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In The Crisis of Psychoanalysis,Fromm (1978) claims that psychoanalysis has lost its potential for being a critical theory of society. In this article it is suggested that a renewal of psychoanalysis may be accomplished by retaining the psychoanalytic method and adopting an extended version of Bowlby's as an alternative paradigm.
In his Autobiographical Study Freud (1925), spoke of metapsychology as “a speculative superstructure of psychoanalysis, any portion of which can be abandoned or changed.” However, once the traditional framework is discarded, there is a tendency to view psychoanalysis as a purely hermeneutic discipline—a set of rules for interpreting verbal communications. This approach is taken, with different nuances, by such authors as Lacan, Schafer, Klein, Ricoeur, and Habermas (Modell, 1981).
But this approach is open to serious methodological objections. In a recent philosophical critique of psychoanalysis, Grünbaum (1984) upholds Eysenck's claim that the psychoanalytic setting may generate heuristically useful hypotheses, but that these hypotheses can be validated only by controlled extraclinical studies.
Griinbaum's approach is followed by Bowlby. To account for clinical observations, he turned to modern biology, in particular to ethology and the theory of evolution. In a recent article, Bowlby (1984) suggests that these principles may be used “to construct a new metapsychology” (p. 12).
Bowlby's starting point was the observation of the reaction of small children to unwilling separation from their mother figure. This reaction goes through three phases: protest, despair, and detachment. Bowlby explained these findings by postulating the primary nature of the child's tie to the mother, in contrast