Quotes About Phylogenetic

Somewhere in that last sixty minutes, high up in the phylogenetic canopy, life grows aware. Creatures start to speculate. Animals start teaching their children about the past and the future. Animals learn to hold rituals. Anatomically modern man shows up four seconds before midnight. The first cave paintings appear three seconds later. And in a thousandth of a click of the second hand, life solves the mystery of DNA and starts to map the tree of life itself.

Among the factors that play a part in the causation of neuroses and that have created the conditions under which the forces of the mind are pitted against one another, three emerge into prominence: a biological, a phylogenetic and a purely psychological factor.

To eat liver, knowing that you, too, have a liver, brushes up against the cannibalism taboo. The closer we are to a species, emotionally or phylogenetically, the more potent our horror at the prospect of tucking in, the more butchery feels like murder. Pets and primates, wrote Mead, come under the category "unthinkable to eat." The same cultures that eat monkey meat have traditionally drawn the line at apes.

This is the great dream of which each individual dream is a personal manifestation. Dream is ontogenetic. Myth is phylogenetic. "Dreams and especially myths are a primary medium for intuitive insights into the ultimate nature of human existence . . . [they] are not restricted to ... sleep. They pertain rather to the symbolic dimension of human experience as a whole."24

The normal symbiotic phase marks the all-important phylogenetic capacity of the human being to invest the mother within a vague dual unity that forms the primal soil from which all subsequent human relationships form. The separation-individuation phase is characterized by a steady increase in awareness of the separateness of the self and the "other" which coincides with the origins of a sense of self, of true object relationship, and of awareness of a reality in the outside world.

This model understands that there are real limits imposed on all individuals precisely because of our phylogenetic and generational legacy; that is, our predicament is less intrapsychically located than external and historical.