Introduction

Jones was an eminent geneticist, at Edinburgh, responsible for the early steps in developing the science of embryology. In 1946, the British Psychoanalytical Society started a series of annual lectures called the Ernest Jones Lecture, in his honour, to present psychoanalytic ideas as relevant to the intellectual world in general. C. H. Waddington argues that psychoanalysis should not concentrate so completely on the primitive and pathological, but pay more attention to the higher functions of human beings as well. He takes the higher functions to be the social ones, based on the ego-ideal and the super-ego. As a geneticist, he was impressed that the human species has adapted in a way that seems quite contrary to the progress that comes from genes and biological evolution. He charges psychoanalysts with the task of answering what to do about these higher functions, which seem so easily recruited to the primitive impulses.