Freud was an avowed Darwinian, but the relationship between his theory and evolutionary biology is still being debated. Similarly, psychoanalysis is a developmental psychology, yet its connections with direct observations of child behavior remain problematic. This chapter examines certain psychoanalytic assumptions regarding the environments of infants in the light of direct observations made in culturally diverse human populations. Its aim is to provide a more secure base for a psychoanalytic contribution to the understanding of early experience and development and their place in human adaptation.

In 1937 Heinz Hartmann presented to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society his attempt to ground psychoanalytic ego psychology in a set of sophisticated assumptions concerning the biology, psychology, and sociology of individual development. Published two years later in German and two decades later in English, Hartmann's Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation (1958) bridged many gaps between psychoanalysis and the biological and social sciences and influenced subsequent theory within psychoanalysis and to some extent outside it. One of its most influential concepts is “the average expectable environment of the child.” Hartmann did not specify what he meant by this nor did he state unequivocally whether it was supposed to be universal for all humans or variable across cultures. His strongest statement on the universal side was the following: