Sigmund Freud, a neoLamarckist – Very Short Coda

Freud is presented as another member of the group of late nineteenth-/early twentieth-century founders, whose endeavor was entwined with transfer from the Spencerian Lamarckism/neo-Lamarckism framework. Adopting Jackson’s hierarchy of the nervous system, the abstract site of ‘the mental’ in his later writings was layered hierarchically, both structure-wise and function-wise. Freud rid himself of the theoretical need for a ‘physiological correlate,’ which allowed him to constitute psychoanalysis. Yet, he transferred a repertoire of evolutionary assumptions, applying it to “the mental/psychological” rather than to the physiological-neurological. This allowed him to relate the new field to established sciences. Freud read Lamarck’s work after he had already written about such transfer mechanisms and the theoretical-methodological need to assume a universal archaic memory. I argue that the addition of the Spencerian-Lamarckian back-and-forth movement between social/psychological and biological/neurological heredity was of particular significance, as it performed the intellectual alchemy needed for his deployment of the use-inheritance-habit mechanism. Combined with a version of recapitulation, that movement was expressed as biological-psychological memory passed on inter-generationally. From an ‘archaic memory’ in the early 1890s it evolved into a sequence of social-sexual conflictual events, evolutionarily primeval and repetitive. This sequence appeared in much of his oeuvre, centrally in Totem and Taboo, the lately discovered Phylogenetic Fantasy, and Moses and Monotheism. It constituted a working out of the central axis of the Freudian structure—the Oedipus Complex—into a multigenerational quasi-familial, quasi-societal collectivity-narrative. His conception of collectivity and sociality was entangled with these evolutionary transfer assumptions.