The editorial by Abed (Reference Abed2000) and the subsequent correspondence cause me considerable concern as someone interested in the history and philosophy of the science. The suggestion that evolutionary psychology and psychiatry has been created over the past 20 years is surprising.

I would suggest that its origins are far more venerable and lie in the work of Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919), sometime Professor of Zoology at the University of Jena, who dominated the discussion of evolutionary theory in German-speaking Europe in the 19th century and who, indeed, published his theory of human evolution in 1868 (see Reference HaeckelHaeckel, 1879), 3 years prior to Darwin's The Descent of Man (Reference Darwin1871). He is now perhaps best remembered for his ‘biogenetic law’ (i.e. that ontology recapitulates phylogeny). For human beings this means that the stages of human development replicate, in sequence, the stages of the development of the human race. In addition to biological recapitulation, Haeckel considered that the mind had also evolved and that one of the tasks of psychology was to trace this evolution.

The task was initially taken up by Freud (Reference Freud and Strachey1950) and by Jung (Reference Jung1953), who started to compile historical evidence for his hypothesis of the collective unconscious in 1909. Indeed, throughout the Collected Works it is clear that Jung considered that ontogenesis in psychology corresponded to phylogenesis and that infantile thinking, as well as dreams, were “a re-echo of the prehistoric and the ancient”.