Introduction to Dr. Abrams’
New Book on Therapy

More than a century ago physicians formalized a new treatment consisting of reassurance, supportive sympathy, and interpreting the sources of anguish. This talking treatment had always been a part of medicine; it had to be since historically medicine had few other options. There were no antibiotics, no vaccines, limited analgesics, and surgery came with grave risks. Thus, the physician’s most effective treatment usually involved palliatives and kind words. This essential component of medical care evolved into a distinct treatment, a treatment for problems with emotions, thinking, and living. With the advent of talking as a medical treatment a new approach to psychological suffering took hold. This method, no longer solely a province of medicine is now called psychotherapy, is applied in literally hundreds of forms and variations. Some of these variations are predicated on the conjectures of one man who is followed, often zealously, with little variation from its advent in the late 19th century. As it progressed as means to help people with emotional suffering, it has become increasingly based on science, clinical research, and improvement. Psychotherapy and the science supporting it, is primarily a province in the realm of psychology, a professional disciple with many components. An unfortunate consequence of psychology’s many subfields is the common tendency for many to give only cursory attention to advancements in their sister disciplines. One such advancement that has been growing within psychology has been the integration of psychological and evolutionary science.

This new field is both logical and necessary. Indeed, since every aspect of our being is at least partially a product of eons of natural selection, it follows understanding natural selection is a requisite for those interested in the functions and dysfunctions of the psyche. Very few argue that complex organs such as the human eye, the heart, and the brain are the result of eons of descent with modification. Even the most complex parts of our anatomy developed as a result of eons of beneficial mutations. Of course, mutations, often referred to as birth defects, are typically deleterious, given vast amounts of time and in the right environmental setting will yield incremental advantages. If this advantage provides even a very small increase in the likelihood of reproduction it will tend to be passed along to offspring. And over thousands of millennia these mutations will combine, or interact, with other genetic changes to produce new organs, new brain functions, or entirely new species. In an extremely distilled form, this is essence of Darwin’s model of species change or what is commonly referred to as evolution – a term that Darwin himself did not use (ref). Evolution refers to an unfolding process, one with an implied direction or purpose. This is not the spirit of this unique process. Instead, it has no direction, no goal, and no purpose. It is a natural process of trial and error in which those attributes that endow the inheritors with even the slightest advantage in reproductive survival will be among the last left standing.

Over the last few decades evolutionary principles have been shown to provident convincing explanations for many psychological phenomena. Like all paradigm changes in science it has elicited contention and debate, some examples will be discussed later in this chapter. However, the growing body of evidence has left little doubt that this approach to has offered powerful new ways to understand human thinking and behavior. Unlike many earlier schools of thought in psychology, the work in evolutionary psychology has almost exclusively been limited to explanations as opposed to applications. Such explanations, have provided new insights into jealousy (e.g. Buss & Abrams, 2016), aggression (Buss), sexual orientation (Abrams), anxiety (Price; Brune), reproductive anatomy (Gallup), Love (Fisher), and even psychosis (Price).

This book will show that evolution is at least as important to clinical psychology as it is to the developmental, biological, and neurological branches of the science. The study of natural selection has revealed, that evolutionarily adapted traits are best understood when considered as products of the environment that man resided in when those traits evolved. Evolutionary psychologists refer to this ancestral setting as the environment of evolutionary adaptiveness (EEA). Importantly, this does not refer to specific time but any epoch that was sufficiently different from the present so as cognitive or behavioral traits that do not necessarily remain as optimal. That is, many of our psychological inclinations evolved to aid survival in settings very much different from the one in which we now reside. This will be shown to be an essential premise of evolutionary cognitive behavior therapy or Adaptive CBT. Specifically, clinicians, as well as theoreticians need to be aware that people now live in settings radically different from the ones in which their distant progenitors developed. As a result, many of our methods of dealing with problems, perceiving our environment, judging others or even assessing ourselves don’t match the current demands of our world. As a result, many psychological problems are that superficially appear to be disorders may actually be functional solutions mismatched with a new environment (Gluckman & Hanson, 2006).

Jealousy when classified as pathological can be an exemplar of a mismatch disorder. As I will discuss at length later in the book, one consumed with jealously will often be diagnosed with any number of psychological disorders. However, this person although classified as psychologically ill, may very well possess innate predispositions that served him quite beneficially during earlier epochs. During eras in which there was no paternity testing, few consequences for violent acts, or no social welfare programs for single mothers, jealousy could have been quite beneficial. The unquestioning man in a primeval epoch took the catastrophic risk of contributing resources and reproductive time to unrelated offspring if he had been cuckolded. Most anthropologists (Marlowe, 2000) agree that early hunter gathers contributed to the upbringing of his offspring. However, small this contribution may have been, those that provided it after being deceived by their mate did so at a significant cost to their genetic legacy. ** if a man had a high confidence in his paternity, and helped their offspring through early development they were far more likely to have their genes permeate future generations.

This premise will require that mental health professionals become conversant not only the demands of daily living, but the demands of living eons ago. They will need to understand the role the EEA had on today’s thinking and behaving. It may surprise many to learn that this term was coined by developmental and attachment theorist John Bowlby (1982, p. 58). Bowlby’s attachment theory, now a foundation of many psychoanalytic writers, is actually a biological theory. According to Bowlby the need for attachment as an evolutionary old instinct. An early evolutionary psychologist, he considered a knowledge of evolution as requisite to comprehending human nature. According to Bowlby, humans are endowed with a large number of instinctual behaviors and inclinations that can only be fully appreciated when considering the environment in which they evolved. This is s the environment of evolutionary adaptiveness. If Bowlby is correct, many behaviors and psychological disorders that are superficially inscrutable, are only so, because we view them solely with a contemporaneous perspective.