Attachment Quotes

“To ascribe feeling is usually to make a prediction about subsequent behaviour.”
― John Bowlby, Attachment

“Whoever may still be sceptical whether knowledge of animal behaviour can help our understanding of man can find no support from Freud.”
― John Bowlby, Attachment

“The psychical energy model is, therefore, a theoretical model brought by Freud to psychoanalysis: it is in no way a model derived by him from the practice of psychoanalysis. Secondly...”
― John Bowlby, Attachment

“In Tom, it can be said, there is a tendency to appraise certain situations in such a way that a behavioural system is activated that results in his attacking his little sister and biting her. Further, the conditions that lead to this appraisal and so activate the system are specifiable, at least roughly. They comprise, perhaps, a combination on the one hand of a situation of mother attending to little sister and not to Tom and, on the other, of certain organismic states of Tom, themselves brought about by specifiable conditions, such, for example, as a rebuff from father, or fatigue, or hunger. Whenever certain combinations of these conditions obtain, it is predicted, a certain appraisal will be made, a certain behavioural system will be activated, and Tom will bite.”
― John Bowlby, Attachment

“We must conclude therefore that the processes of interpreting and appraising sensory input must unquestionably be assigned a causal role in producing whatever behaviour emerges. Like the other causal factors already discussed they are necessary but not often sufficient.”
― John Bowlby, Attachment

“the consequences of some behaviour are experienced as pleasurable or painful, the quicker and more persistent is the ensuing learning likely to be.”
― John Bowlby, Attachment

“Regular monitoring both of behavioural progress and of consequences is of course necessary if the organism is to learn.”
― John Bowlby, Attachment

“The fact that emotional feeling can be experienced during sleep is a reminder that not all processes having an emotional feeling phase originate in the environment.”
― John Bowlby, Attachment

“Propositions of a genetic and adaptive sort are found throughout this book; and, in any theory of defence, there must be many of a structural kind. The points of view not adopted are the dynamic and the economic.”
― John Bowlby, Attachment

“In their ‘attempt to state explicitly and systematically that body of assumptions which constitutes psychoanalytic metapsychology’, Rapaport and Gill classify assumptions according to certain points of view. They identify five such viewpoints, each of which requires that whatever psychoanalytic explanation of a psychological phenomenon is offered must include propositions of a certain sort. The five viewpoints and the sort of proposition each demands are held to be the following: The Dynamic: This point of view demands propositions concerning the psychological forces involved in a phenomenon. The Economic: This demands propositions concerning the psychological energy involved in a phenomenon. The Structural: This demands propositions concerning the abiding psychological configurations (structures) involved in a phenomenon. The Genetic: This demands propositions concerning the psychological origin and development of a phenomenon. The Adaptive: This demands propositions concerning the relationship of a phenomenon to the environment.”
― John Bowlby, Attachment

“Freud only rarely draws on the data of direct observation, one or two of the occasions when he does so are key ones. Instances are the cotton-reel incident on which he bases much of his argument in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (S.E., 18, pp. 14–16), and the agonising reappraisal of the theory of anxiety that he undertakes in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926).”
― John Bowlby, Attachment

“The points to be emphasised are, first, that Freud's psychical energy model originated outside psychoanalysis, and, secondly, that a main motive for his introducing it was in order to ensure that his psychology conformed to what he believed to be the best scientific ideas of the day. Nothing in his clinical observations required or even suggested such a model—as a reading of his early case studies shows. No doubt partly because Freud adhered to the model throughout his lifetime and partly because nothing compellingly better has been available most analysts have continued to employ it.”
― John Bowlby, Attachment

“Thirdly and most important, the psychical energy model is logically unrelated to the concepts that Freud, and everyone since, regards as truly central to psychoanalysis—the role of unconscious mental processes, repression as a process actively keeping them unconscious, transference as a main determinant of behaviour, the origin of neurosis in childhood trauma. Not one of these concepts bears any intrinsic relation to a psychical energy model; and when this model is discarded all four remain intact and unchanged. The psychical energy model is a possible model for explaining the data to which Freud drew attention: it is certainly not a necessary one.”
― John Bowlby, Attachment

“Not only is progress of the overall activity monitored but progress of each bit of it is monitored as well.”
― John Bowlby, Attachment

“Thus, appraisal is a complex process in which two main steps can be distinguished: (a) comparing input with standards that have developed within the organism during its lifetime; (b) selecting certain general forms of behaviour in preference to other forms in accordance with the results of comparisons previously made.”
― John Bowlby, Attachment

“Thus, continues Langer, the question is no longer one of ‘how a physical process can be transformed into something non-physical in a physical system, but how the phase of being felt is attained, and how the process may pass into unfelt phases again’.”
― John Bowlby, Attachment

“One difficulty of exposition is that each sort of appraisal process can be conducted at any one of several levels.”
― John Bowlby, Attachment

“As soon as feeling is regarded as a phase of a physiological process instead of a product of it—namely a new entity metaphysically different from it—the paradox”
― John Bowlby, Attachment

“Now there is nothing unscientific in utilising, for the interpretation of data, any model that seems promising; and there is therefore nothing unscientific either in Freud’s introduction of his model or in his own or others’ employment of it. Nevertheless, the question arises whether there may by now be an alternative better suited for the purpose in hand.”
― John Bowlby, Attachment

“First, it is important to remember that the origin of Freud’s model lay, not in his clinical work with patients, but in ideas he had learned previously from his teachers—the physiologist Brücke, the psychiatrist Meynert, and the physician Breuer.”
― John Bowlby, Attachment

“Although from time to time details of the psychical energy model underwent change, Freud never considered abandoning it for any other kind of model. Nor have more than a handful of other analysts. What, then, are the reasons that have led me to do so?”
― John Bowlby, Attachment

“A model of the psychical apparatus that pictures behaviour as a resultant of a hypothetical psychical energy that is seeking discharge was adopted by Freud almost at the beginning of his psychoanalytical work.”
― John Bowlby, Attachment