was, for these philosophers, some distance from their central concerns: Man’s place in the universe, his relationship to God, the nature of knowledge—these were the big issues. Why the majority of humans behaved as they did was of secondary interest, if of interest at all. Man was man, woman was woman; dramatic variations from human to human were always fascinating—from Lucretia Borgia to Michael Jackson—but the intricate array of traits we all have in common were taken for granted and ignored.
Earlier in the nineteenth century, just before Freud derailed the scientific trend toward a physiological view of mental function, two scientific developments occurred that would gradually have enormous impact on the understanding of human behavior. In light of the monumental import of these intellectual events, recognized by many at the time, it is remarkable that their full relevance for humans was not realized for close to a century. One was the publication in 1859 of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, which launched his theory of evolution that now informs all reputable thinking about life on earth, including human life. The other great development was Mendel’s discovery of the laws of genetics, which he published in 1866.
Darwin’s huge idea was quickly picked up by prominent intellects of his day, some of whom immediately set about exploring its implications, as did Darwin himself for the remainder of his life. Still, the ramifications were so vast, and so threatening to man’s lofty self-view, that the implications for human behavior were either set aside or ridiculed. The most famous example of the derisive reception was when Bishop Wilburforce, a leader of the anti-Darwin forces, regaled a meeting of the Royal Academy of Science when he asked Thomas Huxley, Darwin’s chief proponent, if his ape forebear were on his father’s or his mother’s side. Many joined in on the jibing. In Gilbert and Sullivan’s Princess Ida the man-hater Psyche sings of an ape in love with a woman:
He bought white ties, and he bought dress suits,
He crammed his feet into bright tight boots—
And to start in life on a brand-new plan,
He christened himself Darwinian Man!
But it would not do,
His scheme fell through …
Even though Darwin was quite explicit about his belief that humans were just another animal, the idea met with far greater resistance than the more earth-shaking theory of natural selection. Many could go along with the idea that all species descended from a common ancestor, even man. But the idea that man only differed from other species by a few degrees of intellect or civilization was anathema to many. Our species may have evolved from the apes, the thinking went, but we evolved into something profoundly different, so different in fact, we have severed all behavioral ties with the animal world and now operate purely on free will and brain power.
It was not only the religious and the species-proud who refused to follow Darwin all the way to his logical conclusion that humans inherited behavioral traits just as animals did. Many prominent scientists could not swallow this aspect of Darwin’s system—even Alfred Wallace, who arrived at the theory of evolution by natural selection at the same time as Darwin and who might have been expected to be an unwavering supporter of his cotheorist. To Darwin’s dismay, Wallace deviated on this one major point, proclaiming, on spiritual grounds, that man was a special creation, separate and distinct from all other species.
The mere title of Darwin’s second major work, The Descent of Man, points up his belief that the entire theory of evolution, while explaining all life on earth, culminated in a fresh understanding of the human. On the other hand, Wallace and some others were saying to Darwin, we concur with your entire complex theory, we agree that all species descended from the same organism, but man, who may have evolved the same way, has been divinely endowed with unique qualities that remove him from this evolutionary choo-choo train. For Darwin, these defections were a major disappointment. After convincing large segments of the intelligentsia that all living things had not been produced in a few days of God’s creative week but rather evolved over millions of years through a natural process, Darwin was confronted by allies who balked at his all-important conclusion about humans.
The specialness these holdouts awarded their species applied particularly to behavior. Arms and ears might have evolved, but human behavior was the product of undiluted reason, pure cognition. That lower life-forms were observed to have inherited automatic behaviors or instincts was not seen as having any relevance to human behavior. Their behaviors were immediately dubbed instinctive for the circular reason that being lower life-forms, they could not think. This conclusion was as little justified as the conclusion that we humans thought about everything we did. By imposing simian ancestors on humans, Darwin had inflicted considerable damage to his species’ dignity and self-esteem. Consciousness and reason-driven behavior were clung to as essential dividers between humans and all other creatures, bulwarks to protect our unique place in creation.
In spite of the triumph of Darwinism, rather than Wallacism, a dogged resistance to man’s genetic affinity to other animals resulted in an invisible intellectual wall going up between man and the rest of creation. It was as though the thinkers and opinion-makers were saying, “We will grant you your hard-to-swallow evolution provided you don’t include us.” It was all right to place physical man in the system (our bodies and moving parts), but our greatest glories—our minds, our behavior, our aspirations—such wonders cannot be explained by evolution; they must come from somewhere else, probably a God who was partial to humans. The implicit deal was similar to the Continental Congress’s permitting southerners to keep their hateful slavery in order to pass the Constitution, a compromise that prompted Abigail Adams to refer to slavery as the Revolution’s “unfinished business.” It appeared that a full recognition of modern man’s evolutionary heritage—body and behavior—was, until recently, the unfinished business of the Darwinian revolution.
Although Darwin himself, unlike the Continental Congress, was not willing to make any such concession, the deal-makers had their way, not by jettisoning aspects of
Darwin’s scheme or demanding a scientific line-item veto, but by simply warning others to be very careful in extracting inferences about humans from Darwin’s system. “Very careful” translated to “make no inferences at all.” Although a damaging compromise, this tacit compact held for nearly a century. Any scientists intrepid enough to extrapolate theories about humans from animal-behavior studies were generally derided as anthropomorphic ninnies, passing off as serious science fantasies along the lines of the film Babe, with its barnful of chatty animals. The prevailing wisdom came to be that animal studies were interesting but of little relevance to us oh-so-special humans, a species who had gloriously transcended, broken free of, triumphed over, evolution.
Maintaining our specialness hasn’t always been easy. Over the years the effort has produced a catalog of characteristics said to be unique to humans—the opposable thumb, toolmaking, self-awareness, a moral sense—all of which were demolished by one annoying species or another that was found to possess the same ability. One of the silliest was the claim by a group of anthropologists that humans are the only species to laugh. They were shortly confronted with the discovery of a Central American howler monkey who spends its days in the top of trees, laughing its head off—at human arrogance most likely.
That it would also require a hundred years for awareness of the application of Mendel’s laws to human behavior is less surprising. Unlike Darwin’s theory, which rocked the world, Mendel’s equally monumental findings were virtually ignored at the time and continued to be ignored for thirty years. It was not until 1900, sixteen years after Mendel’s death, that a group of German scientists working on similar breeding experiments came upon his writings and credited him with the discovery of the basic laws of genetic transmission. But even when the importance of Mendel’s system was recognized, only an eccentric few felt it had any relevance to human behavior; for nearly two-thirds of the twentieth century, almost none of the serious thinkers on the subject believed our behavior was in any way inherited.
If anyone could have brought home the connection, it was Darwin. A great misfortune of Mendel’s belated recognition was that Darwin appears to have been unaware of his discoveries, despite the fundamental connection between the two theories. Mendel had, in fact, answered questions raised by Darwin’s theory of natural selection—the mechanisms of inheritance—questions Darwin continued to grapple with for the remainder of his life. Mendel’s first paper on his theories was published only seven years after On the Origin of Species. Even though the paper was sent to scientists and libraries throughout Europe and in America, it was ignored. For another sixteen years, Darwin would live and pursue his scientific investigations. There can be little doubt he would have been inspired by Mendel’s discoveries of trait transmission. A poignant underscoring of the lack of scientific communication, if not the impotence of obscurity, was that after Darwin’s death, a copy of Mendel’s paper was found in his library, its pages uncut.
EVEN WITH THE PHYSIOLOGICAL APPROACH to mental illness of Kraepelin and other turn-of-the-century psychiatrists and neurologists, few of them would have seen any connection between the earthshaking theories of Darwin and Mendel and their own explorations into the determinants of human behavior. This intellectual separation between genetic inheritance and behavior was broadened greatly by the Freudian Anschluss, which put all emphasis on postnatal events in explaining behavioral anomalies. Freud never denied the existence of innate drives and instincts, although this was an area he found troublesome and on which he revised his thinking a number of times. In his system such inherited traits tended to be human constants (sexuality, self-preservation, and so on), while he explained behavioral differences between individuals, particularly the neuroses and psychoses that were his concerns, in terms of early experience that disrupted the normal development of these human givens and left in the mind—the subconscious mind—a residue of problem-causing influences.
This was an entirely new view of the way the mind governs behavior, although, as has often been pointed out, some of Freud’s most important ideas had precedents in the writings of thinkers like Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. But never before had such powerful notions as repression and the subconscious been cast in a medical, therapeutic context. Since Freud applied his insights to all forms of aberrant behavior, from severe psychosis to mild neurosis, his theories had the effect of bridging the gulf between insanity and normal behavior. Increasingly, human behavior would be seen as a broadly varied continuum, and in Freud’s view (and even more in the view of his disciples) the variations sprang primarily from the experiences of childhood or early infancy and the resulting imprinting on the ever-active subconscious. The happy corollary was that if problems resulted from mishaps along the developmental path—denting the developing child, so to speak—the damage could later be rooted out to restore normalcy. Freud’s exciting theories had a major impact in Europe, even more in America. As a result, the notion of biological and genetic influences on behavior was swept aside.
With the disposal of biology as a behavioral influence, the great intellects of the early twentieth century had created a vast playground for arcane and fanciful constructs of cause and effect. It was far more stimulating and, in the end, optimistic, to lay neurosis and insanity at the feet of a snarl in the parent-child dynamic—scenarios involving lush dramatic tools such as jealousy, fear, guilt, and so on—rather than to trace the malfunctions to a few wayward molecules. When such creative and visionary geniuses as Carl Jung and Otto Rank hooked their man-made systems of inner conflict and striving to the spiritual, they brought forth even more dazzling literary outpourings—from themselves and from gifted onlookers like Aldous Huxley and Laurens van der Post. Other sciences aimed at the human took the same giddy position: Human personality was a human construct. Flaws in construction could be corrected and humans could be built better in the future.
Despite the triumph of Freud’s psychodynamic view of human behavior, Kraepelin and others in Europe continued to explore the physiology of brain function and malfunction. Psychiatric historian Nancy Andreasen, in her 1984 book The Broken Brain: The Biological Revolution in Psychiatry, points out that Freud himself had originally been drawn to neurology and the brain’s physical malfunctioning, but that his Jewishness had barred him from the university clinics in Vienna that were essential for research in this field. Because his marriage in 1886 necessitated a regular income, he dropped his primary interest and began seeing patients at home. This unwanted clinical practice led to the theories that changed the world. While Andreasen’s home-office explanation of Freudianism’s birth rests on a number of large assumptions, it is still irresistible to conjecture that had Freud not been discriminated against, he might have followed the neurophysical path of Kraepelin and Alzheimer, whose biophysical view of mental illness Freudian analysis would all but bury for three-quarters of a century, and which has only recently returned to dominate the psychiatric mainstream.
After Freud’s sole visit to the United States in 1910 for his famous lectures at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts (whose honorary doctorate of laws degree I spotted proudly displayed in Freud’s Vienna waiting room on a visit in 1994), his fame and influence spread rapidly across the country, so that by the late 1930s almost every major psychiatric post in America—department heads at leading universities and the editors of the top professional journals—were committed Freudians. So complete was the takeover that most Americans thought that the terms psychiatrist and psychoanalyst were synonymous and were unaware that Freudian analysis was merely one school of psychiatry.
In Europe, however, Freudianism never achieved the domination it achieved in America. From the start, European scientists and neurologists were intrigued by Freud’s thinking but never embraced it with the enthusiastic abandon of Americans, who increasingly saw the theories as the answer to everything worth knowing about humans. The phenomenon conjures a picture of Freud as history’s most brilliant snake-oil salesman working a nation of gul
lible rubes. More likely the explanation lies in American optimism and hunger for new ideas. When the tide eventually swung back to a view of behavioral aberrations that included physical malfunctions and chemical imbalances, the collapse of Freudianism caused less upheaval in Europe than it has in America.
The fifty-year triumph of Freudianism in America was buoyed by the massive political tides that were welling up on both sides of the Atlantic. Virulent social injustice that had swept in with the post–Civil War industrial boom was feeding the growth of progressive movements such as socialism, communism, and other system-changing ideologies. All were aimed at building more just societies and all were based on a belief in man’s capacity for improvement. Freud’s ideas about the malleability of personality jibed neatly with these political visions. Opposing theories about innate, biology-rooted traits, with connotations of immutability, were incompatible with them.
It is possible that the good-news/bad-news stigma that would cling to the nature-nurture debate of later decades received a considerable boost from Freud’s disciples, men and women heady with the prospect of curing mental illness and who didn’t want to hear about stubborn genetic flaws. Snarled and mislearned behavior could be unsnarled and unlearned on the psychoanalytic couch. Inherited personality traits, if they existed, appeared as alterable as eye color and foot size.
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