Freud very quickly complemented his psychobiology with a sociobiological theory of culture and society. As early as 1897, he rooted the psychological phenomenon of repression (shame, disgust) in what he called a “primary,” “organic” repression that corresponded in the history of the species to the adoption of the erect stature and the abandonment of the oral-anal-urethral zones as sources of sexual excitement. To this biological origin of the civilizing process, Freud added in Totem and Taboo the murder and cannibalistic incorporation of the “primal father,” an event supposed to account at the collective, phylogenetic level for the prohibition of incest, and at the individual, ontogenetic level for the “decline” of the Oedipus complex during the latency phase of the libido and the corresponding emergence of an internal “superego.” The whole development of culture is thus viewed by Freud as a constant recapitulation and commemoration of this guilt-producing event whose unconscious memory is imprinted in the “archaic heritage” of the human race and transmitted compulsively through the generations, in conformity with Lamarck’s theory of inheritance of acquired characteristics.

In this chapter I trace the origin of the idea of evolutionary ancestors back to pre-evolutionary archetype concepts in the thinking of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, and Richard Owen. Ancestors and archetypes were both used to explain unity of type, homology, and the origins of organismal form, but due to their metaphysical dissimilarity, they achieved this in fundamentally different ways. The archetypal thinking of these authors each illuminates a distinctive aspect of this explanatory strategy. I also diagnose and defuse a modern myth that has arisen about the views of Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, which claims that he thought that the ventral surface of arthropods corresponds to the dorsal surface of vertebrates. When Darwin reinterpreted the archetype as an ancestor, evolutionary storytelling became possible, with hypothetical ancestors becoming the central subjects in phylogenetic narratives. But the emergence of ancestors as actors in evolutionary stories also required reconceptualizing the systematic relationships between taxa to provide pathways along which evolutionary stories could flow.