THE FIRST YEAR OF LIFE AS THE FOUNDATION OF EVOLVED HUMAN NATURE

A psychologically based story of why Homo became Sapient

In this article I introduce a new hypothesis concerning the evolution and therefore the nature of Homo sapiens. To support it I also introduce a body of ethological data not previously drawn upon by those engaged in evolutionary studies. The axiom underpinning much theorising concerning Homo sapiens is that reproductive adulthood is the stage of life which is both normative and determinative for the species: tool-use, hunting, complex social interaction, and mate-selection have been proposed in turn as determinands for brain expansion and therefore for human nature. Arising from the psychoanalytic discovery of the primacy of infancy in human psychological development, an alternative axiom, that the first year of life is foundationally nomative and determinative, is utilised in this paper, which seeks to demonstrate the value of this paradigm shift.

1. THE HYPOTHESIS

a) That a significant factor in human nature enhancing inclusive fitness is an inherent (instinctive) ability to act in direct opposition to basic, and immediate, survival needs.

b) That this ability evolved because, throughout the Plio-pleistocene, the Homo infant that was most likely to survive was the one that best regulated its demands upon its mother not according to its own needs but in line with her capacity to respond.

2. THE DATA: ETHOLOGY AND PSYCHOANALYSIS

The novel data that will be introduced to support this hypothesis is that provided by the practice of psychoanalysis and other psychotherapies. During a therapeutic session, in which overt physical behaviour is prohibited, the activity of a client?s psyche becomes observable by means of verbal and non-verbal communications. By the word psyche I intend the conscious and unconscious mentality engaged as a whole in the process of daily living. If it is accepted that the natural environment of the psyche is purely internal then the session is merely a device that allows its activity to be more closely observed, and the data obtained may be called ethological. In human beings the behaviour of the psyche does not necessarily correlate with the observable external behaviour of the organism as a whole. Human beings can be conscious of not knowing the causes or reasons for their own behaviour. They can be fully aware that their behaviour has been, or will be at some future point, irrational and even self-harmful, and will nevertheless repeat the behaviour.

John Bowlby, a psychoanalyst with a wide-ranging knowledge in other relevant disciplines, recognised that the human psyche is that of an evolved animal among related animals and applied ethological data and methods to an understanding of both the healthy mind and psychopathology. His theory of attachment (1969), and therefore of separation (1973) and loss (1980), is formulated in terms of genetically encoded structured behavioural systems, including control systems, mediating instinctive behaviour. Such separate behavioural systems are activated by stimuli, either external or internal in origin, and terminated in similar fashion. Such structures evolved in what Bowlby termed the environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA), and are subject, to varying degrees, to environmental modification during the development of the individual organism.

The observable attachment behaviours of human infants are those that act as stimuli promoting maternal approach behaviour - crying, smiling, calling, babbling, gesturing - and those that are responsive to the stimulus of maternal withdrawal - seeking, following, clinging, nipple-grasping (non-nutritional sucking).

The first insight that psychoanalysis has to offer to evolutionary studies is the post-Freud understanding that the psyche of the baby is formed in and by its maternal environment. Winnicott?s dictum, that a baby cannot be understood apart from its mother (e.g. Winnicott, 1988), can be equated with the ecologists attitude to an organism and its habitat. In Darwinian terms the EEA of the human infant is the human mother.

In general, primate infants are born with the instinct and physical ability to adhere by clinging to their mother and they develop the ability to move independently around their EEA, pulling themselves to the nipple, or from the ventral to the dorsal position. The environment inhabited by the mother is mediated through her body to her infant. Current opinion is that human infants have evolved from this precocial primate infancy to become secondarily altricial (Hrdy, 1999). Psychoanalysts, through their meticulous observations of their patients' psyches, have discovered, to the contrary, the omnipotent baby, the necessary psychological foundation for a healthy human adult. (In Greenberg and Mitchell, 1983).

3. THE MOTHER-INFANT DYAD

The early Homo female of about 1.8mya is understood to have been a naked (of body hair) and fully bipedal dweller on the African savannah (Boyd and Silk, 1999). For the first year of its life on its denuded EEA her infant would have to be carried thus rendering her essentially a one-armed creature unable either to climb or to run effectively. Any damage to a foot or leg would be likely to prove fatal if not to her then to the infant since her only recourse would be to abandon it. In comparison with her predecessors, who could move quadrupedally on the ground, or four handed arboreally, unimpeded by their self-attached offspring, and had available the tripedal option at need, the H. erectus female was a seriously disabled mother.

The problem facing the evolving Homo dyad that has been extensively addressed is that presented by brain expansion which necessarily started in the womb (Hrdy, 1999). Current theory holds that as it was advantageous to the adult to have improved mental capacity the increasing mechanical difficulties of birthing an infant with an increasingly large cranium were overcome by the female evicting her infant ever more prematurely. However for the female this would be to replace one problem with another. For the infant it would compound the existing hazards consequent upon ejection from a secure to a disabling (because hairless) and insecure EEA. Therefore the enlarging brain of the neonate must have been of such immediate survival advantage to both the infant and its mother as to outweigh its disadvantages.

a) Symbiosis

As physical clinging, a survival function of the infant essential to both partners, became largely impracticable the brain of the neonate diverted and developed some of the activity previously devoted to this function into new motor patterns (such as the smile) to achieve the same end. A capacity present from birth is the ability of the new born to imitate the mother's facial expression (Gopnik et al, 1999). The infant makes itself the mirror image of its mother sending her the message 'I am you'. A common finding of theorists of the analytic process is of an early infantile state in which the psyches of baby and mother are felt to be merged so that no physical boundary is experienced between them. Various terms have been used - symbiotic phase (Mahler, 1975), non- differentiated matrix (Spitz, 1965), dual unity (in Stern, 1985). It would be of survival advantage to a physically helpless infant to generate in its mother the sensation of its being an inseparable part of herself. Stern (1985) found no experimental evidence for such an early symbiotic phase and saw it as a later development requiring more advanced cognitive processes. But if the evocation of the symbiotic experience in the mother is a survival strategy of the infant having no relation to its ability to discriminate reality when it is of value to it to do so, experiments focusing on the latter ability would be unlikely to reveal the former. Mahler, researching psychological separation, observed how babies at three or four months, would mould to, 'melt into', the mother's body, and a mother might carry her baby as if it was part of herself (Mahler, 1975: 24).

b) The Dual Unity in the Dry Season

The dry season was the time of greatest risk for an infant that had to be carried. If it were to feed to meet its own needs and put on weight at a healthy rate, while its EEA was becoming debilitated in the search for diminishing resources, the symbiotic merger would be unsustainable. It would have been replaced by a parasitic relationship which could be terminated by the host at any time. On its naked EEA the infant was totally dependent on the mother?s acting to hold it to the breast. The normal sequence of activity of the early Homo female was probably: walking in search of food carrying the (sleeping) infant; finding food and satisfying hunger; holding the infant to the breast to suckle. The sequence would be repeated with rests and intervals of tending the infant. In the dry season the female would often have to rest without having first eaten. The infant that, in this event, imitated its EEA by ?resting? and so reducing its demands would maintain its symbiotic merger, and restrain a growth that could put it at risk. This is the essence of hypothesis 1(b). Before amplifying this simple statement and dealing with the questions it raises, I will set out in section 4 some relevant definitions and theory, and in section 5 the psychoanalytic theory that is the basis of the proposition.

4. DEFINITIONS AND STRUCTURAL THEORIES

From the  BOOKMARK  theoretical formulations and practical methodologies of several therapeutic orientations - Freudian, Kleinian, and Jungian Analysis; Gestalt Therapy, Object Relations Theory, Transactional Analysis, Psychosynthesis - universal basic patterns of behaviour of the human psyche can be discerned. In order to demonstrate this some basic information must be presented. The following definitions are adequate to this end but omit the complexities of the subject.

(a) Relevant Psycho-analytic concepts (Rycroft, 1972)

(i) Condensation, which Freud considered to be a primary, that is developmentally primitive process, is visually revealed in dreams when several images fuse into one which signifies all. Together with displacement and symbolisation it is part of the unconscious 'pre-verbal' thinking that has no categories of space, time and logic.

(ii) Displacement is the process whereby activity, intra-psychic or external, is re-directed from one object to another, as for example a person angry with their manager shouts at their partner. In dreams it leads to one mental image appearing in place of another.

(iii) Identification is an internal process by which a person subsumes, merges or otherwise confuses their identity with that of another. It is a defensive process as it precludes separation from or destructive interaction with the other person. Guntrip points out that all relationship involves some identification since the psyche includes both ego structures and object structures (see below) and can ?take up its stand in either without ceasing to be the other? (Guntrip, 1961: 370). However it retains the option of denial, another defence mechanism. So a patient (who had been beaten as a child) while castigating ?girls? and punching herself, could respond to Guntrip?s intervention with ?I?m not being hit. I?m the one that?s doing the hitting.? (Ibid: 191).

(iv) Projection is the perception of a person or a situation through an internal image that overlays and distorts reality, but also fits that reality in some way. A person may project the image of their father, experienced in childhood as authoritarian, onto a necessarily authoritarian manager.

(v) Symbolisation is an unconscious primary mental process. A gun may symbolise a penis, though in conscious use each word is a symbol standing for a quite different referent.

(vi) Transference is the term for the way a patient relates to the analyst which involves a complexity of displacement and projection from much of the patient's past life especially their early childhood and infancy. The analyst attempts to be a blank screen available for any projection while in normal life projections are usually evoked by reality.

(b) Structure in the Psyche

(i) In Freud's (1923) structural theory the unstructured unconscious instinctual psyche of the neonate is called the id. From this forms, under the pressure of reality, the ego, the structured part of the psyche capable of reason and restraint. The superego is the self-reflective portion of this structure containing the internalised images of the parents with all their injunctions. Because it is formed from the child's perspective it can become overbearing and sadistic.

(ii) Transactional analysis (Harris, 1983) has a simple basic concept, that in each person there exist three ego states, the Child, the Adult and the Parent, all formed by interaction with reality. The Child state contains the natural spontaneous reactions, the Parent is formed by all the experiences of the person's actual parents, while the Adult develops in its own right as a rational data processing ego state. In transactions between individuals a person may respond from any ego state, so an authority figure might evoke the Child responding as to its original critical parent, which in turn would cause the manager to move into their Parent ego state to talk down to the subordinate. The theory stems from the findings of Penfield (in Harris, 1973) that a person's experiences are recorded indelibly in memory and may be re-played at any time when triggered by circumstances.

This basic idea, with its resemblance to Freud's formulation, was complicated by the necessity to incorporate the reality that parents are at different times nurturing or critical, protective or authoritarian. Children are not only spontaneous but also adapt to parental pressure, so forming the Natural Child and Adapted Child. The Parent of an individual will contain experience of the real parent's Child, as well as of their Adult and Parent. These three ego states exist in childhood and might be fixated by trauma. The nine-year-old child has a Child, Adult and Parent and within the Child are the more archaic Child Adult and Parent of the pre-schooler. Clients' verbal responses might originate from any one of a multitude of ego states experientially formed from infancy onwards (Berne, 1975; James and Jongeward, 1978).

(iii) Psychosynthesis theory presupposes that each person has many 'selves' (Whitemore, 1991) which it designates sub-personalities, each of which will have its own behaviours, feelings, motivation, habits and attitudes. Each semi-autonomous self grows from a behaviour pattern developed by a child to meet a particular need. Often bi-polar structures of two opposing subpersonalities develop: a ?controller? versus a ?rebel?, a ?critic? versus a ?pleaser?.

(iv) Jungian analysis recognises that all parts of, or structures in, the psyche are as personal as the whole. It defines a complex as a dynamic cluster of feeling-toned ideas and memories gathered round a nodal point in the psyche (in Stevens, 1996). It is recognised by external behaviour, verbal and other. The phylogenetically determined structural pattern or form which forms the nucleus of a complex Jung labelled the Archetype. It is unknowable and distinct from the experientially created ideational and affective content of an archetypal image or a complex. So, for example, there is a mother architype in the psyche at birth ready to be given content by experience.

Jung initiated the therapeutic technique of active imagination (Samuels et al, 1986), dialogue with a dream figure which might personify a complex (or sub-personality). Gestalt therapy (Clarkson, 1989) built on this with clients encouraged to speak from identification not only with dream persons but also with objects, since any structure in the psyche can be 'entered' by consciousness. A common example in daily life is the personification of a loved boat, car, or toy, which has made a deep impression on the psyche.

(c) The Fairbairn/Guntrip Object Relations Theory

Freud's (1915) first psycho-dynamic theory was one which laid the emphasis on instincts, called by him drives, and gave a secondary significance to the objects to which the drives were directed. So arose the idea that babies learn to want their mothers because the mothers satisfy the babies' needs. Bowlby (1969) maintained that there was a primary need to attach (cling) to the mother irrespective of what she could provide. But Bowlby had been influenced by Fairbairn who had rejected Freud's formulation as inconsistent with the clinical evidence that he found in his work with patients.

W.R.D. Fairbairn (1952) came to conceive of the infant psyche as a dynamic unitary self or ego in a non-ambiguous relation with its first object, the mother, in a state of primary dependence. Frustration and deprivation of satisfaction inevitably occur and he theorised that to defend against these real experiences the infant internalises and splits the object into good, accepted, and bad, rejected objects. The bad object is further split in two, reflecting the exciting but frustrating aspect of mother, and the hostile rejecting aspect. In relationship with these bad objects the ego must also split. A part of it, which Fairbairn called the libidinal ego, attached to the exciting object in a relationship of unsatisfied longing, is repressed (rendered unconscious) with its object. Similarly the rejected object is repressed in a hostile relationship with an anti-libidinal ego. The good object, named by Fairbairn the ideal object, is projected back onto the real mother and to this relates the remaining portion of the ego, the central (conscious) ego. The repressed part egos and bad objects exist as dynamic structures within the psyche and this ongoing structural conflict weakens the ego and is projected onto and played out in subsequent experiences. The more seriously inappropriate the real relationship of mother to infant, the more will the infant ego withdraw from it into an equally terrifying unconscious internal world. Guntrip (1968) in his studies of this schizoid condition added to Fairbairn's formulation a final defence. The libidinal ego, persecuted by the anti-libidinal ego as well as by the exciting bad object splits again and, leaving a depleted portion of itself still struggling for survival retreats as the regressed ego into a phantasy recreation of the womb in the deep unconscious to await the possibility of re-birth.

I will clarify the theoretical abstraction of the tripartite splits with the case that Guntrip (1961: 325) uses for the purpose: his patient who fantasised about an ideal woman very different both from his wife, with whom he quarrelled, and a sexually exciting colleague. This  BOOKMARK  patient also illustrated the oscillations typical of such relationships, for there were times when he felt anger towards the attractive woman at work (become a rejecting and therefore rejected object), and sexually excited by his wife. Often this pattern manifests as three different reactions, or behaviours, towards the one person. So a partner may be treated aggressively when he or she embodies the rejecting object, seductively when perceived as the exciting object, or with considerate respect and affection when (unconsciously) viewed as the ideal object. Condensation in dreams illustrates visually the condition Guntrip (1961) described as the layering, superimposing, or fusion of later relationship experiences onto the original template of the infantile splitting of the ego and its internalised object (mother). In a therapeutic session an analyst can become for the patient, for example, the cold and distant aspect of mother as experienced subsequently in the father, the teacher, the partner, etc.

Fairbairn's clinical work had suggested to him that dreams are representations of the actual situations existing within the psyche: dream figures symbolise either part-egos or internalised objects (Fairbairn, 1944). The analysis of a client's dream (ibid) on this basis was instrumental in the formulation of his theory of endopsychic structure. The dream story showed to the observing dreamer herself suffering a savage assault, perpetrated by an actress, and witnessed passively by her husband. She then saw a body lying bleeding which was alternatively herself or a man clothed like her husband. Previous work had demonstrated the transferential link of husband to father, and the appropriateness of an actress as a reference to both mother and daughter. By considering the actress as a condensation of two figures, and including the observing 'I' of the dreamer, Fairbairn was able to analyse the imagery as demonstrating three pairs of endopsychic structures. He linked the observing ego of the dreamer, the central ego, to its real-time principal object, the husband, who appeared passively on the internal stage. The libidinal ego, attacked and wounded, was shown merged and alternating with its exciting object, the male figure, representing father. The actress, embodying the anti-libidinal ego, was totally identified with its rejecting object, the mother.

From a post-Guntrip perspective, this analysis is incomplete. The regressed ego is represented in the dream by the figure lying bleeding on the floor. The drama showed the result of the attack by the merged rejecting part-ego and part-object: the further splitting of the libidinal ego and the consequent regression, symbolised both by the prone position and by the closer identification of part-object with part-ego. This alternating image showed the infantile merged experience as contrasted with the clear separation, at the start of the dream, of the standing libidinal ego and unsatisfying exciting object (husband). Fairbairn's later theory paired the central ego with the idealised object neither of which appears in this dream.

5. IMPRESSED BEHAVIOUR PATTERNS

My own clinical work was focused on the use of dreams and mental imagery informed principally by the theoretical approach of Fairbairn and Guntrip. The integration of Bowlby?s insights into my practice posed a question: what, in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, was the advantage to the organism of having the conflicts between rejecting, exciting, and ideal objects, and central, libidinal, and anti-libidinal egos continue to play out within the psyche, and therefore repeat themselves externally, throughout its life history?

The answer was found by substitution of the term behaviour patterns for the words part-ego, part-self, complex, or personality: these terms refer to second or third order structures in the psyche not to motor patterns governing external stereotypical actions. The dream of Fairbairn's patient reveals behaviours - attacking, suffering attack, lying bleeding, standing watching, (the behaviour of not intervening) and the designation actress itself sums up a set of behaviours. The fact of the re-enactment of childhood trauma in adult life has been dealt with by a number of psychotherapists such as Alice Miller (1983, 1985, 1990) and Robin Norwood (1986). Their work not only supplies many cogent examples but also reveals the compulsions and complexity produced by interacting behaviour patterns originating in multiple, diverse and ambiguous experiences which obscure a basic underlying simplicity.

What I am postulating are experientially impressed structured behaviour patterns that have the same force as if they were genetically encoded and are similarly activated by specific stimuli, so that for example the words, 'Late again. Typical!' were snapped out with the speed of an instinctive response by my client who had consciously resolved to eschew all such negative verbalisations in the quest for reconciliation. The Fairbairn/Guntrip Object Relations theory in actuality charts the mechanism or process whereby experience acquires the force and effectiveness of instinct. The mechanism, I suggest is genetically encoded and can be recognised as operative in other mammals. In Homo sapiens the larger brain results in experientially structured behaviour patterns of such complexity that they require the designation personality or part-self. The term 'learning', with its connotations of voluntarism, of choice, of a time-extensive process, of optionality and of reversibility, is appropriate for only parts of a continuum that extends through the consequences of repetitive minor trauma to major trauma fixation, to which I apply the words impress and impression because it is a common usage to speak of something making an indelible impression on the mind. This is the psycho-dynamic situation confirmed by many theoretical formulations (4b i-v).

Bowlby reports the example of a troop of baboons, once habituated to the approach of vehicles which, after two animals were shot, fled at the first sight of human or car, and continued this behaviour for many months, uninfluenced by daily 'harmless' passing traffic. He notes the known fact that a response learnt in traumatic circumstances does not extinguish quickly, but his concern was with the 'learning by tradition' by those animals who had not witnessed the killings (Bowlby, 1973: 159). From my perspective those baboons had had impressed on their brains a new quasi-instinctive stimulus for the existing behaviour pattern of flight (see also de Waal, 1996: 177, 180).

6. OBJECT RELATIONS, STARVATION AND THE SELFISH GENE

Fairbairn (1941) saw the foundation of the schizoid condition as love made hungry. By this phrase he encapsulated the predicament of the infant needing to suckle but experiencing the breast as absent, or snatched away too soon, so frequently as to render its own need magnified overwhelmingly. This would in turn create the fear of actually devouring to destruction the needed object. The only defence against this calamity would be to suppress the need and turn away from, reject, the breast/mother. In adults this situation is revealed in dreams, about food or about devouring and being devoured, and in dysfunctional behaviours in relation to food (Guntrip, 1968), of which anorexia nervosa and bulimia are the well known extreme examples. More generally common is a loss of normal appetite. The problems brought to therapy usually involve relationships - often an inability to allow closeness, fear of being smothered by or of smothering the loved one, feeling isolated, fear of abandoning or being abandoned. When work progresses appetite may return.

The intra-psychic interdependence of eating and relational closeness can be further explicated by examining the conscious purpose and real effects of anorexia. In today's western culture it is taken to be the pressure on women to be fashionably thin that is a principal cause of the condition. Not eating is promoted as the way to attract admiration, approval and therefore love (Orbach, 1986). In reality anorexia ensures attention, often of an angry nature, from relatives especially mothers and partners, and eventually from medical staff. If being hospitalised and confined to bed can be likened to being carried by, while being rejected by, society, the comparison returns the argument to the situation of the infant in the Plio-pleistocene. Not eating ensured being carried by the starving, and therefore rejecting, mother. Rejecting because she had no energy to spare for positive attentions such as playing. Psychologically identifying with the rejecting object, the mother-not-eating, could gain not only security but also relief from being the rejected infant who was not being fed.

Anorexia is not a modern condition (Vandereyckan and Van Deth, 1994) and at all times could result in death. The Pleistocene infant, following the behavioural imperative of not feeding until mother has fed, might also have died. In doing so it would have contributed to the survival of the 50% of its genes it shared with her, the same percentage as it could have passed on to a future offspring. It is a commonplace of feminist psychotherapy that a little girl's first baby is her mother (Chodorow, 1978) but Winnicott (1958) had preempted this insight with his delineation of the developmental stage of concern when a baby, male or female, will begin to attempt reparation for the damaging effects of its demands. Earlier still, Melanie Klein (1957) detected gratitude in the infantile experience of her patients.  BOOKMARK  This is evidence suggesting a mentally precocial human infant engaging in an active psychological relationship supporting its mother, its EEA, in her efforts to survive. The infant that refrained for longest from the demanding behaviour that could provoke abandonment was the one most likely to survive and so the ability to refrain until death would naturally evolve. Physical closeness became, in extremis, more important than food. As a result today human infants cannot thrive on food alone and will even die without love, that is holding and cuddling, as observations in hospitals and orphanages have revealed.

7. THE ANTI-LIBIDINAL CAPABILITY

Researching the use of mental imagery with clients to alleviate the problems caused by the schizoid condition, my clinical experience led me to depart from Fairbairn?s formulation and to separate the behaviour pattern from the anti-libidinal capability which enables the infant to maintain a behaviour against powerful internal impulses such as hunger. I include one example of this clinical evidence, a transcript from a session in which active imagination was utilised. The client describes her mental images of her maternal and child behaviour patterns separated by the anti-libidinal blocking mechanism, pictured as a black line. Seated facing the therapist with her eyes closed in order to focus on her detached representations (G?rdenfors, 2003) the client had previously imaged her inner child as looking lost, and had offered reassurance, and then imaged her feeling of being burdened with responsibility as a woman tired and old before her time, to whom she gave a comfortable armchair. (All sessions were recorded with the client?s consent).

8. EVOLUTION AND THE PSYCHE OF THE GENUS HOMO

Hypothesis 1b has now been partially justified by the description of two psychological mechanisms the existence of which is attested to by an abundance of published ethological data: impressed behaviour patterns and the anti-libidinal capability which enables the organism to enact the impressed behaviour most appropriate for the survival of its genes, rather than to the needs of its body. As with Jungian archetypes (4biv) a distinction is made between the impressed behaviour pattern and the variable actions through which it is expressed. To present the full case for 1a and 1b I shall trace in the following sections the hypothetical stages in the evolution of the human nature that I have observed in the clinical setting and in society at large. This will allow the inclusion of some of the wider evidence available in addition to data from the psychotherapeutic session.

a) Stage One - The Thicket-dwelling Ape

Along the coast and river valleys of East Africa, 6-3 million years ago, climate change produced a thinning of the littoral forest to woodland and a concommitant growth of extensive dense thickets of fruit bearing shrubs, extending and retreating at times, and becoming seasonal (Kingdon, 2003). A female ape attracted by fruit would find, on pressing into the thicket, that she had to move her infant from the dorsal to the ventral position, and keep it there while she remained in dense vegetation, to ensure its safety. Standing to feed while still structurally a quadruped, would be possible but expensive of energy. However the reduction in energy expenditure required to maintain security would compensate for this. Within the thicket advantages of speed, power and surprise possessed by predators and competitors would be largely nullified. As her infant would be self-attaching she would be only intermittently one armed, and could still feed herself in such a state. By standing up the invader of this niche would have been able to feed not only on the abundant fruit, buds, flowers and numerous invertebrates of the thicket ?canopy? but also on the many small reptiles and mammals exploiting these resources. An adequate, sometimes rich diet would be available the year round, and where quadrupedal speed and dorsal infant carriage had become redundant the female could commit to an upright stance. The thicket niche offers a rational starting point for many significant evolutionary trajectories.

i) New strategies for coping with danger would have been concealment and avoidance entailing an enhanced capacity for silence, stealth, and immobility, which would be equally valuable to a predator of small creatures. The infant and juvenile of this ape would have had to develop the ability to cooperate in these strategies.

ii) Enhanced voluntary control over vocalisation. The adoption of an upright stance, by disconnecting the forelimbs from locomotion and so breaking the connection between locomotion and respiration, allowed the thicket ape to develop the necessary breath control (in Langdon, 1997).

iii) A more discriminating sense of hearing, able to distinguish the sounds made by possible dangers entering the thicket at a distance, the sounds of the listener's own group members and perhaps the faint sounds of possible prey.

iv) Earlier weaning and shorter inter-birth intervals. The pressure on a mother ape standing to feed in the security of a thicket would be to put her infant on the ground earlier than developmentally allowable (for comparison see Goodall, 1986). Hemmed in by vegetation that blocked access to possible playmates the infant would begin investigating and then feeding on fallen fruit and other edibles in the deep leaf litter. Continually alert and poised to climb up onto its (hairy) mother if danger threatened, it is the infant/juvenile that I suggest began to evolve into the squatting ground-forager that Kingdon (2003) postulates; its mother would be likely to suppress any attempts to stand up and become a proximate rival consumer of small prey. To obtain higher level resources a juvenile would have to tolerate separation and probably loss of visual contact with its mother.

v) Increasing infant/juvenile autonomy and self-reliance would be the result. By standing up and becoming a part-time predator the female thicket ape had become, in her infant's experience, a sometimes rejecting , sometimes exciting object. Deprived of body-contact communication the older infant would need to become very alert to signals from its mother and the wider EEA it now shared. Acute perceptiveness (often unconscious) of environmental signals, together with exaggerated, even compulsive, autonomy and self-reliance, are some of the defining characteristics of the clinically observed schizoid condition (Guntrip, 1968).

b) Stage Two - The Aquatic Ape

The aquatic ape hypothesis (Morgan, 1972) which places a significant period of human evolution in an estuarine and littoral habitat offers solutions to a number of questions but for the argumentation of this paper its value lies in providing a pressure point to initiate the development of the anti-libidinal capability. It seems reasonable to postulate that some thicket apes, well adapted to hiding in dense vegetation, when circumstances forced them out of, or denied them, this security, should then move to hiding in, and under, water. A predator in pursuit would be likely to follow such an ape into the water, but a head appearing briefly a few metres away from where the prey had disappeared from view would be unlikely to attract its attention. Heads above the water would not be recognised as prey from the shore or bank. The ape was already equipped with better sight than predators and non-primate competitors (Kingdon: 2003); some further brain expansion would be inevitable to cope with the complexities of an active life moving between two mediums.

The problem for the aquatic infant was to avoid drowning. Its mother was pre-adapted with good breath control and when fleeing would have the incentive of fear to overcome the breathing impulse. Clasped against her body as she went under, only the infant that could match her behaviour and stop breathing when she stopped, would live. In the water identification with mother became a survival imperative. Not only the need to breathe but the impulse to vocalise fear and distress would have to be blocked. Perhaps the latter ability had begun to develop in the thickets but I suggest that the anti-libidinal capability to oppose survival needs to the point of death began to evolve under the pressure of an aquatic environment. Freud (1920), with his theory of a death instinct in humans was the first to recognise the neurotic manifestations of this human universal. Today, some infants, fighting for autonomy, terrify their mothers by holding their breath until they go blue in the face. The reaction of modern adults to a sudden and indeterminate danger is to freeze and hold the breath, even mild excitement or tension is likely to result in an automatic and unconscious pause in respiration.

The aquatic ape mother must also have become more sensitive to the needs of her infant to avoid drowning it. I am postulating that she first took to the water fully clothed with hair so that her neonate would have been held clinging ventrally. Already adapted to protecting her infant from the drag of thorny vegetation I think she could have raised it to her shoulder so that when she swam (dog-paddle) it would travel holding on in the position today's mothers use to wind their babies. Hair loss being advantageous for aquatic living, in due course the neonate in this position would be clinging to the now somewhat longer hair remaining on her head. When she dived under it might slip to lie between her breasts. An older infant could be towed half submerged on her back and be pulled under with her when she went down; when she climbed out of the water it, still clinging to her hair, would be partly supported on her bent back. Today both sexes carry burdens in this manner and in many cultures women attach the load by means of a strap across the forehead so that the head and neck do much of the work.

Foraging one-handed carrying a precocial neonate in shallow water would be possible. Older infants could self-manage dog-paddling and hair-grabbing (Morgan, 1972). Shell fish and other prey, could be tossed on a heap on the shore to be consumed, using pebbles as extraction tools, by the sitting female with her infant securely held in her lap. The infant/juvenile, adapted in the thicket to foraging at an earlier age, could find the new type of edible but probably not manage the extraction. Identifying with its mother's behaviour of gathering up, a type of team feeding could evolve in which juveniles brought food to their mother who extracted and shared it along with what she had acquired. A juvenile could probably collect considerably more than it needed and would make a net contribution to the energy equation of mother and neonate. Social rules governing littoral foraging- territories might evolve, precursors to the home-base development.

It might even be that such efficient team foraging eventually rendered its limited littoral habitat so denuded of the easily accessible that the now firmly bonded matriarchal family unit of the  BOOKMARK  aquatic ape was forced inland.

c) Stage Three - The Savannah Biped

From whatever cause, early Homo became a dweller on the open savannah, a patchwork environment with scattered watercourses, trees, thickets, rocky outcrops, etc. Foraging would entail greater risk and require wider travel. Concealment, stealth and avoidance could remain the principal safety strategies in such a setting but would result in pressure to continually expand the range of edibles exploited, as the new habitat was well stocked with competitors and predators. In this setting I suggest there evolved the true mutuality between mother and infant that psychoanalysts observe today.

i) Mutual Self-Interest in the Dyad

Goodall (1990) describes the difficulties of a chimpanzee mother whose twins could not learn to cling only to her and not to each other and as a result fell off so frequently that they resisted with screams their mother's departure from the nest each morning. She lost weight steadily until the twins died. The mother's problem was rooted in the mental inadequacy of her infants; they learnt the wrong lesson. In contrast the human infant, labelled secondarily altricial, has been discovered to have an inherent drive and aptitude for complex learning by those researching early mental development (Gopnik et al, 1999), indicating that enhanced brain capacity was a necessity for the early Homo infant if it was to survive its first, most vulnerable, year of life.

Returning to the basic issue of feeding, the simple mechanism put forward in section 4, that the infant would enact the mother's behaviour and refrain from suckling, or attempting to suckle when the mother's foraging was unsuccessful, requires a means of adjustment to allow for the infant?s need for water. This exists, I suggest, in the burst-pause sucking pattern that is normal for babies at the breast but does not manifest during bottle feeding (Brazelton and Cramer, 1991). A pause in sucking regularly evokes in today's mothers a response designed to encourage the baby to continue feeding and so leads to social interaction and bonding. I suggest that this regular pattern of a few sucks and a pause evolved in the Pleistocene to allow the mother- infant dyad to mutually regulate feeding according to circumstance. Each pause by the infant allowed the mother the opportunity to remove it from the nipple without any stress-inducing shock or struggle. The anti-libidinal capability enabled even a starving infant to maintain the pattern and so conserve the energy of the dyad.

Another example of mutual regulation is provided by the still face studies carried out by

E. Tronick and Colleagues (1978). These are relevant to consideration of the co-operation required of the infant in enacting survival strategies. In these experiments each mother returned to her baby, with whom she had been previously engaged in play, and presented a still, unresponsive face. The infant, after first attempting to re-engage its parent, invariably began a process of withdrawal, broken by repeated glances at its mother's face, ending up curled over into a foetal position usually sucking a finger; the babies did not vocalise. The response is recognisable as a retreat into the condition of Guntrip's regressed ego and similar behaviour is found in adult patients suffering severe depression, etc. On the savannah the bipedal mother, alert to a sudden danger, needed an infant that could curl silently into her body and comfort itself while she took evasive action. In both these examples the infant can be seen offering a copy of the mother's behaviour, - not-feeding, withdrawing, - and being guided by the mother's reaction on whether or not to continue in that mode.

A third example of mutuality can be provisionally identified from published experiments that utilise the baby's ability to suck (Siqueland and Delucia, 1969). Given a pacifier fitted up electronically and connected to an operable instrument such as a slide projector or tape recorder an infant soon learns that it can change the picture or sound by adjusting its rate of sucking. This facility was used by researchers to ascertain, for example, whether babies prefer the human voice above other sounds (Friedlander, 1970). If the facility itself is referred back to the Pleistocene however it suggests an infant able to exercise significant influence over its mother's mental, and therefore physical, condition. By regulating its sucking it could probably alter its mother's facial expression from stressed to contentment, reflecting an improvement in her internal state.

To clarify this point I will advert to the issue of pleasure. This was defined by Freud (1911) in his early theorising as a reduction of instinctual tension. He proposed that the infant psyche was actuated by the pleasure principal, the need to avoid the unpleasure of high instinctual tension: hunger, high tension, leads to feeding, reducing tension to minimum when the stomach is full. In evolutionary terms pleasure is a means of ensuring that the organism does what is necessary to preserve and replicate its genes. Since the Homo neonate was dependent on the mother exerting physical effort to hold it to the nipple it was of survival advantage that the pleasure factor for the female should increase. Primate females expend time and care grooming their infants and the early Homo mother must have used her tongue and mouth frequently in tending her hairless neonate, which may have initiated responsive behaviours subsequently tracked genetically. I am suggesting that the mutual engagement in tension relieving activity by the dyad following stressful activity or events enhanced its survival potential. The enlarging brain of the Homo infant was able to work for homeostasis in the larger unit.

ii) The Dyad and Family

To adequately review the first year of life the circumstance of the neonate's position in the family must be examined. An observed supermarket scenario of a toddler in the child-seat of a trolley clasping a large item to her chest as commanded, and continuing to gaze all around with lively interest while her mother dealt with other purchases demonstrated how, by clasping its sibling in just such a manner, put into its arms because too young to be put on the ground, the Pleistocene juvenile could have rendered its mother able-bodied for the few minutes necessary to unearth a large tuber. A simple vocalisation could have alerted the female to an observed movement and if it proved a threat the two could have been lifted (away from a scorpion perhaps) as one. The automatic assistance rendered by very small children to mothers is often overlooked: !Kung children are said not to contribute to the family economy (Draper, 1997) but even playing with the baby will benefit the mother's energy equation, as Goodall (1990) noted with chimpanzees. I am proposing that early Homo juveniles could have enacted the impressed maternal behaviours, in so far as they were physically capable, at an earlier age.

At age one year a baby knows to look where a finger is pointing and not at the finger (Gopnik, Meltzoff and Kuhl, 1999). From this it can be deduced that it was advantageous to the ancestral dyad that this facility should exist by the time the infant was able to move effectively away from, and back to, its mother. One class of problem brought to psychotherapists is that caused by the tendency of human mothers to regard, and treat, their children as extensions of themselves. A mobile, energetic and intelligent self-extension would counteract the disabling effects on an early Homo female of carrying her infant. To be completely useful it would need to be capable of operating out of visual contact, but as previously suggested the ability to tolerate visual separation at an early age might have evolved in the thicket niche. An H. sapiens child aged three, in contrast to chimpanzee juveniles, is psychologically ready to spend several hours apart from its mother (Bowlby, 1973). The autonomous juvenile which on the shore had acquired the habit of bringing food to its mother for extraction was, on the savannah, in a situation where much food was beyond its strength to acquire and, or, very tough to ingest. It seems likely that the female, who had evolved a greater sensitivity to her offspring, should move from cracking open shell fish to cutting up, pounding and mashing tough foods for her juvenile and so for her infant, again advancing the weaning process. No doubt this food preparation also aided her own ability to make use of more difficult edibles because food preparation by females has become a human trait in all habitats and a major factor in broadening the range of items utilised (Bunn, 2003).

These developments, I suggest, led on to one that has been regarded by many (Morris, 1967; Lovejoy, 1981) as pair-bonding, but is in reality a female strategy of acquiring an ?eldest child? prior to first parturition. At puberty females and males would seek sexual partners. Habituated to a close bond, team foraging and to food processing and sharing by females, a pair would naturally fall into these impressed behaviour patterns. In due course the male with sexual access would be willing to hold and play with the resultant infant (as he had as a juvenile) while the female dug for food. Females as well as males have the urge for dominance and control and it seems probable that older males might gravitate towards young unencumbered more controllable females and that older matriarchs supported by one or  BOOKMARK  two juveniles might prefer to grant temporary sexual access to less dominant pubertal males. These patterns, and many others, can be observed in modern human societies. Demographic factors would be a major influence for early Homo. This model does not entail long distance travel and transport of food. Male and female, like a mother and juvenile son, would travel together to a source area and the male might gather in only a slightly larger circle than juveniles around the more sedentary dyad. There is evidence for this hypothesis in the results of the survey into mate preferences conducted by Buss (1989): the four traits ranked most desirable in a mate by both genders were those of the Ideal Mother. Further down the scale the results suggest that males tend more towards a partner embodying that aspect of mother that Fairbairn called the exciting object: ?good looks? and ?good cook? suggest the mother looking at and tending to her infant. Traits of the rejecting object, the mother looking outwards from the dyad to forage for and protect her infant, subsumed in the survey under the labels ?ambitious?, ?industrious?, ?good financial prospects?, were given higher ratings by women. This accords with my findings from my clinical practice which led me to the conclusion that everyone, male or female, attaches to a partner who accurately reflects a projection of a required aspect of mother. The evolutionary advantage to the bipedal ape of being attracted towards a mate resembling its mother, whom its own adult existence proves to have been a successful parent, is clear. All the above refers to the mother as experienced in the first year of life.

iii) The Dyad and Danger

Security would have been a major issue in the life of the dyad. The thicket niche and its new defensive strategies would have worked against the use of noisy violent behaviours such as status displays, fights over females, and weaning tantrums. As with Bonobos (de Waal, 1995) the prolongations of female sexual availability was probably an aggression-avoidance strategy. A male in attendance would protect the dyad only from harassment by con-specifics.

The savannah was home to many stronger competitors and the disadvantaged Homo female must have become essentially a scavenger. This term is normally applied to carnivores but I apply it to subsisting on what was left when more powerful consumers had moved on, or on what did not attract them. The early Homo team-foraging family unit could have eaten unripe fruit or found fallen fruit under a tree stripped by baboons,and even a few still hanging to be thrown down by an energetic juvenile put up into the branches. It might have been advantageous to dig deeper where pigs had already turned over the surface, or where a tree had been uprooted by elephants. The open savannah would have been a dangerous place for food processing and family feeding, ensuring a constant tension of insecurity. However, the infant that was able to suppress its hunger when necessary would have grown up into an adult with an inherent block operating on the initial impulse to eat which would have allowed a low-level anxiety to activate a move to a safer location: behaviour that gave the appearance of forethought, in time, through the evolutionary process, became what it seemed. A female could have held several tubers by their roots in one hand and still carried an infant with one arm, and supported a juvenile on her back as modern mothers do when necessary, though today?s toddlers grab at the head, cut and shampooed hair being unserviceable for attachment (Fox, 2003).

iv) The Dyad and Fire

The family units under consideration, for whom speedy flight would be impossible, would have had to be alert to the danger of fast moving fires in the dry season. A tendency surviving from the aquatic phase, to make for water, would have been advantageous. Coming up for air, they would have observed the flames chasing rivals and predators away from them. Fire would leave much desirable dead meat in its wake but once all had cooled, and smoke and the fear-engendering smell had dissipated, there would be more powerful scavengers at work and no concealing cover. However, the ape with the anti-libidinal capability that, as an infant, had blocked the pain of hunger, and that now blocked the strongest initial impulse, the fear-induced or pain-induced flight impulse, would be moved by hunger to scavenge in the safety zone close behind the fire and to try again at a smouldering carcass. The encumbered female could have benefited from the many smaller fatalities without having to compete with males at the larger ones and flash-roasted and therefore more edible vegetable matter might also have been available.

Wild fire is still today a cause of death and injury. The domestication of fire must have entailed frequent major trauma, the type of experience from which modern humans, even trained fire fighters, do not always, psychologically, recover. I suggest that early Homo, having moved onto the savannah, began a process of evolving its anti-libidinal capacity to a high degree of effectiveness through an ever closer association with fire: it became a fire seeker. The mechanism of impressed behaviour patterns would have allowed experiences of dangers (hot spots, buried fires) left behind the advancing flames, and their associated betraying signs, to be passed on within a group without benefit of language and across years when no fire was encountered. In support of this statement I can submit the evidence gathered by therapists treating the children of holocaust survivors. Parents pass on the trauma, of which they never speak, by such unconscious actions as freezing motionless, white-faced, at the sight of a policeman, or cutting off a daughter's long hair at exactly the age at which their own head was shaved by prison-camp guards (Kaplan, 1995). In the Pleistocene later experiences as a juvenile would have built unambiguously on the templates of the impressions embedded in the infant psyche during its first year as part of the dyad. They would not have led to the pathological distortions produced today by disfunctional early mothering in the midst of plenty.

Like the earlier moves into the thickets and into the semi-aquatic life, exploitation of the fire niche would have had several important consequences.

Fires would cross and obliterate territorial boundaries. Groups would tend to meet and mingle as they followed. The short term abundance of high value food would work against aggressive encounters. From the daily situation of groups operating the fission-fusion life-style shown by chimpanzees (Goodall, 1986) would arise the longer term irregular cycle of the larger 'tribe?, fusing behind fire, and breaking up again onto smaller territories when the rains came.

The process of language evolution would be stimulated. Its beginnings probably lay in the attachment needs of the infant/juvenile supplanted by a younger sibling while still developmentally dependent, and in a less benign environment. The three/four year old had to be able to attract help from its mother without endangering her (or, therefore, the neonate), or itself, by loud screams. A quiet vocalisation given force by meaning would be a viable solution: 'help snake' would lead to better outcomes than a simple 'help'. Language in Homo sapiens is fully usable exactly by the time the toddler needs it to counter the more compelling demands of the new baby. Even today mothers and babies tend to develop their own 'words' which of course are soon overtaken by language proper. Scavenging close in the wake of a savannah fire 'Help hot!', 'Help hurt' and 'Help heavy' might eventually emerge. The meaning sounds of the more dominant animals, already current in several related family units, would be likely to spread eventually through the 'tribe'. It will be seen that I am not referring to complex grammatical language but to the development of proto language (G?rdenfors, 2003) an expanding repertoire of meaningful sounds easily to be distinguished by the discriminating sense of hearing first developed in the thicket niche, and likely to be tracked genetically as potential not as content.

The facts of the preservative effects of smoking and drying on meat would be likely to have become impressed upon the psyches of the fire niche scavengers.

As a gradual process over time older females well experienced in feeding their family and transporting food and offspring, under the incentives of failing strength and the need for security would find themselves increasingly responding to the ?infantile? signals of small fires (vocalising, feeding/messing, biting, wriggling, weakening, etc). by adapting their impressed behaviour patterns to the feeding and transporting of fire. Older males, losing status and dominance, with the same behaviours impressed on their psyches by juvenile experience and observation, could similarly acquire fire-management skills. Adults who, as juveniles, brought food to mother for processing, sharing, and security, would readily fall into the same behaviour pattern, bringing food to share with the older group member in exchange for the security of the fire they managed.

Since the starting, or creating, of fire for the first time would have ranked in the Pleistocene rather above the creation of life in the laboratory today it is probable that H. erectus moved into Asia supported only by domesticated fire, understood, that is responded to, as a living creature, not as a tool as Kingdon (2003) suggests. It is conceivable that the knowledge of how to start a fire from  BOOKMARK  scratch was one of the advances that enabled modern humans to survive while Neanderthals could not. (Cultural indicators such as the Olympic Flame suggest that the significance of transporting and maintaining fire has been more deeply embedded in the human psyche than the technical business of starting one). Such an extended time lapse between domestication and technical mastery would have allowed space for the evolution of the prolonged non-fertile post-menopausal female life stage. Infertility would be a positive advantage to an older female (but not to a male) ensuring her own survival and that of her last offspring by tending a fire ?infant?, and by association with older progeny protecting her genes into the third and fourth generation. Mutuality would be preserved in the new Dyad and it is a common finding for psychotherapists today that some mothers turn, unconsciously, to their infants for support and protection.

9. DISCUSSION

This portrait of early Homo differs from the established one. The new axiom works against the tendency to project modern humanity too far into the past onto apes whose only claim to it is their upright stance. An example is the suggestion that culture was an important evolutionary factor for early hominids (Kingdon, 2003). Human nature and culture, I suggest, interactively developed through the evolutionary process of domesticating fire. Similarly, it has been suggested that early bipeds dealt with predators and rival omnivores by mob action and intimidating displays (ibid). The survival strategies proposed here - concealment, silence, immobility, stealth - like quadrupedal locomotion, climbing, swimming and diving - are all still spontaneous and also culturally elaborated human behaviours worldwide (e.g. Marshall Thomas, 1959: 47, 108, 157; McGrory, 2003). Rather than groups of H. sapiens chasing away dangerous animals one moderately dangerous animal - a large dog - can suffice to intimidate groups of (male) H. sapiens. Had a mobbing strategy developed in the Plio-pleistocene there would have been no pressure sufficient to have forced early Homo through the trauma of domesticing fire or into the practice of carrying food long distance, to a safe ?home base?. Fire provided the security essential for cultural advance.

This paper?s hypothesis covers three major, readily observable, abilities of Homo sapiens that manifest the anti-libidinal capability.

i) The ability to refrain from eating available food while starving, without which, for example, agriculture, dependent as it was upon the preservation of seed corn through hard times, could not have developed.

ii) The ability to move towards, and into, life-threatening danger. This must have been vital in the progression to hunting large animals and is still necessary for many essential occupations. This ability to overcome fear and the impulse of flight is a human universal expressed and elaborated in diverse cultural forms of no productive value, as in dangerous sports and rite of passage ordeals.

iii) The ability to engage voluntarily and effectively in activity that causes harm and pain.

This ability in its neurotic manifestation is seen in clients who self-harm: cutting, burning or otherwise damaging their own bodies. However, many freely chosen occupations and activities also entail pain. Dancers and sportspeople, for example, endure long painful training and in diverse cultures body-piercing and tattooing display the successful endurance of pain.

All that has been presented is readily susceptible to investigation by modern methods. Historical and cultural research, observation and analysis of attitudes and behaviour in regard to hunger, fear and pain could provide much evidence to support,or refute, the thesis.

For example, much statistical and other data on the response of the mother/infant dyad to hunger must of necessity be gathered by aid agencies and medical teams in the course of their work in famine stricken regions and could be subjected to analysis. A cursory reading of charity appeals reveals that the recipients of aid are often lone mother family units, and also often reveals something of the team work within such a unit (ITDG, 2004, Christian Aid, 2000, 2004). A recent radio interview (BBC Radio 4) engaged such a mother who, fleeing from war into the forests of the Congo, had endured a miscarriage (survival tactic?), buried her nine-year-old son and emerged months later with her other severely malnourished but living children. Interviews conducted for research purposes with fully recovered and re-established victims of war could still be conducted even in Europe with those who, as children, survived hunger post World War II. Experiments using brain imaging, etc. with volunteers willing to undergo medically supervised fasts, and incorporating variables such as motivators - small rewards to self, mother, partner, charity - could be devised to give information on the anti-libidinal not dependent on therapeutic technique. It might seem that response to danger is less susceptible to experimental work but the still face studies show the possibilities. The response of the infant/mother dyad to moderately alarming stimuli, loud noises off for example, could be monitored in a number of situations, such as the mother moving to crouch with her baby in a hiding place. In the 21st century volunteers could no doubt he found willing to take part with the upper body (and baby) unclothed to more accurately reflect the Pleistocene reality of body-contact communication. The brain?s response to fire, using as stimuli visual images, smell, sound and heat, might repay investigation. Laboratory experiments involving the infliction of pain on volunteers have already been conducted and ones appropriate for the investigation of my thesis would present no problem. Infant observation, a standard part of psychoanalytic training, could usefully be employed to investigate, for example, spontaneous support of mothers by infants and toddlers, and experimental situations in Mahler?s (1975) style could be devised.

For a complete review of the possibilities it is necessary to refer to pre-natal life on which much research is going forward. Psychotherapeutic data on the pre-natal and peri-natal psyche (e.g. Lake, 1981) indicating that splitting starts in the womb has been supported by such work as that of Piontelli (1992) who found that behaviour patterns acquired in the womb can persist until age four. Guntrip?s regressed ego may be in reality a pre-natal impressed behaviour pattern - curl up immobile in a small dark place and wait - a survival strategy often enacted by both juveniles and adults. Given that the enlarging brain is most problematic at parturition it would be reasonable to adapt some of the current observational and experimental research effort to discover whether the foetal brain works for homeostasis in the dual unity.

The proposition that human juveniles have an inherent disposition to provide effective support to their mothers from birth is relevant to a subject of much current research: the apparently extended period of human juvenile dependence. My clinical experience supports the view that a child?s degree of independence is principally a product of parenting behaviours, through which are mediated the influences of culture and circumstance. It is a long speculative step to suggest that the management of the fire ?infant?, which could not be permitted either to die or to grow up, influenced the development of the globally pervasive cultural (and neurotic) parental controls and manipulations of children and grandchildren observable today. However an experiment conducted by Blurton Jones and Marlowe (2002) is (unintentionally) relevant. Designed to test the significance of a juvenile learning period for success in the (male) task of climbing baobab trees to collect honey, the adult participants in the experiment, (constructed so as to eliminate hazard), prohibited the involvement of the children who volunteered on the grounds of risk. This was accepted and the experiment intended to supply information on juveniles was carried out by adults only. An investigation of the prohibition might have yielded valuable information. The photograph of a thirteen-year-old Guatemalan prostitute, independently supporting herself and her baby (Downing, 2003) together with regular media reports on street children, child labour and child soldiers, suggest other avenues of research.

I will employ one further speculation to illuminate my principal argument. At some point in time, (perhaps as early as 100,000 - 200,000 years ago when the species was reduced to 5,000 or fewer breeding females (Boyd and Silk, 1999)) it became advantageous for the necessary link between copulation and parturition to be perceived. This could have led on to the imaginal idea of giving birth to fire by friction; the penis imaged as stick. Magical thinking is an ineradicable feature of the psyche which indicates that it must once have constituted an important advance in adaptive cognition. Primary process thinking, fantasy, dreams and images are the matter of psychotherapy. Condensation, displacement, identification, projection and symbolisation are the operations of Pleistocene cognition in the imaginal language that still underpins conscious verbal thought (Person, 1997). Research into this language led to hypothesis 1(b). Much information about this language arising from the workings of humanistic psychotherapies is being lost because unrecognised. Bowlby proved  BOOKMARK  that what psychoanalysis called pathological dependence is in reality genetically inherent attachment behaviour; I have concluded that some analytic defence mechanisms are the evolved intra-psychic survival mechanisms of the Homo infant, which became in due course mentally super-precocial and only later culturally altricial. In many stressful situations adults and children are stripped of cultural supports and constraints and manifest Pleistocene cognitive and survival behaviour. However the use of a vocabulary formed to deal with the modern pathologies of, for example, child abuse victims in dysfunctional families, is limiting. Further research as suggested could develop one more appropriate to the Pleistocene psyche still there to be studied beneath the recent additions of grammar and intellect.

The hypotheses and arguments put forward do not necessarily oppose or refute others that are currently in use. The new axiom on which they are based takes the issue back to neglected origins and causal factors while ensuring that no developmental stage of human life is ignored in the process. To illustrate, aimed throwing has been investigated (G?rdenfors, 2003; New Scientist, 2000) and linked to hunting by males. The just-so story above offers a process: throwing food items onto the shore by semi-aquatic mother ? throwing food items towards the mother by the juvenile ? directive pointing at food items by the mother ? interogative pointing by the juvenile ? throwing and catching of food items by (playful) team foraging juveniles ? throwing and catching of food (and other?) items by adults as capuchin monkeys do (in G?rdenfors, 2003) ? pre-existing skill then facilitates development of throwing-weapons for hunting ? future research, throwing and catching in cultures worldwide. Again, Hypothesis 1b provides a causal origin for a humane altruism arising from anti-libidinal self-sacrifice and (instinctive) parental behavioural responses to signals of needy ?juvenile? behaviour irrespective of age. It also suggests a causal factor for the evolution of reason. The bipedal ape which approached fire because the anti-libidinal blocking of overriding fear allowed the impulse of hunger to prevail would have experienced intense stress. Today some clients come to therapy because of the distress caused by their own incomprehensible actions. Others relieve the anxiety by devising post-facto explanations: the defence labelled rationalisation (Rycroft, 1972) by analysts (see also de Waal, 1996: 209/10). The Pleistocene biped moving towards fire who could match its behaviour to a relevant memory or a detached representation of a future possibility would reduce its stress level. Reason, as causal to action, was a subsequent development, arising in the gap opened up between internal need and external action by the anti-libidinal capability. In all the above I have only introduced the intra-psychic possibilities. Many issues, for example the relationship between the anti-libidinal capability and anxious and avoidant attachment (Bowlby, 1969, 1973) or the projection of rejecting and exciting objects onto aspects of wild fire, await further work.

The discovery of H. floresiensis (Knight and Nowak, 2004) adds a topical piece of data in support of the new axiom. If mentally precocial infants and juveniles played a major role in the success of the genus Homo, and if this was a consequence of a new evolved capability in the psyche not dependent on brain size, then to forego the energy-expensive growth to larger adult size can be seen as a simple, unsurprising evolutionary move for an island-bound offshoot of H. erectus.

The new axiom, resulting hypotheses, and the psychological theory in this paper are founded on a century of published observation and interpretation. The just-so story constructed from and around them serves the purpose of pointing to new and productive avenues of research, and to valuable data that is fast disappearing.

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