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  • The Stones That the Builders RejectedThe Scapegoat Mechanism and Evolutionary Psychiatry
  • D. Vincent Riordan (bio)

introduction

Mental illness is difficult to reconcile with the Darwinian theory of natural selection. Major psychiatric conditions, such as psychosis and suicidality, often occur in young adults and impair reproductive potential, yet they also appear to be genetically mediated.1 The challenge for evolutionary psychiatry has been to explain not only how such seemingly disadvantageous genes have evaded natural selection, but also how the widespread vulnerability to such conditions ever became established in the human genome in the first place.2

In Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World,3 Girard, with psychiatrist coauthors Oughourlian and Lefort, advanced an account of human evolution in which the scapegoat mechanism plays a central role. Later in the same book they introduced the concept of interdividual psychology to describe how mimetic desire might shape the human psyche. Oughourlian has since expanded on this and has applied interdividual psychology to various mental disorders.4 Although this approach offers a plausible account of, amongst other things, the [End Page 59] dynamics of psychosis, it is nevertheless an account of what evolutionist theory might call proximate causes, as distinct from ultimate or evolutionary causes.5 As far as interdividual psychology addresses the question of an evolutionary, or ultimate, explanation for psychosis, it is by linking it to mimetic desire, with the implication that psychosis is an unfortunate by-product of mimesis.

This essay describes a different approach to the application of mimetic theory to psychiatry, one which explicitly addresses the evolutionary origins of psychosis and suicidality. It expands on a recently published hypothesis, the Archetypal Scapegoat Hypothesis,6 on the evolutionary origins of schizophrenia (psychosis), which applies to evolutionary psychiatry, Girard's insight that scapegoating was adaptive in the premodern world.

Rather than focusing on the emergence of psychological traits in the general population, traits that might have been products of mimetic desire or would have facilitated scapegoating (i.e., crowd traits), it focuses instead on the psyche of the victims. It is proposed that specific victim traits emerged in a minority of individuals that made them more efficacious scapegoats. Such traits, it is suggested, would have functioned as a type of altruism, resulting in the community benefitting from a more efficacious scapegoat mechanism. Thus, psychosis, and suicidality, rather than being unfortunate by-products of hominization, would instead have been important functional adaptations that acted as catalysts, facilitating the emergence of the scapegoat mechanism, and thereby enabling our ancestors to cross the threshold of hominization.7 This essay discusses the potential implications of this hypothesis both for mimetic theory and for evolutionary psychiatry.

background

Mental Illness

The term "mental illness" can refer to a wide range of phenomena, but the focus of this essay is on psychosis and suicidality. This is not only because these are among the most severe of mental health conditions, with high morbidity and mortality, but also because unlike other conditions, such as anxiety disorders or some features of depression, there are few if any convincing analogues observable in the animal world. As far as we know, not even other great apes develop delusional beliefs, nor do they kill themselves. Such phenomena would seem to be uniquely human.

Furthermore, unlike conditions such as eating disorders or attention deficit disorders, psychosis and suicidality are evident across all races and cultures,8 [End Page 60] and seemingly throughout human history, albeit more so in some environments than in others.9 This combination, of being both specific and ubiquitous features of humanity, suggests that these phenomena originated during the process of hominization,10 emerging after the last common ancestor (with other apes) but before the geographical expansion of Homo Sapiens and the resultant separation of the races.11

This suggests that although animal models might help our understanding of some mental health conditions, and environmental or cultural models might explain some others, in order to understand psychosis and suicidality we need to focus on the process of hominization. If Girard's account of this process is correct, then the scapegoat mechanism might be expected to provide some insight into the origins of these uniquely human phenomena.

Psychosis

Psychosis...

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