Quand l’éthologie revisite la psychanalyse

In 1972, the French psychologist René Zazzo declared that a “new fact” similar to the darwinian “scientific revolution” had just been discovered in the field of psychology. He referred to the attachment theory or rather to the discovery of this theory by John Bowlby (1907-1990), who had found out, r...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Wolf Feuerhahn
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Éditions de la Sorbonne 2016-03-01
Series:Revue d’Histoire des Sciences Humaines
Subjects:
Online Access:http://journals.openedition.org/rhsh/1547
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:In 1972, the French psychologist René Zazzo declared that a “new fact” similar to the darwinian “scientific revolution” had just been discovered in the field of psychology. He referred to the attachment theory or rather to the discovery of this theory by John Bowlby (1907-1990), who had found out, reading ethologist studies, that attachment was not the result of learning but rather caused by a “primal need”. Using these animal findings to comprehend human behaviours, Bowlby estimated that this indeed shattered the utter existence of psychoanalysis: for if attachment was primal, then it could not result from the satisfaction of hunger as psychoanalysts had previously believed with the notion of libido.This article thus has two methodological goals. First, it aims to propose a new way of writing transnational history. I deliberately proceed in a regressive way, starting from an analysis of Zazzo’s operation of importation before going back to the context of departure. Secundly, it aims to contribute to a reflexion on the relationships between the history of science and what I call “indigenous history”. Starting from the historical discourse of the actors (here: Zazzo and Bowlby), I want to think about the statut of the one proposed by the historian of science.
ISSN:1963-1022