The Adaptive Design of the Human Psyche: Psychoanalysis, Evolutionary Biology, and the Therapeutic Process

Addressing one of the most fundamental issues in any examination of human experience, this important new work connects evolutionary biological concepts to modern psychoanalytic theory and the clinical encounter. Synthesizing their years of experience in the practice of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, the authors provide a comparative psychoanalytic map of current theoretical controversies and a new way of deconstructing the hidden assumptions that underlie Freudian, Ego Psychological, Kleinian, Object Relational, Self Psychological, and Interpersonal theories. In so doing, they provide a new vantage point from which to integrate competing models into a larger picture that more fully embraces the many facets of human nature. Moreover, they offer clinicians a new framework with which to understand and respond to the inevitable paradoxes and conflicts that arise in the therapeutic relationship.

Malcolm Owen Slavin, Ph.D., graduated from Yale, studied at the Sorbonne, and received a Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard University in 1972. He was a consultant to the Harvard North Africa Project in Tunisia and is the Director of Training at the Tufts University Counseling Center. Dr. Slavin is a director and one of the founders of the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis. He has contributed widely to the psychoanalytic literature and maintains a practice of psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, and supervision in Cambridge, Massachusetts.