Hominin Psyche.

Proposition: evidence for why and how Homo became sapient is to be found in the hominin psyche (the unconscious) and the answer is of vital practical importance today.

Dreams and images, products of the hominin psyche, manifest the evidence; currently, Object Relations Theory is the most effective ordering of this evidence, and psychotherapy the most effective method for obtaining it.

The key question I have never seen asked: why and how did Homo sapiens, evolving along strictly Darwinian lines, end up so free from the shackles of instinct? This is what really distinguishes our species from all others. The issue is in the brain; the genus is defined by brain size; the answer must lie in brain function, the psyche.

Context:- mammalian psyche> primate psyche> hominid psyche> Hominin Psyche
Sapiens psyche: the walnut on the icing covering the marzipan on the cake.
Modern verbal consciousness constitutes the sapiens psyche, but the hominin psyche is still where the action is.

The key answer that comes out of the century of psychotherapy is mutuality in the Mother/Infant bond, forged by the anti-libidinal capability.

Personal statement: this is the website of a psychotherapist who spent years researching the use of dreams and images in the work of assisting schizoid clients to overcome their problems and finally discovered what she was really dealing with. Writing a book was my original intention, only the focus changed.

I am a Cambridge University honours graduate with more than 20 years experience in middle management within a large public service organisation. I have taught children, lectured to adults, managed and trained staff, and worked in management development and assertiveness training before qualifying with a diploma in psychotherapy.

I am now too old and disabled to continue pursuing the chimaera of publication. So I am placing all my work on this website.
The Contents menu gives access to the data and argumentation supporting the key answer, which has implications both for the understanding of human nature and for the practice of psychotherapy.

The Areas of Interest menu offers a way into the material from the different perspectives,
My book was eventually aimed at the typical New Scientist reader: someone with an open, agile mind, well able to leap over the fortified boundaries between disciplines.

Under Updates and critiques I shall continue to speculate in response to what I read either in the New Scientist or in such relevant books as I can obtain from my helpful local branch library.

Under Hominin Psyche Makes Headlines I shall express my thoughts about the key problem: the Disregard, Distortion, Disruption and sometimes the Destruction of the Mother/Infant bond, and the consequences -- suicide bombing, cot deaths, road rage, breast-feeding problems, drug culture, child pornography etc revealed in the daily news headlines.