On Darwin and Freud

https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9780203780145/5f6b89d4-3073-4273-aaf6-de2b1e1aeb8e/content/fig_155_B.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/> Peter L. Rudnytsky

My project involves interviewing people who have worked in the field of psychoanalysis, whether as analysts or scholars, and when Phyllis Grosskurth suggested that I contact you it seemed like a great idea. What I think you can bring to bear in a very valuable way is a perspective from outside the discipline, which people in psychoanalysis need to take into account more than they do. I expect you and I will find that we agree about many things, but probably there will be times in our conversation when I show greater sympathy with psychoanalysis than you do. Your two books—the Freud book of 1979 ¹ and now Born to Rebel ² —take Freud and Darwin as central figures, and one thing that I want to explore with you is the role of Freud and Darwin in your thinking and how your assessment especially of Freud has changed. Your admiration for Darwin seems to have been consistent, but clearly there has been an evolution in your thinking about Freud in the two decades since you published Freud, Biologist of the Mind. I’d also like to hear about how you got interested in Freud and Darwin and how you see your theoretical work connected to your own life experience. So maybe we could start with something autobiographical and then move on to issues of theory and substance.

Frank J. Sulloway

My first academic interest was in Darwin and stemmed from a project that retraced his five-year Beagle voyage (1831–1836). At this time I was a junior at Harvard College. I raised about $30,000 and put together an eight-person film crew that went around South America during the summer of 1968 and made a series of films. Our script was constructed entirely in Darwin’s own words. We took his letters, diary, and various published versions of his account of the Beagle voyage and strung all these materials together into a self-narrated documentary.