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This is the second of Bowlby's projected three volume opus, in which he presents his well-known views on the central position of separation in normal as well as pathological development. Too many psychoanalysts have only a partial acquaintance with Bowlby's voluminous work and consequently fail to recognize his radical departure from the Freudian schema of mental development. Bowlby is commonly identified in the psychiatric community at large with his most widely known thesis, the triad of reactions to separation: protest, despair, and detachment. On the descriptive level at which this is usually understood, it could hardly excite even minor controversy. However, the basic understructure represents a fundamentally different model of psychological organization. Bowlby assumes that there is an inborn instinctual urge which ties an infant to his mother. He holds that separation anxiety is a primary response, not reducible to other terms, and is due simply to the rupture of the child's attachment to his mother. This core of his thesis, he asserts, is firmly based on modern biological evolutionary thinking and has the adaptive function of ensuring the survival of the young. Thus he dismisses not only the full psychoanalytic metapsychological super-structure but also the mind-body problem that bedeviled Freud and so many other important thinkers. It is startling indeed that the index to this large volume on an important aspect of human psychology contains not one single reference to the dynamic unconscious.
There is certainly an appealing directness and simplicity to Bowlby's schema as contrasted with the at times intricate and complicated turns in Freud's metapsychological reasoning. However, these complications seem no more than a true reflection of the complexity of mental life. In Bowlby's work there is an undercurrent—one that surfaces at times in explicit statements—which would liken Freud's mind-centered metapsychology to the baroquely complicated Ptolem