Why Relationships Exist: Evolutionary Foundations for Psychotherapy - Randolph Nesse

Professor Nesse is professor emeritus in the department of psychiatry and department of psychology at the University of Michigan. He is Former Founding Director of the Center for
Evolution and Medicine at ASU.
Randy helped establish one of the world’s first anxiety disorders clinics in Michigan and
conducted research there on neuroendocrine responses to fear.
He was the initial organizer and second president of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society,
and subsequently became president of the International Society for Evolution, Medicine & Public
Health. He is a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, a Fellow of the
Association for Psychological Sciences, and an elected Fellow of the AAAS. And importantly
from the point of view of this lecture, Randy is recognised as the father of the field of
Evolutionary Medicine.
Randy co-authored a landmark book in 1994 together with George Williams, Why We Get Sick:
The New Science of Darwinian Medicine, which inspired the whole field of Evolutionary Medicine
world-wide. He has also written extensively about the evolutionary origins of moral emotions,
strategies for establishing evolutionary biology as a basic science for medicine as well as on
numerous other areas concerning the application of evolutionary science to medicine and
psychiatry. In 2019 he published Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of
Evolutionary Psychiatry which should be required reading for anyone interested in an
evolutionary understanding of mental health and mental disorder.
The title of his lecture is: Why Relationships Exist: Evolutionary Foundations for
Psychotherapy

[@psicologamarcelacollado5863]

Thank you so much for posting this excellent presentation! Over the years I have been polishing an introduction for my new patients in order to create a more balanced relationship. I tell them my age, my marital status, my children, and my hobbies. Also, speak about my qualifications and the basis for my thought on human behavior. In essence, I tell them, "I will introduce myself because it is not fair that you will have to tell me your most difficult issues, without even knowing what my age is." I also explain involuntary behaviors on evolutionary terms and people find relief in hearing it, it explains a lot and helps them trust that it is not necessary to worry so much about it. Great conversation, I thought I was the only one that wondered about these things, including the power of sexual selection, which for me is obvious mostly because of the "selfish gene" conundrum.

[@T61APL89]

48:14 This is a great question, everything he covered is on face to face relationships not face to screen to google api to etc.. how our social and mental health will adapt to an ever growing artificial world is beyond me

[@paintingtracey]

Very interesting, thanks.

[@iansowden8049]

Very Stimulating.
However I noticed that the subject crept in of how treatment funded increasingly effects available treatments and even attempts to take the question of diagnosis out of clinicians to managers, commertial lobbying, and god forbid software and insurance companies. Sad

[@arnoldlg]

Finally thanks

[@arnoldlg]

How come there is so like discussing about the pecking order

[@walteralter1686]

Every human on the planet suffers from chronic, low intensity PTSD. We are traumatized from the womb onward by every frustration we have ever experienced. For a helpless infant, to be frustrated equals to threat of death and no way to escape ... threatened and helpless. The only strategy for the infant is to lose consciousness of the trauma by memory repression into subconscious darkness. That repressed shit is our Pavlovian psychological foundation. The daily traumas are all indexed in memory along with all aspects of the trauma's circumstance, i.e., the elements of the trauma scene become symbols which become triggers. Our socialization, then, is overlayed on a foundation of trauma lurking just beneath the surface waiting for a trigger to activate a fight or flight reflex response or a psychosomatic linked to a symbolic trauma element. Traumas of the same sort, with similar symbols, over time amplify themselves to the point that they can interfere with rational thought and create neuroses in a weak ego structure. Neuroses are inappropriate or magnified responses to situations that trigger danger reflexes or symbolically internalized/introjected instances of the first trauma of a particular type and can manifest as a psychosomatic symptom or failure of logical observation as in delusional thinking. In extreme cases this can result in debilitation or psychosis. This is the human condition and this is what the ruling class, globalist crypto-Nazi CIA wizards of doom harness when they control events and the perception of events via propaganda. Google "Edward Bernays" for the how of it

[@margrietoregan828]

big battles continuing about how to understand the origins of our huge
15:42
pro-social capacities george williams was right in the middle of this in 1993 he published an article
15:50
saying mother nature is a wicked witch he says it's undoubtedly true that many of the
15:56
ethical systems that are preached and sometimes practiced are thoroughly unselfish and genuinely altruistic this
16:03
means that the benign motivations that underlie them cannot have been directly favored by natural selection they must
16:09
have been produced indirectly by some sort of accident the sort of thing that happens routinely by an evolution on an
16:15
evolutionary time scale natural selection is immensely powerful but it's also abysmally stupid it's
16:22
utterly indifferent his deep thinking about the origins of sociality led george to a deeply deeply
16:30
cynical view contrasting though he was an extremely moral man