The analyst and psychiatrist Anthony Stevens, who has died aged 90 after suffering a stroke, was distinctive among followers of Carl Jung in looking to evolutionary theory for a basis for the idea of a collective unconscious and archetypes affecting development and behaviour in the individual psyche. Rather than extending the archetypal concept upwards towards a spiritual dimension and inwards into the realm of inner psychic life, Anthony traced it to its biological roots and outwards into the realm of social behaviour.
In his first book, Archetypes: A Natural History of the Self (1982), he compared the findings of behavioural biology with those of analytical psychology – the term that Jung used to distinguish his approach from the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud – in order to illuminate the ways in which the so-called archetypes of the collective unconscious might influence human development in fundamental areas.
The attachment bonds between parents and children first sparked his interest when, in 1966, as a newly qualified doctor, he was offered a research fellowship at the Metera Babies Centre in Athens, an institution that cared for orphaned infants. It was run by Spyros Doxiadis, who had taken to heart the theories of John Bowlby, pioneer of the now well-attested theory that attachment between babies and loving mother figures provides the basis of mental health.
Anthony’s research at the centre suggested that despite being routinely fed and cared for by a large number of nurses, the babies were only disposed to form close attachments to single or very small groups of women. When interviewed, the chosen attachment figures revealed that they had often had little to do with feeding the babies, and that it was play, physical contact and social interaction that had formed the mutual affectionate bond. In Anthony’s mind this disproved the then current belief that it was cupboard love, with attachment following from sufficient feeding, that fostered these bonds.
By this time, he had undergone a successful Jungian analysis with Irene Champernowne, an early analysand of both Jung and his disciple Marie Louise von Franz, in which he was introduced to the study of dreams as archetypal messages offering potential remedial possibilities. Matching his experience in analysis and his consequent reading of Jung with his findings at the Metera, he concluded that Jung’s archetypes amounted to determining blueprints of human behaviour, the mother archetype referring not so much to an innate symbolic image as to an inner dynamic latent in the individual’s development. It was from this point that he began to pursue the idea of a more humane science of human nature that embraced psychology, anthropology, ethology (the study of animal behaviour in natural environments), psychoanalysis, psychiatry and medicine within the ambit of evolutionary theory.
As a jobbing psychiatrist at the Horton hospital, Epsom, Surrey, in the later 1960s under the forensic psychiatrist Henry Rollin, Anthony began to consider whether the accepted psychiatric symptoms might also have some evolutionary biological source. A series of conversations with the psychiatrist John Price eventually led to their co-authored book Evolutionary Psychiatry: A New Beginning (1996), in which they argued that psychiatric symptoms are not signs of disease, but rather ancient adaptive strategies with which humankind has been equipped through natural selection.
These responses become troublesome when exaggerated in contemporary life far removed from the situations they may have evolved to deal with. In essence, they argued, affective disorders, phobias, obsessive-compulsive phenomena and personality disorder should be reclassified and treated as dysfunctional consequences of innate dispositions.
The advantage of the evolutionary perspective was that each patient is studied for the specific archetypal issues at the heart of the problem, which then provided useful therapeutic indicators. Conventional psychiatry can do little, for example, for phobic anxiety. But understanding it not as some personal aberration but as an extension of an innate defence mechanism shared with all humanity can offer a reassuring relief to the sufferer, which is itself healing. Similarly, agoraphobia, they proposed, is an offshoot of the innate territorial disposition shared by most mammals, a willingness to leave the home base being the exception rather than the rule.
Born in Plymouth, Anthony was the only child of Frances (nee Pollington Perry), an actor, and William Stevens, a boatbuilder. His father’s occupation led to a permanent love of the sea. A close bond with his mother conspired to ensure that early attendance at school was sketchy. His primary school years were frequently spent at home off “sick”, pursuing the interests to which he later attributed his love of art, music and reading. His attendance at Plymouth college was more regular. From there he went on to gain degrees in psychology at Reading University (1955) and medicine at Keble College, Oxford (1963).
As a boy of 16 his imagination was gripped by a BBC radio production of Hamlet, followed by a programme on the Freudian analyst Ernest Jones’s Oedipal take on the play. He liked to dine out on his form teacher’s alarm when, on being reprimanded for some act of adolescent rebellion, Anthony was asked how he proposed more usefully to spend the rest of his life. He replied that he proposed to become a psychoanalyst in order to better understand the meaning of acts of rebellion.
In 1970 Anthony left the Horton to establish a private practice of psychiatry and Jungian analysis in London. He was my own training analyst when I entered the profession, later a colleague in clinical practice and finally someone with whom I debated ideas and a close friend. While his theories of evolutionary psychiatry are what he became best known for in the academic world, his patients will remember him for his humour, his therapeutic kindness and enthusiasm for dream analysis.
He was a founder member of the Independent Group of Analytical Psychologists and taught and lectured widely in the UK and the US. He was also involved in a pioneering training programme for analysts in Russia.
In The Talking Cure (2013), his three-volume account of all the major schools of psychotherapy, he argued that the best hope for the future of psychotherapy lay in determining the positive therapeutic ingredients that all the different approaches have in common. A selection of his prolific writings appeared as Living Archetypes (2015).
His time at the Metera centre in Athens, where he taught himself Greek, engendered a lifelong love affair with Greece, and in 2002 he retired to the island of Corfu, where, in the absence of any surviving family, he was a generous host to friends from all over the world.
• Anthony Stevens, analytical psychologist, psychiatrist and writer, born 27 March 1933; died 13 July 2023
