ABSTRACT
By reading Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct, we see that his reliance on evolutionary psychology and neurobiology prevents him from seeing how humans are not determined by their instincts. Furthermore, because he fails to recognize the ways human consciousness transcends material reality, he is unable to determine what differentiates humans from animals. This lack of distinction leads him to make the common mistake of comparing human beings to language processing machines. What he then misses is the way that our relationship to others is predicated on an unconscious demand for love, recognition, and knowledge within the structure of transference. Pinker also does not define reason as the separation of memory from perception and what Freud calls the limitations of our own knowledge in the face of an unknowable real.
