0.10 Biology and personality  (Page 10/22)

Indeed, the competition that accompanied the desire to obtain and hold onto a mate in our distant past was so intense that we also evolved the psychological mechanisms necessary to kill people. Although this psychological mechanism may be maladaptive in our society today, its effectiveness in the prehistoric past remains hidden just below the surface of our minds. As a result, it can come out suddenly, explaining why the majority of murderers seem to be normal individuals until the day they kill someone (often someone they know and care about; Buss, 2005).

We have a tendency to think of things such as marital conflict, marital infidelity, jealousy, and murder as abnormal situations. Evolutionary psychologists suggest instead that such behaviors are the result of natural adaptations. However, as noted above, these adaptations were appropriate for our ancient ancestors, and may not fit within our society today (murder is illegal). Yet, these behaviors and emotions are common, suggesting that we can’t simply dismiss them. Since evolution typically takes a very long time, it is hard to say whether different adaptations will occur in the future of our species, given the cultural changes that have occurred through history. Perhaps the best we can hope for now is a continued development of our understanding of personality, through a variety of theoretical perspectives.

Connections Across Cultures: The Somatic Psychology of Wilhelm Reich

Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957) was a respected student and colleague of Sigmund Freud, a political activist, and eventually a convicted criminal in the United States whose books and journals were burned by the American government. But he left behind a legacy of focusing on the body and mind as deeply interrelated. In Germany in the 1930s, Reich devoted extraordinary effort to programs addressing sex education, sex hygiene, access to birth control, etc. He gave up his psychoanalytic practice, because he felt that sex education programs had the potential to be more helpful to more people by preventing sexual and psychological difficulties. Despite the so-called sexual revolution of the 1960s, many of these issues still plague society today. Reich’s description of the phases involved in the experience of an organism (first studied in the 1920s and 1930s) anticipated the famous research of Masters and Johnson (1966), and incorporated a psychoanalytic view of mindsets occurring during sexual activity (Reich, 1973). His work on somatic psychology relates to physical approaches to psychotherapy that continue today. These contributions and controversies earned Reich a place in the marvelous history of the study of mental illness entitled Masters of the Mind (Millon, 2004).

Raised on a farm, Reich was interested in animal husbandry, and conducted extensive studies of animal sexual behavior. As a young child, he witnessed one of the family’s maids having intercourse with her boyfriend. When he asked the maid if he could “play” the lover, she obliged. When he was 12 years old, he caught his mother having an affair with one of his tutors. In a classic example of the Oedipus complex, he considered using the information to blackmail his mother into allowing him to have sexual intercourse with her! Instead, he turned again to one of the family maids. He then told his father, whom Reich had witnessed beating his mother in the past, and shortly thereafter his mother committed suicide. For the rest of his life, Reich was tormented by the thought that he may have been responsible for his mother’s death. His father died when Reich was 17 years old, and Reich took over the family farm until it was destroyed in World War I.