ABSTRACT
Previous chapters in Part II of this book have traced the movement of psychoanalytic thought about the relationship between the individual and the group from the early formulations of Freud to more and more relational, intersubjective, group and social perspectives. This movement has involved the incorporation of systems thinking into psychoanalytic theory where the relationship between the individual and the group/social is understood in terms of systemic interaction between people. In recent years, there has also been a movement of thought in the other direction, namely, toward the universal, innate nature of individual human beings. The resulting evolutionary psychotherapy is built on the foundations laid by theories of biological evolution as it was taken up in sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. Here the relationship between the individual and the social is explained in terms of genetically determined survival strategies produced by evolution. The social is then genetically determined attachment behavior and there is a frequent appeal to Bowlby's development of attachment theory in psychoanalysis. This move to genetically determined survival strategies is highly compatible with Freudian thought, extending it to include not only the libidinal and aggressive drives but also attachment and altruistic ones. Evolutionary psychotherapy re¯ects a substantially different notion of evolution (see Chapter 3) to that upon which the perspective of complex responsive processes is built and this chapter explores that difference.
