Culture, Mind & Brain Speaker Series: Evo-devo-psycho: attachment, cultural evolution and the free energy principle

By Dr. Jeremy Holmes, MD, FRCPsych, Visiting Professor, Department of Clinical Psychology, School of Psychology, University of Exeter.

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Bio:

Professor Jeremy Holmes MD FRCPsych was for 35 years Consultant Psychiatrist/Medical Psychotherapist at University College London (UCL) and then in North Devon, UK, and Chair of the Psychotherapy Faculty of the Royal College of Psychiatrists 1998-2002. He is visiting Professor at the University of Exeter, and lectures nationally and internationally. In addition to 200+ peer-reviewed papers and chapters in the field of psychoanalysis and attachment theory, his books include John Bowlby and Attachment Theory, (2nd edition 2013), The Oxford Textbook of Psychotherapy (2005 co-editors Glen Gabbard and Judy Beck), Exploring In Security: Towards an Attachment-informed Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (2010, winner of Canadian Goethe Prize) , The Therapeutic Imagination: Using Literature to Deepen Psychodynamic Understanding and Enhance Empathy (2014), Attachment in Therapeutic Practice (2017, with A Slade), and The Brain Has a Mind of its Own: Attachment, Neurobiology and the New Science of Psychotherapy (2020). He was recipient of the Bowlby-Ainsworth Founders Award 2009. Gardening, Green politics and grand parenting are gradually eclipsing his lifetime devotion to psychoanalytic psychotherapy and attachment theory.

Abstract:

Although Bowlby was a committed evolutionist, he based his ideas to threat protection and the ‘stone age’ model of the human mind in the context of its original environment of evolutionary adaptation. I shall look at the implications for attachment theory of recent developments in evolutionary theory: kin and group selection, cultural evolution and the role of agency, and ‘universal Darwinism' as a Bayesean process in which Karl Friston’s Free Energy Principle applies. Although these ideas may seem far removed from the everyday world of the psychotherapist in the consulting room, I shall argue otherwise!