This essay synthesizes the place of biological evolutionism in the early history of psychoanalysis, and shows the implicit significance of German Darwinism in Sigmund Freud’s whole psychoanalytical works. In particular, Freud, together with Sándor Ferenczi (1873–1933), applied to mental disorders hypotheses inspired by August Pauly’s (1850–1914) psychological Lamarckism and Ernst Heckel (1834–1919) theory of recapitulation. Both of these theories rested upon the principle of inheritance of acquired characteristics, and were disproved by biological discoveries during the interwar period. However, despite these scientific progresses, Freud never gave up his idea of inherited unconscious memories, and we try here to sketch out what would have cost him a renunciation to such outdated biological principles. Notwithstanding, Sigmund Freud was the first to elaborate on evolutionary causes of mental syndromes, which makes of him the forerunner of current neo-Darwinian psychopathology, with few continuators to date within the psychoanalytic field. Nowadays, the extended neo-Darwinian synthesis and affective neuroscience may pave the way for a rational Darwinian approach to human mental disorders, which would take into account the whole neurological and psychological evolution of species, and be centered on emotions and their vicissitudes.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is characterized by atypical perception, including processing that is biased toward local details rather than global configurations. This bias may impact on memory. The present study examined the effect of this perception on both implicit (Experiment 1) and explicit (Experiment 2) memory in conditions that promote either local or global processing. The first experiment consisted of an object identification priming task using two distinct encoding conditions: one favoring local processing (Local condition) and the other favoring global processing (Global condition) of drawings. The second experiment focused on episodic (explicit) memory with two different cartoon recognition tasks that favored either local (i.e., processing specific details) or a global processing (i.e., processing each cartoon as a whole). In addition, all the participants underwent a general clinical cognitive assessment aimed at documenting their cognitive profile and enabling correlational analyses with experimental memory tasks. Seventeen participants with ASD and 17 typically developing (TD) controls aged from 10 to 16 years participated to the first experiment and 13 ASD matched with 13 TD participants were included for the second experiment. Experiment 1 confirmed the preservation of priming effects in ASD but, unlike the Comparison group, the ASD group did not increase his performance as controls after a globally oriented processing. Experiment 2 revealed that local processing led to difficulties in discriminating lures from targets in a recognition task when both lures and targets shared common details. The correlation analysis revealed that these difficulties were associated with processing speed and inhibition. These preliminary results suggest that natural perceptual processes oriented toward local information in ASD may impact upon their implicit memory by preventing globally oriented processing in time-limited conditions and induce confusion between explicit memories that share common details.

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Congrès Franç ais de Psychiatrie / European Psychiatry 29 (2014) 541-562 559 buted to current nosologies, more specifically to the DSM. One of these problems is the lack of a clear and consensual definition of mental disorder; I will then examine specific attempts to spell out such a definition that use the evolutionary framework. One definition that deserves particular attention (for a number of reasons that I will mention later), is one put forward by Jerome Wakefield. Despite my sympathy for his position, I must indicate a few reasons why I think his attempt might not be able to resolve the problems related to current nosologies. I suggest that it might be wiser for an evolutionary psychiatrist to adopt the more integrative framework of "treatable conditions". As it is thought that an evolutionary approach can contribute to transforming the way we look at mental disorders, I will provide a brief sketch of the basic tenets of evolutionary psychology. The picture of the architecture of the human mind that emerges from evolutionary psychology is thought by some to be the crucial backdrop to identifying specific mental disorders and distinguishing them from normal conditions. I will also provide two examples of how evolutionary thinking is supposed to change our thinking about some disorders. Using the case of depression, I will then show what kind of problems evolutionary explanations of particular psychopathologies encounter. In conclusion, I will evaluate where evolutionary thinking leaves us in regard to what I identify as the main problems of our current nosologies. I'll then argue that the prospects of evolutionary psychiatry are not good.Les émotions, objet d'étude neuroscientifique relativement récent encore, ne sont plus considérées aujourd'hui comme des perturbations, du « bruit de fond » brouillant le signal de la raison, mais comme une composante cruciale de la vie psychique [1]. Le modèle des neurosciences affectives élaboré par Jaak Panksepp s'appuie sur une approche pluridisciplinaire et fait la part belle à la phylogenèse des émotions, tout en critiquant l'approche selon lui biologiquement réductrice de la psychologie évolutionniste [2]. D'après le modèle de Panksepp, nous avons hérité de lointains ancêtres nos systèmes émotionnels de base, et partageons ce « trésor archéologique » avec de nombreux mammifères, dont nos plus proches cousins les grands singes [3]. Le modèle des neurosciences affectives propose une vision étagée de la vie émotionnelle et motivationnelle, les émotions de base ayant leurs substratums dans des structures et circuits cérébraux profonds et phylogénétiquement anciens, et les processus sémantiquement et épisodiquement élaborés et contrôlés faisant appel au néocortex. Ce modèle intéresse à plusieurs titres la psychiatrie, nombre de troubles mentaux pouvant être décrits en termes de perturbation émotionnelle. Tout d'abord, les troubles psychiatriques peuvent être analysés en tant que dysfonctionnements d'un ou plusieurs des systèmes de commande des émotions de base, ces endoph...