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The Evolved Structure of Human Social Behaviour and Personality: Psychoanalytic Insights

Author(s) : Ralf-Peter Behrendt

Reviews and Endorsements

'This volume presents an original effort to construct a comprehensive developmental model of human personality and social behaviour, based on a combined neurobiological, evolutionary biological, psychodynamic, and social psychological perspective. In the process, psychoanalytic theory is employed as a basic, unifying set of theoretical propositions, and a wide spectrum of psychoanalytic proposals and clinical observations applied for this purpose. For the psychoanalytic reader, the juxtaposition of this broad body of psychoanalytic formulations may be surprising, and, at some points, puzzling, but always, given the scope of this project, stimulating and thought provoking.'
- Otto F. Kernberg, MD, Director, Personality Disorders Institute, The New York Presbyterian Hospital, Payne Whitney Westchester, Professor of Psychiatry, Joan and Sanford I. Weill Medical College of Cornell University, Training and Supervising Analyst, Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research

'An extremely ambitious work of scholarship, which seeks to connect ideas from disparate disciplines in the social, behavioural, evolutionary (ethology in particular), and the neurosciences with a careful and extensive reading of psychoanalytic ideas in the service of explication of normal and abnormal human behaviour. The crucible or platform on which this anatomisation of human normal and abnormal behaviour works is the mind-brain and its principal goal is providing a deeply rooted interdisciplinary account of behaviour as construed by social evolutionary sciences (i.e., behaviour as natural and ecologically rooted) as well as clinical sciences (e.g., "psychopathology"). Dr Ralf-Peter Behrendt's primary interest is to provide for the reader a deep and clear synthesis of relationships among central concepts in diverse sciences of human behaviour, psychoanalysis, ethology, and neuroscience in particular, for purposes of showing how they illuminate traditional concepts about the pathology of inter-individual and intra-individual behaviours. There are now several textbooks and a large literature written by distinguished clinicians and evolutionary social scientists that provide syntheses between ideas of human evolution and the difference of clinically relevant human behaviour problems. These address largely molar, social behavioural questions and categories, rarely probing into the workings of mind, although sometimes the brain. Dr Behrendt's synthesis adds a new dimension to this body of work: an in-depth account of the relevant sciences as per the working of the brain and mind in service of understanding normal compared to abnormal behaviour as calibrated in the clinical sciences (e.g., psychoanalysis, clinical psychology, general psychiatry).'
- Horacio Fabrega Jr, MD, Professor of Psychiatry and Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine

'In this deeply scholarly book, Ralf-Peter Behrendt breathes fresh life into the well-worked field of evolutionary psychology. Peppered with many memorable concepts ("phylogenetic ritualisation", "moral masochism"), his apparently effortless synthesis of philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, and emerging neuroscience is surely a worthy successor to Freud's Project for a Scientific Psychology.'
- Bill (KWM) Fulford, Fellow of St Cross College and Member of the Philosophy Faculty, University of Oxford; Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Mental Health, University of Warwick; and editor of PPP - Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology