ABSTRACT
I hope that those readers who have stayed with me as far as this final chapter will be clearer about the course that psychoanalysis and analytical psychology must steer between two opposing dangers. There is the danger of a scientific and deterministic imperialism which attempts to reduce the complexity of the human psyche to explanation in terms of one unified theory. Dupré (2001) suggests that evolutionary psychology is one such example, and writes in scathing terms of this approach, in relation to Stephen Pinker’s (1997) How the Mind Works:
The view that is presented therein, that the mind is a computer programmed by natural selection in the Stone Age, is as reductive and simplistic an approach to its topic as anyone is likely seriously to propose, and is as lacking in serious insight into the human condition as such an attempt is likely to prove.
