Pomo frenzy

In his book Modernity Under Siege, Argentine sociologist J.J. Sebreli points out that according to postmodernistic criteria, we should view the Copernican Revolution as a local phenomenon restricted to Central Europe during the late XVI century, since Copernicus was a Polish priest who advanced his theory in a booklet called De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On The Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres) in 1543. Therefore, the double-spin planetary movement around themselves and about the Sun ought to be held true only for sixteenth century Central Europe. This implies it has ceased to be true, an assertion that plainly contradicts the fact that after 450 years we still believe in the heliocentric planetary system as developed by Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo. Such is the boundless frenzy postmodernist are possessed by in their blind spell to attack anything that has to do with reason, reality and science. However, I would like to point out that, as far as the history of science is concerned, certainty as to the origins and intentions of the purported "discoverers" of certain crucial theories is far from clear. My thesis in this essay advances the notion that neither Copernicus nor Bowlby held the smallest intention of revolutionizing the scientific status quo in their respective disciplines. All they wanted was to offer a more rational explanation of otherwise untenable theories: the Ptolemaic System and Freudian Psychoanalysis.

Nicolaus Copernicus was a redoubtable catholic priest learned in Arts, Medicine, Laws, especially canonical laws, Theology and Philosophy, all disciplines in which he excelled. He made a poor astronomer, though. He held religious rather than scientific reasons to concoct his heliocentric planetary system. He had gathered no empirical evidence to buttress the theory he advanced. According to Alexadre Koyré he had observed the skies only 27 times during his lifetime.

The universe, the cosmos, resulted from a sacred act of God's creation. Therefore, what we observe when we scrutinize the skies are reflections of God's work. God could not have created such an ugly imperfection as the Ptolemaic system suggested. God was perfect, and perfection was at the time thought to be an ideal clockwork system, perfectly round, absolute, and without yearly corrections. Copernicus's system fit these principles of perfection conveniently. The planets, each set on a solid sphere which revolved round the sun constituted perfect harmony. That was why his system was far from rejected from the Papacy. Pope Paul III was a Copernican convert and used his "discovery" as a counter-reformation weapon. So, summing up, Copernicus did not advance his theory of planetary movement as a tribute to facts, science and truth, but as a tribute to God Almighty.

Let's not forget Copernicus lived in the XVI century, the century of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation. Catholics had to sharpen their wits to show they were the devotest congregation to honour God, that God was served in his omnipotent perfection.
 

Historical Background

Initiatives Toward Reform

Only when Paul III (Copernicus' s pope) became pope in 1534 did the
church receive the leadership it needed to orchestrate these
impulses toward reform and to meet the challenge of the protestants.

One of Paul's most important initiatives was to nominate sincere
reformers such as Gasparo Contarini and Reginald Pole to the
College of Cardinals. He also gave encouragement to new religious
orders such as the Theatines, Capuchins, Ursulines, and especially
the Jesuits. This last group, under the leadership of St. Ignatius
Loyola, consisted of highly educated men dedicated to a renewal of
piety through preaching, catechetical instruction, and the use of
Loyola's Spiritual Exercises for retreats. Perhaps Paul's most
dramatic action was the convocation of the Council of Trent in 1545 to deal with the doctrinal and disciplinary questions raised by the Protestants. Often working in an uneasy alliance with the Holy Roman emperor Charles V, Paul, like many of his successors, did not hesitate to use both diplomatic and military measures against the Protestants.
 

          BOWLBY'S INITIAL SCIENTIFIC STANCE

     Bowlby's first attempts focused on countering psychoanalysis
     psychologism and replacing it by a more common-sense,
     everyday experiences both children and their parents undergo,
     and which may be labelled "environmentalism", which enabled him
     to make a strong point against psychoanalysis' subjectivism,
     fantasies, inner representational world, and the like, since the
     hypotheses he advanced were in keeping with empirical data,
     whereas, psychoanalytic introspective speculation was not liable
     to contrastability, and so it simply rendered it unscientific.
 

     Let's recall the three fundamental papers that, to my mind, might have made a tremendous dent in psychoanalysis' structure, had Bowlby ever intended to do so:

          Bowlby's first formal statement of Attachment Theory,
          drawing heavily on ethological concepts, was presented in
          London in three now classic papers read to the British
          Psychoanalytic Society. The first, The Nature of the
          Child's Tie to his Mother was presented in 1957 where he
          reviews the current psychoanalytic explanations for the
          child's libidinal tie to the mother (in short, the theories of
          secondary drive, primary object sucking, primary object
          clinging, and primary return to womb craving). This paper
          raised quite a storm at the Psychoanalytic Society. Even
          Bowlby's own analyst, Joan Riviere protested and Donald
          Winnicott wrote to thank her: "It was certainly a difficult paper
          to appreciate without giving away everything that
          has been fought for by Freud". Anna Freud, who missed the
          meeting but read the paper, wrote: "Dr Bowlby is too
          valuable a person to get lost to psychoanalysis".

          The next paper in the series, Separation Anxiety, was
          presented in 1959. In this paper, Bowlby pointed out that
          traditional theory fails to explain both the intense attachment
          to mother figure and young children's dramatic responses to
          separation. Robertson and Bowlby had identified three
          phases of separation response:

          1. Protest (related to separation anxiety)

          2. Despair (related to grief and mourning), and

          3. Detachment or denial (related to defence).

          All of which proved Bowlby's crucial point: separation anxiety
          is experienced when attachment behaviour is activated and
          cannot be terminated unless reunion is restored.

          Unlike other analysts, Bowlby advanced the view that
          excessive separation anxiety is usually caused by adverse
          family experiences, such as repeated threats of
          abandonment or rejections by parents, or to parent's or
          siblings' illnesses or death for which the child feels
          responsible.

          In the third major theoretical paper, Grief and Mourning in
          Infancy and Early Childhood, read to the Psychoanalytic
          Society in 1959 (published in 1960),
          Bowlby questioned the then prevailing view that infantile
          narcissism is an obstacle to the experience of grief upon loss
          of a love object. He disputed Anna Freud's contention that
          infants cannot mourn, because of insufficient ego
          development, and hence experience nothing more than brief
          bouts of separation anxiety provided a satisfactory substitute
          is available. He also questioned Melanie Klein's claim that
          loss of the breast at weaning is the greatest loss in infancy.
          Instead, he advanced the view that grief and mourning
          appear whenever attachment behaviours are activated but
          the mother continues to be unavailable.

          As with the first paper, many members of the British
          Psychoanalytic Society voiced strong disagreement. Donald
          Winnicott wrote to Anna Freud: "I can't quite make out why it
          is that Bowlby's papers are building up in me a kind of
          revulsion although in fact he has been scrupulously fair to
          me in my writings". Because he was undermining the very
          bases of psychologism in psychoanalysis.
 

     These three papers were more than enough to tear the fantasy
     building of speculative psychoanalysis to pieces. So why did
     Bowlby have to concede his was an object-relations theory, when
     it sprang from the very reading of the papers that it was a theory
     about personal relationships? We insist on this distinction, as the incompatibility of the theories in question is all too often overlooked.
     Either you are related to an ambiguous inner object
     which happens to be projected onto a real person (object-relation
     theory), or you distinctly know who you are related to, who you
     are for the other party in the relationship, why you are related,
     what you expect from the relationship in each interaction, and so
     on.
 

     Let us examine Bowlby's contradictions regarding his central
     arguments which approach personal relationships, psychology
     and psychopathology in a radically new way.

     In book 1 of his trilogy, Attachment, page 16, he asserts:
     "Throughout this inquiry my frame of reference has been that of
     psychoanalysis. There are several reasons for this. The first is
     that my early thinking on the subject was inspired by
     psychoanalytic work -my own and others'. A second is that,
     despite limitations, psychoanalysis remains the most serviceable
     and the most used of any present-day theory of psychopathology.
     A third and most important, is that, whereas all the central
     concepts of my schema -object-relations, separation anxiety,
     mourning, defence, trauma, sensitive periods in early life -are the
     stock-in-trade of psychoanalytic thinking, until recently they have
     been given but scant attention by other behavioural disciplines".
     So as we can see, he has a first sentimental reason to stick to
     psychoanalysis, a second consensual reason, and a third
     pedagogical reason. One wonders, what on earth did
     psychoanalysis need Bowlby for to drum the practice away on
     those three feeble grounds: nostalgia, hegemony, and an
     example for other rebel stances (for instance, his own).

     However, only seven pages later, he criticizes psychoanalysis'
     way of gathering data for its conclusions. Psychoanalysis relies
     on "a process of historical reconstruction based on data derived
     from older subjects... "The point of views from which this work
     starts is different... it is believed that observation of how a very
     young child behaves towards his mother, both in her presence
     and especially in her absence can contribute greatly to our
     understanding of personal development. When removed from
     mother by strangers, young children respond usually with great
     intensity; and after reunion with her they show commonly either
     heightened degree od separation anxiety or else unusual
     detachment... Because this starting point differs so much from
     the one to which psychoanalysts are accustomed, it may be
     useful to specify it more precisely and to elaborate the reasons for
     adopting it."

     And he goes on: "Psychoanalytic theory is an attempt to explain
     the functioning personality, in both its healthy and its pathological
     aspects, in terms of ontogenesis. In creating this body of theory
     not only Freud but virtually all subsequent analysts have worked
     from an end-product backwards. Primary data are derived from
     studying, in the analytic setting, a personality more or less
     developed and already functioning more or less well; from those
     data the attempt is made to reconstruct the phases of personality
     that have preceded what is now seen."

     "In many respects what is attempted here is the opposite. Using
     as primary data observations of how very young children behave
     in defined situations, an attempt is made to describe certain early
     phases of personality functioning and, from them, to extrapolate
     forwards. In particular, the aim is to describe certain patterns of
     response that occur regularly in early childhood and thence, to
     trace out how similar patterns of response are to be discerned in
     later personality. The change in perspective is radical. It entails
     taking as our starting point, not this or that symptom or syndrome
     that is giving trouble, but an actual event or experience deemed
     to be potentially pathogenic to the developing personality."

     " Thus, whereas almost all present-day psychoanalytical theory
     starts with a clinical syndrome or symptom -for example, stealing,
     depression, or schizophrenia - and makes hypotheses about
     events and processes which are thought to have contributed to its
     development, the perspective adopted  here starts with a class of
     event -loss of mother-figure in infancy or early childhood- and
     attempts thence to trace the psychological and
     psychopathological processes that commonly result. It starts with
     the traumatic experience and works prospectively."

     It is fairly evident that an approach such as the one advanced
     above cannot but clash against classical psychoanalytic mores.
     Where psychoanalysis relies on memories, Attachment Theory
     distrusts them. Where psychoanalysis asserts the natural site to
     perform research is the consulting-room, Attachment Theory
     declares research must be done out of psychotherapeutic
     premises. Where psychoanalysis works retrospectively, trying to
     reconstruct the patient's infancy, Attachment Theory is
     determined to see by its own eyes what goes on during infancy
     and early childhood directly, dispensing with untrustworthy
     informants. But this is exactly what the "new generation" of
     Attachment Theorists is encouraging throughout the United
     States: they rely exclusively on
     reports, self-reports: they interview a mother-to-be, or for that
     matter, anybody else, and ask her about her relationship with her
     mother. From her responses and the way they are made, they
     infer the kind of early attachment the adult must have had with her
     own real mother, as they are convinced patterns of attachment
     endure unalterably throughout life. Therefore, present-day                    methodology                amounts to about the
     opposite to what Bowlby recommended half a century ago, and
     which he had come to adopt as a rejection of similar methods
     characteristic of psychoanalysis, a whole century ago.

     But Bowlby is even more emphatic concerning the unreliability of
     reports, let alone of self reports. On page 25 of Attachment and
     Loss: Attachment, he says that psychoanalysts regard direct
     observation of behaviour as superficial and that it contrasts
     sharply with what is the almost direct access to physical
     functioning that obtains during analysis. On page 26, he
     unambiguously states: "Now I believe an attitude of this sort to be
     based on fallacious premises. In the first place we must not
     overrate the data we obtain in analytic sessions " (let alone data
     obtained in interviews). So far from having direct access to
     psychical processes, what confronts us is a complex web of free
     associations, reports of past events, comments about the current
     situation, and the patient's behaviour. In trying to understand
     these diverse manifestations we inevitably select and arrange
     them according to our preferred schema; and in trying to infer
     what psychical processes may lie behind them we inevitably leave
     the world of observation and enter the world of theory (i.e.,
     speculation). As regards infants or children's observations he
     firmly contends:" Since the capacity to restrict associated
     behaviour increases with age, it is evident that the younger the
     subject the more likely are his behaviour and his mental state to
     be the two sides of a single coin. Provided observations are
     skilled and detailed, therefore, a record of the behaviour of very
     young children can be regarded as a useful index of their
     concurrent mental state". As anybody can appreciate, nothing of
     the kind is being carried out in the late nineties, where all that
     seems to matter is adult attachment, and may God take care of
     the kids. Furthermore, we can see from these quotations from
     Bowlby's Attachment I, that reality takes pride of place over
     fantasy, or inner representational models, which amounts to be
     the same.
 
 

So, why all these contradictions? Why did Bowlby set off to a fresh start over perfectly testable observations with a minimum of theorization? Why did he not follow the path he had started? Why take back the freshness of the making of personal relationships and affectional bonds and surrender it to grim object-relations theory. Why didn't he stick to what he saw instead of trying to conform to psychoanalytic mores? Why did John Bowlby come accross a revolutionary theory that threatened psychoanalysis down to its very roots, only to backtrack his own steps? Bowlby was a staunch psychoanalyst and remained so till the end of his life. Therefore, he did not develop Attachment Theory to refute psychoanalysis, as evidence all along suggests; quite to the contrary, he developed Attachment Theory to salvage psychoanalysis from its own shortcomings. He used to say: "Before Attachment Theory I thought psychoanalysis was irredeemable". So he advanced his theory of personal affectional bonds to redeem psychoanalysis from its irrational blunders, such as the Oedipus complex, the inheritance of acquired traits, the absurd developmental theory based on libidinal evolution, the theory of instincts, the theory of the secondary drive, its metapsychology, and its many, many arbitrary interpretations about reality which did but violate common sense, and so rescue it from the depths of occultism and turn it into a modern, natural science. He updated psychoanalysis to more palatable modern prejudices. Instead of and old, crude, old-fashioned instincts theory, he furnished a modern ethological, fashionable theory. He added information processing theory to keep updated with the computer expansion and to remove all traces of the aged electric and hydrodynamic models used by Freud. he advanced a multidisciplinary stance in which psychoanalysis was integrated with ethology and sociobiology, psychobiology, the cybernetic theory of control systems and modern structural approach to cognitive development. He "enriched" psychoanalysis by refurbishing all its suprastructure of auxiliary sciences and those making it "more scientific".
 
 
 

REFERENCES

Bowlby, John (1958) The Nature of The Child's Tie to His Mother,
International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 39, 350-73.

Bowlby, John (1960a) Separation Anxiety, International Journal of
Psychoanalysis, 41, 89-113.

Bowlby, John (1960b) Grief and Mourning in Infancy and Early Childhood.
Psychoanalytic Study of The Child, 15, 9-52.

Bowlby, John (1969, 1982) Attachment and Loss, vol. 1: Attachment.
London: The Hogarth Press.

Bowlby, John (1973), Attachment and Loss, vol. 2: Separation. London:
The Hogarth Press.

Freud, Sigmund (1938) An Outline of Psychoanalysis, Standard Edition, 23,
pp. 163-4.

Garelli, JC (1989) Critique of Psychoanalytic Reason. (In Spanish: Critica
de la Razon Psicoanalitica. Buenos Aires: Troquel).

Rapaport and Gill (1959) Beyond Metapsychology, New York:
Psychological Issues

Bowlby, John (1969, 1982). Attachment and Loss, vol. 1: Attachment, pp. 24 ff. London: The Hogarth Press.

Copernicus, Nicholas (1543) De Revolutionibus orbium coelestium (The Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres). Nuremberg, 1543.

Koyré, Alexandre (1934), Nicolas Coperníc: Des Révolutions de Orbes Célestes, Paris: Alcan, 1934.

Sebreli, Juan José (1991). Modernity under Siege. In Spanish: El Asedio a la Modernidad. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana