They say there are big lies, small and statistics. A paraphrase of this saying would be that there are incredible myths, credible and…scientific. Although some scientific myths were and are downright shocking to people with a critical sense and a lot of logic. It doesn't even look like silly lies like those in a Russian story where the character walks through a darkness to cut it with a knife in St. Petersburg during the white nights. Rather some so-called scientific ideas with tangible effects (that is, we are not talking about quantum physics) they are as hard as can be to swallow.
How the press was not free from the beginning, in the sense that she was a partisan, freedom consisted more in doing the politics of a party. Modern science soon became politicized as well. And how parties change, ideological fashion changes, paradigms can also change in science Sure, when possible. Euclidean geometry cannot be politicized, as in general one cannot politicize most of the fundamental sciences. But otherwise there was and is quite a lot of room for manoeuvre, which has really been taken advantage of and is still being taken advantage of.
Feelings had and still have a very high stake in this regard. Feelings in humans and animals. Actually feelings in people, "affects" in animals. That's what I read in ethology books in college. Because animals don't have feelings, they have "'affects". In exams, depending on the teacher, I was told how to approach the issue of affection in animals. There were some more open or less open to how far animal sentience goes. Etologul Frans de Waal, author of numerous popular books on animal behavior, describe the situation in detail, much tougher during his youth, through the years 60-70. De Waal was always ridiculed for arguing that animals are more than automatons, as the official paradigm sounded. Imagine someone who has had a dog "serious" scientists, whatever that means (or not indifferent, one of the meanings is "distant, rece”), saying something like that?
According to behaviorism, whose famous representative was B. F. Skinner (the name may describe a family trait) animals are automatons that respond to environmental factors. If we remember Ivan Pavlov's dog experiments, considered a precursor of behaviorism, we can extend the model to other animal behaviors, but also to human psychology. Animal behavior (but also human) it would be a kind of tabula rasa, with few innate behaviors. Animals would learn just about everything they do. They would actually respond to environmental stimuli. Humans would do something similar. Sure, it is true that animals with a more complex brain, like mammals (including man) and the birds, they have the most learned behaviors. People don't talk or even walk on two legs unless someone teaches them. So do other mammals learn to hunt, and birds learn to fly. But what about those behaviors that look like emotional manifestations in animals? By no means what it seems, but...adaptive behaviors! That is, all responses to the environment of some automata that do only what is necessary for survival and reproduction. Anything else would not have been…scientific.
Behaviorist conditioning has made contributions to the study of learning, language, but he also tried to explain the morality and development of the genre. Simone de Beauvoir believed that you learn to become a woman. Some feminist theories today have been influenced by these ideas. Although, as I mentioned, learned behaviors are very important in humans, it is difficult to determine what is nature and what is environment. But although the psyche is influenced by the environment, his support is natural. If only society makes you a woman, and gender, that is, the cultural imprint associated with a sex completely overwrites biology, then we can only regret that the male descendants of Queen Victoria, including Prince Alexei, son of the last tsar, they were not trans. That's how he would have gotten rid of hemophilia, specific male disease. And maybe history would have shown otherwise.
Maybe the communist re-education centers, including those in the prisons where political prisoners ended up, they were not influenced by behaviorist ideas? How else could anyone think that a person with clear and firm convictions could be transformed into something else by conditioning like that in communist prisons? The new man desired by Ceaușescu, but also by Pol Pot, it was to appear through a similar type of training.
Behaviorism, whose founder is considered John B. Watson, although some credit Edward Thorndike with this quality, it's actually a movement that had to happen, according to some authors, with the decline of introspective psychology, but also with the new trends in society. Inspired, among others by Freud, Watson is trying to turn psychology into science. Behaviorism lent itself as a scientific paradigm, laboratory. Only science abstracts, that is, it simplifies. That's why doing science is not exactly easy. And especially if you do, you have to know how far it goes. You extract phenomena from life and study them in the laboratory, you don't describe life just by what you get in the lab. And on the altar of so-called science, affectivity was the one sacrificed. As already the idea of body-spirit dualism was out of date, Emotions, traditionally associated with spirit, it was becoming useless (and old fashioned).
Freud, whose contribution to this mythology we cannot deny, considered that the attachment of the young child to the mother is purely related to the source of food. Ideas of this kind dominated the first half of the last century (be any relation to which children resulted from this type of education?). The isolation of young children in hospitals and orphanages was something that nobody bothered about, on the contrary. Watson considered affection to be an unimportant and rather rare instinct, that too much attention given to a child spoils it, it makes him weak and spoiled. More, among the tips for raising children recommend that, to avoid the development of attachment, rotation of nurses or nannies. Jonathan Haidt tells in "The Hypothesis of Happiness" about the terror his father went through when he was isolated in the hospital, in childhood. As in the Romanian orphanages during the Leninist dictatorship, I would add.
If it's only about food, then a bottle was enough to provide comfort and peace to a baby. Why would the human cub need… other people? As strange as it may seem, some have even tested this hypothesis. Fortunately, this experiment really cracked behaviorism. In an attempt to create a macaque farm for laboratory studies, Harry Harlow observed that isolated chicks at birth, according to the methods of the era of raising children, they did not survive. And if they did they had serious behavioral disorders. He tried to fix the problem with an experiment (actually more over the years 50-60). The rhesus macaque pups were probably frustrated that they did not have an attachment object to provide them with food. Then he mounted wire monkey models in the chickens' cages, to climb on, to which he had attached a bottle. The problem has not been solved. Then he thought it might be another attachment. And in addition to the wire mother with a baby bottle, she also brought a fabric mother. The chicks preferred the textile mother, with whom they spent more time. They were reaching for the bottle on the stuffed mother. The bottom line was that the chicks needed touches, and attachment were for touches, not for food. What a find, I would say now! It would be an excuse that back then people didn't really know much about other primates, they didn't watch primate movies on TV. Jane Goodall had not done the famous chimpanzee studies. Primates soothe each other with hand touches. It also goes between primate species, such as between chimpanzees and humans, but also between chimpanzees and baboons for example. Goodall describes many such situations in her book In the Shadow of Man. If we think about it, what do we do when we accidentally hit someone with the basket at the supermarket?
The Fall of Behaviorism, part through Harlow's experiments, part through other experiments has led to the acceptance of feelings in animals, but also in humans? When we were in college we were told a lot about the plush versus the wire mother, but it seems that even this experience was not enough. As for the animals, at least. Frans de Waal believes that the many animal films, made by many people, downloaded on social networks, they came to better convince researchers that animals do have the condition. Maybe not conviction is the right term. At least it made them stop advocating something that could be characterized as semi-anthropocentrism, half cult of psychopaths and machines. This attitude was in the era, and still is, helpful. Industrial society, which had gained momentum during Freud's time and even before him, it needed easy-to-condition casters. Feelings were something that harmed efficiency. The boss thinks for you, but if possible, he must feel for you. Or better not to do it. We don't know what the percentages of psychopaths in high positions were then, in the first half of the 20th century, although history offers some clues. Now things are clearer, supported by studies, which suggests that psychopathy (lack of moral feelings and empathy) it would be a quality of many CEOs, surgeons or other influential people. Impersonal communication does not need feelings, but it needs handling. Exactly what psychopaths can offer.
But the acceptance of feelings in people had a better fate? Apparently not. Harlow's experiments with baby monkeys inspired other researchers, who criticized the isolation of children. One of these is John Bawlby, who discovered in the late 1960s that the normal development of some children depends on the ability to create an attachment relationship with at least one person, usually one of the parents. Mary Ainsworth, his assistant, who studied in Africa, where children are somehow raised by the community, he went on. Although in Africa, as they say, the whole village contributes to the growth of a child, distinguish (probably hardly) a person who is the main point of attachment. That person is usually the baby's mother. This is where attachment theory comes from (term coined by Bawlby). effects, as they say, it would be that we went from lake to well. Children are no longer isolated, but somehow related to the mother, to develop a proper attachment. As psychologist John Rosemund says, now women have changed their master from husband to child, they are still corseted.
Criticisms of attachment theory are easy to lay out. Well, let's think about where it all started. That is, from Harlow's experiments. Well, it looks like a stuffed animal, not necessarily one's own mother, improved the affective situation of the baby monkeys. As for Africa, where children are raised by the village, and up to two years they are almost never let go by adults, if a peak of attachment is noted, however there is no exclusivity. But too much emancipation of women hurts society and the privileges of some. So a new obstacle to women's freedom was welcome. Anyway, native women in non-Western cultures marvel at the extraordinary slavery to which women are subjected in the West, the infinite obligations mothers have here.
Are children raised with exclusive attachment better than others? Let's think, as Ioana Petra says in "7000 Years of Patriarchy" how those who created the Enlightenment and French humanism were raised. Noble children (but not only) they were then raised by nannies from the country, not by their mothers. Information about what happens to children who are not raised by humans also dates from that time, the so-called "feral children".
The strongest application of attachment theory is attachment involvement (of attachment type) in romantic relationships. Well, that's what romantic relationships are all about, let it not be about attachment. Only, MEAN. Good, if it's not about arranged marriages, in which it would actually be beneficial. But people shy away from the idea of just being attachment bridges. Eventually the guard also becomes attached to the prisoner after a while. But if you are not Borcea, you don't want relationships created this way. Attachment would have no place in a privileged relationship, exclusively, very subjective by definition. Or not?
Denial of nature, the type and importance of the condition in humans and animals continues in other forms. Antonie Damasio's book "Descartes' Error" shows how crippling it is to lose the condition while keeping cognitive functions intact. Without affection we are not more effective, on the contrary. Pure reason does not exist. More, new studies on so-called gifted people (at least creative) it shows that they are actually full of emotions, as Jeanne Siaud-Facchin points out in Too Smart to Be Happy?”. New findings suggest that autism, too (at least some functional forms) would be associated with great emotionality, which effectively blocks.
Someone wondered how we could communicate with another civilization, if we do not communicate with the animals of our own planet. I would answer that it would be extraordinary to communicate with alien species as we communicate with other mammals, for example with dogs. Even if we don't know ethology, there is a universal language of mammals: AFFECTION. If we look at how a dog plays with a bird we see how well mammals communicate with each other. You wonder how the bird does not understand some actions of the dog. Mammals are creatures with helpless young, who were cared for and protected when they were small. Perhaps their superior intelligence is related to their sensitivity. They became so intelligent because their ancestors felt so much. Probably all that is good in human society, that is, moral sentiments and the institutions derived from them come from what I might call the "puppy-protecting instinct", that is, of the helpless, present in both sexes (v. "Civilization of hunger/another approach to humanization"). But a society based on force and the threat of force, from which authority results, he can't admit it.
