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According to our times and to our experience we represent the natural and the human world by a great set of images. To this set of images we apply, as a template, a system of hypotheses which seems to us coherent. The difficulty in scientific advance arises when some new experience necessitates a reassembling of the pattern of our images.
C. F. A. PANTIN, The Relation between the Sciences
Since the conceptual framework I bring to the study of mourning differs from those traditionally applied, it may be useful to review some of its principal features and to elaborate on those that are of special relevance.
When I began my studies of the effects on young children of their being placed away from mother in a strange place with strange people, my theoretical framework was that of psychoanalysis. Finding its metapsychological superstructure unsatisfactory, however, I have been developing a paradigm that, whilst incorporating much psychoanalytic thinking, differs from the traditional one in adopting a number of principles that derive from the relatively new disciplines of ethology and control theory. By so doing, the new paradigm is enabled to dispense with many abstract concepts, including those of psychic energy and drive, and to forge links with cognitive psychology. Merits claimed for it are that, whilst its concepts are psychological and well suited to the clinical data of interest to psychoanalysts, they are compatible with those of neurophysiology and developmental psychology, and also that they are capable of meeting the ordinary requirements of a scientific discipline.1