What does Evolution have to do with Psychotherapy?
What does evolution have to do with psychotherapy? The answer to this question may be just about everything. How the brain and mind have been sequentially shaped over millions of years to adapt and survive may help us to better understand how they work, why they go wrong, and how to heal them. This was central to Freud’s belief that the mind contains means and methods invisible to the naked eye but that the deep biological and social histories of mankind can powerfully shape our experience of the present. We listen to what our clients say, what they do, and what they complain of. We observe their lifestyle, relationships, successes, failures and frustrations. We look at how they relate to us, we learn about their histories, and mix in our reactions, biases and predilections toward them. From all this (and more) we make inferences about their minds – what’s on their mind, what’s in their mind, what might they might be hiding from us, and what regions of their minds might be hidden even from them. We can also speculate about what is occurring in their brains.
“Solutions come through asking the right questions, because the answers pre-exist. You don’t invent the answer – you reveal the answer.”
As we explore evolution more deeply, we learn that it is both a problem-solving and problem creating process. Many of the adaptational solutions from our past, can cause problems of the present. A good example is reflected in the human biodynamics of our caloric intake and fat storage. In paleolithic times, this system was adapted to a low caloric availability / high caloric expenditure environment, while we in the West now live in a high caloric availability / low caloric expenditure world. Obesity and its related health issues were not a problem for our ancestors, nor did they have to work hard to get thin. Another example is the conservation of our primitive fear systems now living with an extremely sophisticated imagination. This odd couple allows us to be fearful of the products of our mind that don’t exist in reality. In the same way, our minds have built a society that the primitive networks of our brains find very difficult to navigate.
It seems pretty certain that the mind and brain didn’t evolve for rational thought and objective analysis. They evolved to shape conceptual shortcuts, behavioral habits, and mental cliches in the service of day-to-day survival. This means that if you approach a client on a purely rational, language-based level within the present moment, you are working with a great myopic handicap. We and our clients are generally unconscious of our unconscious and most of our clients have little appreciation of the impact of their deep evolutionary history. This is where your knowledge of the evolution of brain and mind, and the skill to apply them in the therapeutic process, come in handy.
We interact with our clients, not with discussions of evolution and consciousness, but with the many narratives we share and construct together during the therapeutic journey. Clients come with memories, stories and histories. We come with clinical orientations, case conceptualizations and treatment plans. The stories we tell about ourselves and others come to shape our sense of our histories, become the core of our personal and identities, and the maps we use to guide us into the future. Narrative therapy dissects and edits these narratives, cognitive therapies search for the irrational thoughts embedded within them, analysts seek to find the historical cause and effect relationships which shaped them through time.
These narratives are a top-down process, organized in the cerebral cortex. They are thoughts in search of emotions, they arise in the present and search for a past, begin in light and peer into the darkness. All interesting and important but only a part of the picture. There is also a broad flow of information that arises from the bottom up. There is knowledge and memory in the body, transferred to us through genetics and epigenetics, from the deep history of life on earth through our own unremembered past which flow into our minds through a firehose of unconscious and implicit channels. This information has been referred to as the collective unconscious, species specific memory, proprioception, somatic memories, and as the body keeping the score.
So it is to biology and evolution that we look for clues about these non-verbal and non-conscious sources of our experiences. After all, the mind depends on the brain for its existence - the brain is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for the mind. The minds also require relationships and some level of culture. Candace Perth’s definition of mind as “a matrix of energy and information” is a good starting point and the information which occupies the minds of primates and other social animals revolves around navigating and surviving our social and physical worlds.
All brains, including ours, have been shaped over millions of years by modeling the structures of the physical and social worlds. They do this for the purpose of survival, to predict and control situations, to use learning from the past to increase the probability of safe passage in the present. Based on our deep history, the brain and the body generate information that form the basic implicit assumptions and presuppositions of the mind. These implicit assumptions are not based on top-down thinking or contemporary logic, but rather the ways of thinking, feeling and behavior which have served our survival in times past. Therefore, an understanding of mind requires the comprehension of these structures and strategies of these models.
Uncovering these assumptions is not easy in that we are using the same mind to see them that has shaped the mind that is searching for them. They are like water to a fish, unseen yet essential to our survival. This is where a study of biology, comparative anatomy, and evolution come in handy. These and other forms of science are capable of shedding light on what may be hiding in plain sight. Facts like how much our rational thinking depends on somatic experience (Antonio Damasio), metaphors of the physical environment form the basis of our abstract thinking (Mark Johnson), and the ways in which our brains and minds distort reality to decrease our anxiety, favor our friends, and demonize those we experience as “the others.”
Theodosius Dobzhansky famously said, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution,” which is quite true. The only way to understand why the body and brain are organized the way they are and process information as they do, is when they are placed in an evolutionary context. Where we gain a window into the sequential adaptational processes over many generations, that led to the systems and strategies that give rise to the brain, and somehow, to the mind.