Andreas De Block

Essentialism is one of the most pervasive problems in mental health research. Many psychiatrists still hold the view that their nosologies will enable them, sooner or later, to carve nature at its joints and to identify and chart the essence of mental disorders. Moreover, according to recent research in social psychology, some laypeople tend to think along similar essentialist lines. The main aim of this article is to highlight a number of processes that possibly explain the persistent presence and popularity of essentialist conceptions of mental disorders. One such process is the general tendency of laypeople to essentialize conceptual structures, including biological, social, and psychiatric categories. Another process involves the allure of biological psychiatry. Advocating a categorical and biological approach, this strand of psychiatry probably reinforced the already existing lay essentialism about mental disorders. As such, the question regarding why we essentialize mental disorders is a salient example of how cultural trends zero in on natural tendencies, and vice versa, and how both can boost each other.

Mental disorders are often thought to be harmful dysfunctions. Jerome Wakefield has argued that such dysfunctions should be understood as failures of naturally selected functions. This suggests, implicitly, that evolutionary biology and other Darwinian disciplines hold important information for anyone working on answering the philosophical question, 'what is a mental disorder?'. In this article, the author argues that Darwinian theory is not only relevant to the understanding of the disrupted functions, but it also sheds light on the disruption itself, as well as on the harm that attends the disruption. The arguments advanced here are partially based on the view that a core feature of Darwinism is that it stresses the environmental relativity of functions and dysfunctions. These arguments show a very close empirical connection between social judgments and dysfunctions, which is of interest for psychiatric theory. Philosophically, they lead to the conclusion that the concept of mental disorder is identical to the concept of mental dysfunction. Consequently, it is both misleading and redundant to conceptualize mental disorders as 'harmful dysfunctions', and not simply as 'mental dysfunctions'.

At first sight, homosexuality has little to do with reproduction. Nevertheless, many neo-Darwinian theoreticians think that human homosexuality may have had a procreative value, since it enabled the close kin of homosexuals to have more viable offspring than individuals lacking the support of homosexual siblings. In this article, however, we will defend an alternative hypothesis - originally put forward by Freud in "A phylogenetic phantasy" - namely that homosexuality evolved as a means to strengthen social bonds. Consequently, from an evolutionary point of view, homosexuality and heterosexuality have entirely distinct origins: there is no continuum from heterosexuality to homosexuality. Indeed, the natural history we propose shows that the intensity of the homosexual inclination has little or no predictive value with regard to the intensity of heterosexual tendencies. In fact, this may be a sound Darwinian way to understand sexual ambivalence. But if sexual ambivalence is a biological datum, one has to conclude that psychodynamic mechanisms are often needed in order to explain exclusive heterosexuality or exclusive homosexuality.

The idea has recently taken root that evolutionary theory and social constructivism are less antagonistic than most theorists thought, and we have even seen attempts at integrating constructivist and evolutionary approaches to human thought and behaviour. We argue in this article that although the projected integration is possible, indeed valuable, the existing attempts have tended to be vague or overly simplistic about the claims of social constructivist. We proceed by examining how to give more precision and substance to the research programme of evolutionary social constructivism, a task we accomplish by focusing on the specific selection pressures that may have shaped the psychological and cultural mechanisms that give rise to social constructions. The benefit of such an integration for social constructivism is to have a solid foundation in the natural sciences. For evolutionists, evolutionary social constructivism offers a wider assortment of methods with which to study the interplay between culture and human nature.

Sublimation is usually defined as a defense-mechanism that desexualizes the sexual instincts. This desexualization then results in socio-cultural activities and psychic health. That means that sublimation is a crucial concept for psychoanalytic thinking, because it seems to connect the Freudian metapsychology with both applied psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic therapy. However, in this article I argue that within Freud's theory sublimation is an empty and redundant concept. It is a redundant concept as far as it 'explains' the socio-cultural tendencies of human beings, since these tendencies can be easily understood as the outcome of other defense-mechanisms, such as repression and identification. For that matter, Freud's only example of the sublimation process — found in Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood — is in fact no sublimation, but a classic example of repression followed by symptom-formation. Secondly 'sublimation' is an empty concept with regard to the psychoanalytic therapy, because in that context it is used to explain something that simply never happens, at least according to Freud, namely a perfect recovery and a completely 'terminable' analysis.

Both the so-called high priests of atheism and the proponents of Intelligent Design argue that the Darwinian theory of evolution is more problematic for theism than any other scientific theory. Against the grain of most contemporary philosophers and theologians, I contend that their arguments are largely correct. Moreover, neo-Darwinism is especially threatening the soft theism or deism, defended by Darwin and several of the most prominent Darwinian theorists. For the proponents of ID, this implies that a more theistic science is needed, whereas Dennett and Dawkins hold that the triumph of Darwinism as a science goes hand in hand with the death of theism. However, I contend that a reconciliation of today’s evolutionary theory with theism is possible. In order to substantiate this claim, I sketch out different intellectually legitimate ways to immunize theism against the many ‘Darwinian dangers’

Some evolutionary psychologists claim that humans are good at creating superstimuli, and that many pleasure technologies are detrimental to our reproductive fitness. Most of the evolutionary psychological literature makes use of some version of Lorenz and Tinbergen’s largely embryonic conceptual framework to make sense of supernormal stimulation and bias exploitation in humans. However, the early ethological concept “superstimulus” was intimately connected to other erstwhile core ethological notions, such as the innate releasing mechanism, sign stimuli and the fixed action pattern, notions that nowadays have, for the most part, been discarded by ethologists. The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, we will reconnect the discussion of superstimuli in humans with more recent theoretical ethological literature on stimulus selection and supernormal stimulation. This will allow for a reconceptualisation of evolutionary psychology’s formulation of (supernormal) stimulus selection in terms of domain-specificity and modularity. Second, we will argue that bias exploitation in a cultural species differs substantially from bias exploitation in non-cultural animals. We will explore several of those differences, and explicate why they put important constraints on the use of the superstimulus concept in the evolutionary social sciences.