Deprivation, separation and anxiety? Notes on Freud’s and Bowlby’s conceptions of early childhood, education and maternal care
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14393/REVEDFIL.v39a2025-75341Keywords:
Bowlby, Education, Freud, Infancy, SeparationAbstract
In this article, we seek to understand and analyse the appropriation and reformulation of Freudian theory, as undertaken by John Bowlby in his proposal of attachment theory. A fundamental theory today in the field of pedagogy, education and even child psychiatry, attachment theory was formulated by Bowlby based on Freudian psychoanalysis. However, Bowlby carried out a critical reading of Freud’s theory, in which concepts and notions are altered. In this article, we focus our attention on concepts related to childhood; with this, we seek to compare the words of Bowlby and Freud, in what they reveal about conceptions of childhood, education and maternal care. Throughout our analysis, it will become clear that the Freudian conception of “infant” and “childhood”, for example, is quite different from the Bowlbyan conception. Based on this, some more general conclusions are stated regarding the relations between Bowlby’s attachment theory and Freudian psychoanalysis.
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Data de registro: 16/09/2024
Data de aceite: 03/12/2025
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