Gerald Edelman’s Project: How Gerald Edelman’s Theory of Consciousness Completes Darwin’s Theory of Evolution and Provides a Basis for a Brain-Based Psychoanalytic Perspective

Abstract

In this article we consider Nobel Prize Winner Gerald Edelman’s remarkable contribution to the understanding of human evolution, and our own application of Edelman’s theory to a brain-based psychoanalytic perspective we have devised. Edelman’s paradigm setting out his theory of the evolution of mind, brain, and consciousness concerns not only mankind’s evolution over all of time, but also the evolution of each and every individual over and within his single lifetime. Edelman contends that human beings, as individuals, and not only as the taxonomic category from which they sprang, have a separate and distinct evolutionary history of their own, and it is especially from within Edelman’s theoretical assumptions about the evolution of the individual per se that our own psychoanalytic understanding of theory and practice derives.

Notes

¹ Eric Kandel, in writing about genes, distinguished a transcriptive gene function from a transformative gene function. The first (the transcriptive function) describes the genetic inheritance; the second (the transformative function) describes the changes that genes undergo during the person’s life through interaction with others.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lucyann Carlton

Dr. Carlton is Senior and Training Analyst, Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles; President of International Association of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology; and Editor of Neuro-psychology for International Journal of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology.

Estelle Shane

Dr. Shane is Training and Supervising Analyst, and Faculty Member, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis and The New Center for Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles; Clinical Faculty Member, UCLA; and Past President, International Association of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology.