Just by this time, Attachment Theory is no longer what it used to be 30 years ago. Dozens of founding tenets have been arbitrarily replaced by beliefs akin to our irrational times. Now we deem it impossible to overemphasize the fact that one cannot be both irrational and adhere to Bowlby's theory of affectional bonds.
We face the awkward situation to do our best to make people become aware that the so-called Attachment Evolution is but a backtrack move to Pre-Bowlbyian times. As we don't think this is the best of places to discuss these issues at length, we simply wanted to lay emphasis on the fact that the so-called self-appointed Post-Bowlbyian "Modern Consensus" boils down to a circuituous way of deviating from Bowlby's rigorous stance about laborious adherence to the Scientific Methodology* by adopting the speculative, armchair thinking of resorting to introspective instruments or tools, which by the simple expedient of interviewing an adult for a few hours, direct observations of child-environment interactions can be dispensed with. Hence, postings dealing with this "Modern Consensus" approach will be considered off-topic. *The Scientific Method
Definitions of scientific method use such concepts as objectivity of approach to and acceptability of the results of scientific study. Objectivity indicates the attempt to observe things as they are, without falsifying observations to accord with some preconceived world view. Acceptability is judged in terms of the degree to which observations and experimentations can be reproduced.
Furthermore, agreement of a conclusion with an actual observation does not itself prove the correctness of the hypothesis from which the conclusion is derived. It simply renders the premise that much more plausible.
The ultimate test of the validity of a scientific hypothesis is its consistency with the totality of other aspects of the scientific framework. This inner consistency constitutes the basis for the concept of causality in science, according to which every effect is assumed to be linked with a cause.
Scientists, like other human beings, may individually be swayed by some prevailing worldview to look for certain experimental results rather than others, or to "intuit" some broad theory that they then seek to prove.
The scientific community as a whole, however, judges the work of its members by the objectivity and rigour with which that work has been conducted; in this way the scientific method prevails. Developmental Psychology
We have never heard of a psychological theory that can escape the gauntlet of advancing a theory of Psychic Development. Those in vogue ever since Freud stubbornly insist in seeing the infant as hopelessly handicapped to get in touch with the outside world. Particularly with distinct, preferred persons in close contact with the infant, which we generically call "mother·".
According to Freud and his followers, the infant faces serious problems trying to make out itself from the other, or others. They assert he feels as though the external world did not exist. Margaret Mahler, the champion of this trend of indiscrimination between self and other, even talks about a "phase of normal autism and normal symbiosis" which would last for at least a year; that's why her book is entitled "The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant", as though we humans were doomed to go through two distinct births, a biological birth, whereupon we prove to be dependent, hallucinatory, indiscriminate, autistic, symbiotic, paranoid, schizoid, and so on. It seems as though one were being described a serious psychopathological condition. Under such dire settings, communication with an infant proves impossible, hence socializing with an infant would have to be postponed till he overcomes those so-called early developmental stages and becomes a more or less tractable child. One is amazed at the extraordinary luck we humans posses having been able to make it through the hazards of evolution with such seriously handicapped offspring: mothers in the Pleistocene must have been supermothers, especially taking into account no Early Stimulation Treatments were available at the time.
After the advent of the Attachment Theory by John Bowlby, infants redeemed their rights to be seen as humans, even as healthy humans. Just by the simple expedient of taking a look at how infants behaved. One of the most impressive discoveries was that, contrary to what everybody asserted, infants were ONLY interested in socializing from birth onwards. Categorical proof of the innate trend to socializing in infants came through when Bowlby decided to study EARLY SEPARATIONS. When an infant is separated from his mother for a short period, he undergoes a series of stages which go from protesting, through despair, to recoiling into himself as the outer world did not matter anymore (as if he considered he had lost mother for ever). The rest of Bowlby's work, with the addition of Mary Ainsworth's Strange Situation opened up a pathway of unpredictable dimensions for Early Developmental Researchers: now they did have a good theoretical framework to work under. The Attachment Research Center's Approach
The Attachment Research Center (where I work) has always followed that policy: stick to empirical basis, or direct observation, do not take anything for granted, not even Bowlby's theory of attachment, a multidisciplinary approach (Attachment Theorizing, Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, Ethology, Scientific methodology , Philosophy of Science and Epistemology, Information Processing, Updated Cybernetics, and so on, form the bulk of the basis we feel we must be trained in to start even talking about Infants, about mother-infant interactions, about the subjective world of the infant, and so on). That is why we deplore relying on introspection to carry out either research programs or simple diagnostics. Instrospection leading to retrospective speculations about how an adult must have been treated by his parents harks the specialty back to Pre-Bowlbyian times.
Our endeavour focusses on the Bowlbyian perspective, trying to refine and scrutinize unexplored aspects of child development, such as how infants perceive the world, how they perceive us, their caregivers, or very early experiences such as the so-called period of alert inactivity which follows birth.
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