Freud

Got a catalog in the mail today from The Great Courses (aka: The Teaching Company). I love this company and have bought many of their DVD and CD series over the years. They can't be praised highly enough.

Anyway, in this week's catalog, there was an excerpt from one of the lectures in a series called The Great Ideas of Psychology.

...

"What else is featured in evolutionary theory that will profoundly influence Freud's thinking is instinct, the fact that complex organisms throughout the animal economy enter the world with quite fixed behavioral dispositions. That, absent the instinctual dispositions, not enough time would be available for the animals to learn what they have to learn, even with human beings.

"There's ample evidence to suggest that important aspects of human psychology are not acquired, but are more or less in place—and even if they're not present at birth, they are very likely to surface when the requisite degree of maturation has taken place—and they do not seem to require any intentional training from the outside. Need I mention anything more than the age at which youngsters begin to impose grammatical structure on their linguistic utterances? Of course, that is what Chomssky's theory is all about."

The Great Ideas of Psychology
Lecture 35: Freud's Debt To Darwin
Daniel Robinson

Hmmmm... sounds like, maybe, he could mention the concept of rebirth here?