ABSTRACT
Insights gained by psychoanalytic theory need to be harnessed if we want to understand the way in which interrelated processes of anxiety, aggression, avoidance, submission, and care-seeking/care-giving behaviour give rise to the complexities of interpersonal behaviour, mental illness, and social structure. The authors are concerned with psychoanalytic conceptualisations insofar as they help us to lay the foundation for a biologically and evolutionarily sensible model of human social behaviour and personality; the aim is not to provide a critique of psychoanalytic writings. Apart from psychoanalysis, ideas that have emanated from the field of ethology, in particular, open the prospect of arriving at an internally consistent and evolutionary grounded model of the mind-a model that has the potential to explain neuroscientific data more parsimoniously. It is argued that a perspective informed by psychoanalysis will help us to integrate an accumulating wealth of neurobiological data pertaining to normal behaviour and mental illness and overcome a sense of theoretical confusion.
