Recapitulation, Heredity, and Freud’s View of Human Nature

There’s something strange about Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents (1930). Biologically, Freud was a Neo-Lamarckian, who believed in both the modification of organisms through need and the inheritance of acquired characteristics. However, in Civilization, Freud argued that because human nature is immutable, society has dim odds of improving substantially. Lamarckians, of course, rejected that any species-nature is immutable, as species can always be transformed via the inheritance of acquired characteristics. In fact, many of Freud’s Viennese contemporaries—such as Wilhelm Reich, Julius Tandler, and Paul Kammerer—took their Lamarckism to license precisely the sorts of radical social projects Freud deemed impossible. Thus the Freud of Civilization helped himself to a rigid view of human nature which, given his associated biological views, he seemingly ought to have rejected. In this paper, I explain this apparent inconsistency, and suggest Freud resolved it in the following way: Freud was not merely a Lamarckian, but also a strong and peculiar kind of recapitulationist, who believed stages of psychological development both recapitulate phylogeny, and “remain with us” throughout both individual lives and future species-history. I suggest Freud’s recapitulationism supposed a certain inertia: what occurred in phylogenetic history cannot un-occur, and therefore there are aspects of our nature which we cannot un-acquire. In this way, Freud reached a rigid conception of human nature despite his Lamarckism.