Review of "Evolutionary Psychiatry" by Stevens and Price

Posted by Tanos on Sat 24 Feb 07, 6:43 PM

This week I finished Evolutionary Psychiatry by Anthony Stevens and John Price. I've had this book since it came out in 2004, but up to now I'd only read the Sadomasochism chapter and some of the introductory material. Now that I'm getting interested in evolutionary models for Internal Enslavement again, I decided to read it in full - not least because they discuss social rank and dominance in detail as part of their attempt to explain some psychiatric problems.

One of the major advances in the study of the human mind during the last couple of decades has been the emergence of Evolutionary Psychology - a way of looking at the mind in terms of evolution, and attempting to identify which aspects are the result of an evolved human nature - that is, are "adaptive" traits, acquired over the course of evolution. These evolved psychological mechanisms each made a contribution to survival and reproduction in the paleolithic ("Stone Age") environment in which humans evolved, although many are no longer useful, or even wanted, by modern humans.

A lot of academic and popular titles promoting Evolution Psychology have appeared, but Stevens and Price's book is one of the few to apply these ideas to psychiatry - traditionally not how the mind works, but how it goes wrong. On the face of it that isn't very useful to our purposes in Internal Enslavement, but you often learn more from observing systems fail than from watching them perform as intended. And indeed, their position is that the medical model of psychiatry is flawed: mental illnesses are not diseases of the brain or mind, but are part of ancient adaptive strategies for survival and reproductive success which respond in an unwanted way to the individual's environment today, including their environment of upbringing and the social status and demands they find themselves with.

Much of the book is implicitly based on MacLean's Triune Brain hypothesis. This identifies the human brain as really being three layers, acquired over our evolutionary history: the oldest, the R-Complex or Reptilian brain, is concerned with instinctive behaviours, without emotion or thought, such as displays of aggression; the limbic system or Paleomammalian Brain provides emotions and much of our personality, and is similar to that of lower mammals; the Neocortex or Neomammalian Brain is responsible for what we normally call thought - our rational ability to think through problems and make decisions, rather than follow instinctive or emotional responses. The human versions of the reptilian and paleomammalian structures will have adapted over time, but similarities with other animals are still striking.

Each of these three sub-brains have their own way of responding to the environment, and their own memory system (for example, the way a long-forgotten smell can trigger a strong emotion in the Paleomammalian Brain, without being able to understand why consciously at first, until your Neomammalian Brain catches up and finds the corresponding memories of old schoolbooks and break times.) Furthermore, the three sub-brains can remain in different states, producing a conflict over what course of action to take (for example, knowing something is a bad idea but being emotionally driven by anger or fear to do it.)

Stevens and Price lay out the Triune Brain at the start and only explicitly revisit it at the very end, in their discussion of treatments. I think that is a missed opportunity, since their single example of misalignments between the three sub-brains was very persuasive, and surely would have been relevant to their evolutionary perspective at other points in the book.

One possible application of the Triune Brain to Internal Enslavement theory fleshes out the idea that there are two routes to achieving graceful submission in the face of reactance to a particular command or restriction. First, based on the idea of helplessness from Reactance Theory itself, involves the master exercising enough dominance and control to collapse the slave's state of reactance so that they accept defeat and submit to his will. Secondly, a slave may defuse their reactance by thinking about what is happening - for example, by thinking about their lack of entitlement.

Armed with the triune model of the brain, we can identify the helplessness approach as a response of the Paleomammalian Brain, in the same way that a pet dog can be pushed into a submissive role in the household hierarchy by being sufficiently firm with it; whereas the rational approach to submission relies on Neomammalian Brain. And realising that these brain systems exist side by side, we can see that either or both approaches can be used depending on circumstance: that masters need to be strict about their requirements and that slaves need to reflect on their position to make their and their master's lives easier.

Turning back to Stevens and Price's book, as Jungian psychotherapists they have set out not only to introduce Evolutionary Psychology to psychiatrists but also to vindicate Jung's work from the early 20th century. In particular, they are able to identify several passages by Jung which appear very evolutionary: for instance, they describe Jung's famous archetypes ("The Hero", "The Old Wise Man", "The Self" etc) in terms of the "mental modules" and "evolved psychological mechanisms" used in Evolutionary Psychology.

Then follows an exploration of the one of the main classes of psychiatric disorders: the affective disorders of mood, including depression. As part of their position that psychiatric disorders are the result of adaptive responses, they identify depression as functioning to suppress activity. This can be either be the result of the loss of a relationship (including death) and prompts the individual to shut down or withdraw from the behaviours associated with the lost relationship; or as the result of losing social rank, in which it may help stop a losing battle by accepting defeat and presenting an image of harmlessness to the winner. These desirable responses lead to disorders, they argue, when continued for years rather than days in the context of a modern society rather than a tribe of fifty or so paleolithic humans.

This discussion of social rank is worth examining in more detail due to its possible relevance to Internal Enslavement, but I need to revisit evolution itself first.

Evolution is often described as "survival of the fittest", but that is merely the natural selection aspect of Darwin's theory, which deals with the simple survival of individuals, by competing for food, avoiding predators, fighting infections etc. But evolution works at the level of genes rather than individuals, since it is only genes which survive after the individual's death. The fittest genes can only survive into future generations by way of reproduction, and for mammals, reproduction involves getting access to the opposite sex. "Getting access" results in sexual selection, and this itself has two components: first, competition to be chosen by mates, and secondly, competition with others of the same sex over the resources or status which give access to mates. In mammals, and humans in particular, this intrasexual competition between males for females produces the social hierarchies we are all familiar with, and to survive and hopefully succeed in such hierarchies, males are equipped with mental machinery for constantly judging others' status, making choices to increase status, and dealing with reduced status (and depression, they argue, is one of these coping tools pushed beyond its desired limits.)

Lower animals have a limited range of options for establishing rank, and they centre around agonistic behaviour: that is, fighting or killing rivals if necessary. These options are retained by more sophisticated animals, with the addition of agonic competition, in which threats and displays of strength and prowess are sufficient to establish rank without pursuing costly physical combat. This requires enough mental machinery to correctly assess the danger posed by rivals (too optimistic, and both will fall back to a dangerous agonistic confrontation; too pessimistic, and the individual will back down too readily and their investment in size and strength will not be recouped.)

However, in the case of humans and some primates, hedonic competition for social rank evolved as a third option, based on attraction rather than intimidation. This gave us the inspirational leader as an alternative to the tyrant, and the offer "Do you want to be in my gang?" instead of "Your money or your life!" Hedonic competition is implicitly co-operative, since it implies that there are benefits to be had from deferring to an attractive, successful or skilled rival, rather than just risks to be avoided that would come from an agonistic test of strength.

In the long history of discussions of leadership, Macchiavelli's posing of the question of whether it is better for a prince to be loved or feared, and his answer that it is best to both if possible, can be seen as the human leader's need to compete and succeed hedonically to amass followers, but to resort to agonistic measures (such as fighting and hanging traitors) which he publicises so that other malcontents are agonically deterred from rebellion. A little reflection will show that this pattern is repeated, usually with less drastic measures, in playgrounds, offices, army units, golf clubs, political parties, and other human social groups. It's tempting to ask what effect this change to competition and subordination based on attraction had on relations between males and females, who are drawn together by sexual attraction already. It seems likely that it would strengthen any existing tendency for male mammals to take the leadership role in their relationships with females.

Stevens and Price discuss other psychiatric disorders, including schizophrenia, but it's their two chapters on homosexuality and sadomasochism that I'm going to finish with.

On the face of it, homosexuality poses a problem for Evolutionary Psychology: homosexuality is a cross-cultural feature of human societies across the world and throughout history, so it must have some basis in human nature. But how can the desire to form relationships and have non-reproductive sex with members of one's own sex have survived? Surely any genes for homosexuality would die out within a generation?

There are various hypotheses which attempt to answer this question, with no obvious front runner, and several are presented in the book following a brief discussion of the arguments over whether homosexuals are born or made: they concur with the consensus that male vs female sex and homosexual vs heterosexual sexuality orientations are fixed at different points during the foetus's development before birth. Due to the similarity between heterosexual and homosexual long term relationships (when given the chance by society), it would appear that homosexuality is based on the same mental machinery as heterosexuality - just directed at the same sex. But from an evolutionary perspective, the bigger question is why it has come about and persisted in humans.

The first point is that pure homosexuality is the difficult problem, since genes resulting in bisexuality can still be passed on directly, especially if the homosexual component of the individual's behaviour gives benefits. So it is probable that there are various genes or factors which increase the chance of some homosexuality and that pure homosexuality is the result of several of these factors all being present. Stevens and Price compare this to the gene for sickle-cell anaemia which gives resistance to malaria if one copy is present, but the blood disease if it is inherited from both parents.

The first hypothesis, the dominance failure theory, basically presents male homosexual behaviour by bisexuals as a substitute for sex with females, if females are being monopolised by more dominant males or otherwise not available (for example, men in prison who practice homosexuality inside but are heterosexual when freed.) I think this is quite hard to argue for as an evolved mechanism which promotes the reproductive success of genes, since it would seem to promote acceptance of reproductive failure without compensation, rather than motivate individuals to change their circumstances.

Secondly, it may be that the taboos against homosexuality in some societies have compelled those with strong homosexual tendencies to overcome them and go through the motions of reproductive sex, thus passing on their genes. Again, given the elaborate mechanisms men and women have for cheating, especially in the face of disinterested or unattractive partners, I'm not particularly convinced by this theory and its claim that homosexual genes could survive over the long term this way.

I'm more convinced by the final set of proposals they present, based on William Hamilton's concept of inclusive fitness and kin selection. This was developed to account for a set of altruistic behaviours towards close relatives, on the basis that they are likely to share your genes. For example, that a gene to help your brothers and sisters could evolve, since even if you sacrifice yourself for their sake at the prompting of that gene, you are likely to be helping their copy of that gene to survive into future generations. It appears that humans subconsciously do this kind of arithmetic when assessing how much of their own resources to devote to increasingly distant relatives with fewer and fewer shared genes (J.B.S. Haldane apparently joked that he wouldn't lay down his life for his brother, but he would for two brothers or eight cousins.)

Inclusive fitness adds up not only your direct descendents, but also the fraction of your genes shared with your siblings, cousins etc and their descendents, and provides a way for genes present in purely homosexual individuals to be passed into future generations, if some of them are also present in brothers or sisters etc who do reproduce. And although homosexuality is still a reproductive disadvantage by itself, it may confer other advantages across family members which more than make up. Suggestions include sharing resources with brothers and sisters (or their nephews and nieces), but it strikes me that forming alliances is more likely, since human societies and groups that accept homosexuality frequently feature very strong alliances between men: for example, the Spartans and Thebans who used homosexual relationships between soldiers to promote morale and comradeship. In fact, it may even be that a thread of homosexuality is an adaptive tool for building strong male to male bonds in the hunting parties, war bands and other teams that men formed. However, like Price and Stevens' book and the subject in general, there are less ideas about reproductive advantages conferred by female homosexuality, although alliances would seem an obvious possibility.

One prediction I would make from an alliance model of homosexual adaptiveness is that it should be associated with a greater tendency for hierarchy in male homosexuals than female homosexuals, since paleolithic hunting and fighting by men required a rough and ready chain of command in a way that paleolithic gathering of fruits and vegetables and hunting of small animals by women didn't. This would appear to be bourne out by the relative sizes and characters of the gay and lesbian leather and SM scenes.

This leads us on to Price and Stevens' chapter on Sadomasochism itself. Although it ends well, with an acknowledgement that consenting adults should be able to pursue their own sexuality in a free society, this chapter is unfortunately based on a very limited set of data. Certainly by the time of the second edition in 2000, this is an unnecessary shortcoming in light of the accounts in books and websites which became readily available in the 1990s. In common with most academic discussions, they refer to all of what is now called BDSM purely as SM, but for clarity I will use the more general term.

First, they repeat Kamel's assertion that women are rarely interested in BDSM, which can now easily be refuted by visiting any BDSM community website, munch or club. They do acknowledge that some lesbian groups are "now" starting (they appear to be unaware of groups like Samois dating back to the 1970s) and that more heterosexual women are showing an interest, but "reviewing the literature as a whole, the impression persists that it is men who who are excited by (BD)SM and that, when they take the initiative, some women are prepared to play along with them." Which points to severe deficiencies in the literature.

Furthermore, with their single SM term for BDSM, they catalogue the ways in which psychology has floundered about, first describing masochism as being sadism turned inwards; as being such a great desire for pleasure that it subverts anxiety and pain into pleasure; as guilt-relieving pain; and as a pathological association between sex and violence. Then they are informed, again by Kamel, that "The pain of S&M is defined differently because it is the method by which partners maintain their dominant and submissive roles." ie BDSM = SM is now really D/s.

Their own position follows from this, in that BDSM is a fusion between the reproductive and social rank systems of the mind, and they attempt to interpret what happens in BDSM as a distorted version of the hierarchies that men form. This is straightforward with gay male BDSM, where the team hierarchies I've discussed above may become sexualised. And since they have dismissed female interest in BDSM, except as indulging men, they interpret male submissives and bottoms as trying to insert their female tops and dominants into a similar sexualised male hierarchy - almost as honorary male superiors.

I think their view of gay male BDSM has more probability, since much of the gay BDSM scene centres on hypermasculinity, with the worship of leather, uniforms, quasi-militaristic ranks and strength. However, if anything, heterosexual male submissives and bottoms look for hyperfemininity, with the worship of astonishingly high heels, thigh hugging boots, exposed but untouchable cleavages and flowing hair. These do not sound like the trappings of a woman inducted into the mysteries of the paleolithic male hunting party to me.

Furthermore, the relationships between male dominants and female submissives, which amount to the majority of heterosexual BDSM relationships but which they do not discuss, also stress strong masculinity, although to a lesser extent than the hypermasculinity often presented in the gay BDSM scene, and pronounced femininity. Again, these submissive women do not appear to be slotted into a typical male hierarchy.

As well as Price and Stevens' lack of accurate data, I believe their discussion of BDSM is seriously weakened by the omission of any account of Fetishism.

If one considers the huge range of sexual fetishes which are practiced by enough people to be represented on the web, and the highly specific nature of many fetishes, which are entirely dependent on modern society for their existence (eg high heel shoes), then it is hard to argue against the position that fetishes are acquired by men during childhood or adolescence in response to objects in the environment which become associated with sexual thoughts. But the conventional sexual preferences in men for breasts or for legs are also acquired in this way, and so from an evolutionary perspective it is natural to argue that fetishism is part of an adaptive mechanism for eliciting a sexual response based on triggers associated with women in the particular environment of development. This mechanism would then be able to cope with the wide variety of clothing, nudity, body marking and adornment which human societies from the tropics to the Arctic have employed. This model would put, say, high heel fetishism on the same footing as breast fetishism, despite the supposed perversion of one and the apparent normality of the other.

Whereas BDSM and Fetishism are distinguished by their practitioners as about activities versus objects (or body parts), I believe some motivations for BDSM can be very fetishistic when they are acquired by this same process. For example, the stereotypically hyperfeminine image of the dominatrix with thigh boots, exposed cleavage and whip may become attractive in a fetishistic way, rather than as part of a wider preference for submission in relationships with women. One way of distinguishing between sexual fetishistic motivations and the desire to take the submissive role in a relationship, is to examine the desires that remain after ejaculation - ie the point at which motivations purely related to having sex have been fulfilled. And indeed, many heterosexual male bottoms report loss of interest in submission towards their dominant at this point; whereas most submissive heterosexual females report continued or even increased desire to serve and worship their male dominant. This difference suggests that large fractions of male and female submission may have very different motivations, aimed at sex and relationships respectively. For example, that female submission is an exaggerated form of the attraction to dominant, successful, controlling men represented in much mainstream romantic fiction aimed at women.

In summary, Stevens and Price's book provides many new and interesting approaches on the possible evolutionary bases for common psychiatric disorders, and its short summaries of Jung's archetypes, the Triune Brain and Social Rank from an evolutionary point of view are useful. However, from the narrow perspective of BDSM and Internal Enslavement in particular, I'm not convinced by their position on Sadomasochism as a fusion of male social hierarchies and reproductive drives. I think it's much more likely to be part of the broad spectrum of attraction to masculinity and femininity that homosexuals and heterosexuals display.

Edited Thu 1 Mar 07, 9:15 PM by Tanos