We could date the beginning of pretty much all modern psychology to around the turn of the 20th century.

In 1900, Freud published his interpretation of dreams.

Slightly before that, William James proposed the James Lang theory which showed that there is a significant unconscious function to the mind

that the bulk of mental operations are not in fact conscious but are driven by what we could call automatic processes

that are not volitional, not in our control. Freud basically postulated that human beings are born with libidinal drives

and that we spend a lot of our lives trying to locate ways to

discharge these energies for pleasure, catharsis. And for a long time, psychologists diligently tried to make this theory work.

It was only until around 1958 when John Bowlby started to propose his radical

re-envisioning of the core human drive which pretty much turned all of modern psychology on its head.

Boulby basically had the audacity to suggest that the core human drive had nothing to do with

discharging sexual energy that it was the impulse to connect that human beings depend for a core survival on

bonding with others and he didn't just come up with his ideas entirely out of the blue.

Zoologists such as the great Conrad Lorenz had shown with many mammals, including his

legendary studies with geese, that all animals are born with an

imprinting period where they have the strongest need is not for food or anything other than to develop a core bond with a caregiver that will protect and nurture and essentially show the infants,

provide the holding environment where the infant mammal can

learn how to survive on its own.

And Bulby's work wasn't alone in psychology by any means,

D.W. Winnicott's legendary work on the false self, the good enough mother, the holding space,

the transitional space, and all these ideas boiled down to the key observation

along with Bulby and Ronald Fairburn and so many other object relations psychologists that the way,

the manner in which the reliability of our

...