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III. Bbd. John Bowlby: Attachment as a primary drive John Bowlby (1958) in his attachment theory stressed the importance of feelings of security; and argued that the child does not explicitly look for drive release but for an attachment figure who supplies feelings of safety. Fairbairn’s and Bowlby’s main critique of the Freudian drive concept became part of the broader question of motivation . For Freud, the human subject is put on the move by his drives: drives are the “things” and “forces” which make him “tick”. Fairbairn and Bowlby both claimed that the behaviour of children (and adults) is often not well explained by a search for drive or sexual-tension relief, but only as part of a broader search for a relation providing safety. In his detailed analysis of early infant development, especially effects of traumatic separation from the mother or mother’s emotional inaccessibility, Bowlby (1969) viewed the attachment to mother as the primary drive. In contrast to Fairbairn who postulated the formation of specific internal structures based on the drive’s object seeking, he emphasized rather behavioral and interpersonal patterns. Diamond and Blatt (2007) saw his work as providing an account of behavioral expression of the internalized object relations within the mother-infant dyad. Understood within broad evolutionary and adaptive contexts of a broadly based Contemporary Freudian thought, considering the caregiver’s provision of safety and security enhancing the infant’s chance of survival (Bowlby 1958), attachment theory may be compatible with the early psychoanalytic concept of ego instincts (Blum 2004b, Papiasvili and Mayers 2015). Creative syntheses of Bowlby and Freud have appeared in later theorizing of Didier Anzieu (Anzieu 1979; Anzieu-Premmereur 2015). III. Bbe. Donald W. Winnicott Donald Winnicott’s contributions created some of the major shifts in the way drive theory was perceived after Klein and her followers. Donald Winnicott presented his contribution to psychoanalysis as essentially part of the Freud-Klein tradition, while at the same time proposing a radically new theory of object-relationships (Green 1999; Abram 2013; Rycroft 1995; Fulgencio 2007). The contrast to Freud´s view was illuminating. Freud may be said to start out from a position of “one person psychology”, namely trying to understand the complex condition of the human subject ‘from within’; from the point of view of a baby most helpless, but in itself already an individual in his/her own right. The infant is in great need of care. The drives, for Freud, were lifesavers: they connect the child (as subject) to the parents (the object) on one hand and to its body on the other hand. The logical starting point for Freud was thus this vulnerable child, who gets linked to the much-needed parents thanks to life-preserving and object-seeking drives. For Winnicott, the logical starting point is not the infant (as a closed unit), but the infant- mother matrix – since the baby cannot be conceived without a “holding environment.” When all goes well, the mother´s preoccupation with the baby and her ability to adapt to its needs, (which is taken for granted by the child) make the dyad of infant and mother one unit . This
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