In my post of June 22, 2010 entitled Farmer Freud and Farmer Bowlby—Ploughing the Same Field? I ended with this quote by Bowlby (from vol. I, page xxvii): “From a new viewpoint a familiar landscape can sometimes look very different.” The familiar landscape Bowlby is referring to here is none other than Freud’s psychodynamic theory and thinking. On page xxxi, Bowlby tells us that “Freud followed many different lines of thought and tried many possible theoretical constructions.” For an excellent treatment of how Freud tried to use the hydraulic model—very much in vogue back at the turn of the last century—to frame his work, see if you can’t grab a copy of Professor Solomon’s tape series Passions: Philosophy and the Intelligence of Emotions (available through the Teaching Company). Lecture eleven is entitled Freud’s Catharsis—the Hydraulic Model. A bit further along in vol. I (page 3), Bowlby writes, “During nearly fifty years of psychoanalytic investigations Freud tried first one then another point of view from which to start his inquiries.” As I mentioned in my June 22 post, recognizing that Bowlby and Freud looked at similar core issues (i.e., love and hate, anxiety and defence, attachment and loss) but framed them using worldviews diametrically opposed to each other, is rather important.
On page xxvii, Bowlby gives us the following quote from his famous WHO report Maternal Care and Mental Health:
What is believed to be essential for mental health is that the infant and young child should experience a warm, intimate and continuous relationship with his mother (or permanent mother-substitute) in which both find satisfaction and enjoyment.
Critics of Bowlby’s WHO report generally agreed that Bowlby (along with a number of colleagues) successfully demonstrated a correlation between ill effects in children and maternal deprivation. However, “[The WHO report] said very little indeed about the process whereby ill effects are brought into being” (quoting Bowlby). Early on Bowlby was faced with a dilemma: how to properly frame “the process whereby ill effects are brought into being” so that he could gain a certain level of scientific respectability (which is what critics called for and Freud was not able to satisfactorily deliver). Today, to gain scientific respectability you are essentially forced to use a reductionistic model, that is to say, a model that calls for reducing all elements under investigation to simple billiard ball style “cause and effect” chains. But the decision back in Bowlby’s day wasn’t as clear-cut as it is today. In the same way that the Mac operating system today challenges the Windows operating system by holding (roughly) 10 percent of the operating system market, back in Bowlby’s day there was (metaphorically speaking) a Mac-esque challenge to the dominant reductionistic model. It was (and still is) called systems theory. Rather than reducing elements to causal chains, systems theory is about looking at elements in dynamic relationship with other elements in their natural environment (as opposed to a reduced lab environment).
Which “operating system” (metaphorically speaking) to choose? This was Bowlby’s dilemma. It’s the same dilemma facing a computer buyer who goes into a big box store and sees rows and rows of PCs running Windows and one or two Macs off in the corner running the Mac OS. Even though the odds are stacked against them (in terms of widespread acceptance and convention) there’s a hardy (some would say fanatic) group of Mac followers (myself included). Equally, back in Bowlby’s day, there was a hardy (maybe even fanatic) group of followers who believed in the systems approach to science. The names may surprise you: Erik Erikson, Jean Piaget, Margaret Mead, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Konrad Lorenz, Julian Huxley, Bäerbel Inhelder, Grey Walter, and the list goes on. For a behind the scenes look at this systems theory “user group,” see the 1969 book Discussions on Child Development (edited by Tanner & Inhelder). This book is a collection of proceedings of a study group (which met from 1953 – 1956) where a fair amount of the focus was on systems theory, processes, and thinking. I’m pulling my observations from an unpublished paper (commissioned by our Foundation) by Dr. Gary Metcalf designed, in essence, to see how much of a systems theory fanatic Bowlby really was. Dr. Metcalf’s paper has a working title of John Bowlby: Rediscovering a Systems Scientist. Turns out that Bowlby very much was a part of a systems theory movement, along with the luminaries mentioned above. Like picking a Mac today can put a computer user at a disadvantage (in terms of widespread acceptance and convention), so too picking the systems theory “operating system” back in Bowlby’s day. We get a sense for this risk when on page 41 of vol. I we hear Bowlby lament:
At one time to attribute purposiveness to animals or to build a psychology of human behavior on the concept of purposefulness [a key focus of systems thinking] was to declare oneself a vitalist [which is how Bowlby viewed Freud] and to be banned from the company of respectable scientists [who would no doubt use Windows if it were available to them].
I mention all of this because the systems road, the systems “operating system” if you will, that Bowlby apparently used (at least according to Dr. Metcalf’s research) is a road that isn’t often talked about these days. As we continue our journey, I’ll try to point out the artifacts in Bowlby’s trilogy that mark this systems road in much the same way old gas stations and motels still mark where the old Route 66 used to pass.
