Attachment Behaviour, Object Relations and the Dynamic-Economic Points of View—Critical Review of Bowlby's Attachment and Loss1

Two development of the past 20 years, one empirical and the other theoretical, provide the basis for re-examination of some of the theoretical propositions of psychoanalysis. The first is the large body of information about infant behaviour, both animal and human, derived from direct observation and experimentation, now available to supplement the retrospective data of psychoanalysis (Escalona, 1968); (Wolff, 1966); (Hinde, 1966); (Schaffer & Emerson, 1964); (Provence & Lipton, 1963). For the most part, these contributions have come from ethologists, naturalists and psychologists more than from psychoanalysts. The second has been the development of general systems theory, the attempt to conceptualize biological phenomena in terms of organized complexity instead of in terms of the linear causality of the 19th century or of probability outcome within unorganized complexity (the statistical approach) of the 20th century (von Bertalanffy, 1967), (1969); (Wiener, 1948); (Miller et al., 1960); (Hebb, 1949); (Young, 1964); (Pribram & Melges, 1969). By identifying organized complexity as the property unique to living systems, the new theory attempts to free biology from its exclusive dependence on models derived from the physical sciences (Simpson, 1963); (von Bertalanffy, 1967), (1969). Freud's first dynamic and economic propositions understandably leaned on the mechanistic models of 19th-century biology. With the developments of ego psychology, metapsychology independently moved in the direction of what, in fact, were early general systems theory type formulations, as represented by its use of a homeostatic model (Hartmann, 1939); (Hatrmann et al., 1946); (Rapaport, 1960).

Bowlby's work, Attachment and Loss, of which Attachment is the first volume, is an effort by an analyst to re-examine the nature of the child's tie to its mother in the light of these two developments in biology. This in itself makes it an important work, for Freud's view of the mental apparatus a