Commentary on “Freud, Darwin, and the Holding Environment” by Richard Brockman

In his wonderfully written and documented article, Richard Brockman puts forth a Darwinian perspective on the psychology of the neonate. As a new organizing principle for psychoanalysis, it opens the door to a new understanding of infant development. He departs from Freud's conclusion that what was in an infant's mind is impossible to ascertain, that the contents of the infant mind could be “constructed” using the data of the analysis of the adult psychoneurotic. Instead he turns to John Bowlby's (1969) monumental work on attachment. Rather than the analytic couch, the source of Bowlby's data was his observation of young animals and infants. Brockman quotes him as saying that “One of the first behaviors that are seen in man and animals are behaviors directed toward attaching to an object, towards a mother or mother figure” (Bowlby, p. 155). Brockman unites Bowlby with Darwin whose observations led to the understanding that an innate mammalian ability to communicate had survival value for the individual and thus this characteristic evolved. The author writes further that “Mammals in Darwin's view were social by virtue of evolution. And thus mammals because of evolution are born with an innate biology of attachment.” He concludes that psychoanalysis must begin with data that is scientific, that it must go back to attachment which is where interpersonal behavior begins. “[I]n the beginning, there is no evidence of fantasy. In the beginning, there is attachment. In the beginning there is holding.” He concludes, “We do not begin life focused on internal fantasy. We begin with an orientation to the world, to …a holding environment. It is not a metaphor. It is a foundation. It is an evolutionary fact.” With this new organizing principle for understanding human psychology, old psychoanalytic concepts can now be reconsidered. One of these is the origins of the superego, of a sense of right and wrong, of what is good and what is bad.

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