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The ethological frame of reference, which is concerned with the study of inborn patterns of behavior, may appear to be at variance with the interpersonal or cultural approach to psychiatry. The very terms “interpersonal” and “cultural” seem to imply an incompatibility with any innate component. In the history of psychoanalysis, we are accustomed to viewing the swing of the pendulum from the Leibnizian pole of the orthodox Freudian school to the Lockean pole of the school of Sullivan, Fromm and Horney as a positive development. However, as Arieti pointed out in a recent review of his own intellectual development (Arieti, 1978, p. 16), the individual is not “a tabula rasa molded passively by the interpersonal events of his life.” Arieti has consistently emphasized the significance of man's cognitive mechanisms, which are an essential part of his native endowment. He has also repeatedly discussed the development of cognitive mechanisms and the emergence of higher-order emotions in the course of evolution. Arieti's whole work may thus be considered as an attempt to integrate the Leibnizian and the Lockean positions. A discussion of the relevance of ethology may be a further contribution in the same direction.
An integration of attachment theory and interpersonal psychoanalysis has already been undertaken in several papers by Schecter (1978). We are in agreement with Schecter on many points, as we shall specify in the course of this paper.
In a previous article (Bacciagaluppi and Bacciagaluppi Mazza,