Freud and Darwin

My post is not about a particular quote from the text rather I wanted to discuss Darwin's work in relation to Freud because I think it's cool to see how these guys actually agreed on concepts while taking a different lens for understanding- especially given the time period they worked in. 

Darwin's work was relatively new when Freud was working. As such, Freud's choice to make connections to Darwin demonstrates his desire to explore different paradigms of understanding human development. 

As we can see in Totem and Taboo, Freud and Darwin agree on the notion of a primal hoard as being one of man's early development milestones. Another concept that the two men ultimately agree on is the concept of degenerate. Degeneracy was a theme that was incredibly prevalent in European society in the late 1700- mid 1900s. (Arguably this is still an issue today just in a different form). Charles Darwin’s theories are the primary bases for how degenerate is used today, the term was explored before the realization of evolution. The concept of degeneration was also highly influenced by Darwin’s Social Theory, which evolved from his Theory of Evolution. Evolution meant that the development of mankind was no longer fixed and predictable, but could change by evolving or degeneration. The future was thus unpredictable, with the potential for clashes between evolution and civilization in attempts to progress positively. People began to take a more social approach to the concept and researched different forms of degeneration. By 1890’s there was a growing fear of degeneration spreading across Europe.

We see this issue playing an especially significant role in Freud's work with homosexuals. As we have discussed earlier, Freud did not consider homosexuals to be degenerates and in fact suggested that we all have homosexual tendencies unconsciously. Again, though these men addressed human understanding and development differently, they still were able to come to similar understandings about degeneracy. Additionally, we can see how Freud incorporates Darwin's frame of thinking when discussing how this concept of Totem and Taboo pass down through generations.