Freud and Sociobiology: Reflections on the Nature of Genius

It is a sign of Freud’s greatness that, as we enter the decade which will mark the 100th anniversary of his first psychological publications, we still can’t get over him. We are still quarreling with him, still revising our understanding of his life and theory in order to reconcile Freud with our other preoccupations. There has been the attempt by the postwar German school of Adorno and Marcuse to reconcile Freud with Marx. There has been the attempt by the French psychoanalyst Lacan to reconcile Freudian psychoanalysis with the latest linguistic theory, and the attempt by the contemporary French philosopher Ricoeur to turn upon psychoanalysis the latest hermeneutical or interpretive methods. There have been attempts, in books like Henri Ellenberger’s The Discovery of the Unconscious (1970), to question Freud’s originality by recalling the scientific and intellectual milieu from which he drew his ideas.

The most recent revisionist book is Frank J Sulloway’s Freud, Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend (NY: Basic Books, 1979). Sulloway continues Ellenberger’s work of deflating the so-called “myth of the hero,” but he does it for a polemical purpose—to justify the controversial new discipline, sociobiology, by showing Freud as the link between Darwin and the sociobiologists’ aim to synthesize biology with sociology and psychology. A Harvard-trained historian of science now at the University of California, Berkeley, Sulloway supports Harvard’s Edward O Wilson, whose Sociobiology: The New Synthesis has stirred up much discussion since its publication in 1975.