Well I didn’t expect this thread to reach these respectable proportions. But it is indeed a very interesting topic.
I believe it would take a fair amount of scholarly time to realy throw an elegant ligth on the matter. I say elegant because scholarly is not necessarly a guarantee of absolute truth. This would call for a multi-disciplinary approche; history, anthropology, sociology, ethology and psychology. Aries is one of the most intersting writers of our time but cannot be our only reference to close this investigation. I do wish I had more time to get deeper into this, but I’ll have to limit myself to a few ideas.
In another century, when pregancy and parenthood were not planned and children arrived like another year and child mortality rate was so high, people were not attached to their children (only adults were considering to have a value of some sort) and it was very bad behaviour for a mother to be sad for the death of a baby or a child. Mothers were expected not to complain about the loss at all.
Very strange attitude in our time.
Despite the social expectations or constraints of any period of history (culture), I still need to cling to some basic commun ground (nature). It is indeed difficult not to project our own present day individualism on the past cultures we attempt to look back to. Individualism is maybe a new thing. People in the past were more drowned into the group or caste. The group’s survival may, for a long time, have been more important than the individuals composing it. Does this acknowledgement permit to conclude that people were not attached to their children in the past, frankly, I don’t know. But intuitively (what ever that is worth) I don’t think so. I think there must always have been attachement. I’ll even risk saying that any social (culture) impairment of attachement (nature) is never and has never been without heavy consequences. I like to percieve psychology as an atempt to fix cultural traumas imposed on the natural universals. It is not because psychology is a creation of the twenthieth century that people were not screwed up and did not suffer traumas in the past, no matter what the social norm may have been.
My own bias about attachement has been influenced a great deal over the last few years by
John Bowlby’s theory of attachement. But again that is just one thinker in the sea of knowledge. See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bowlby
http://psychematters.com/bibliographies/bowlby.htm
http://www.doctissimo.fr/html/psycholog ... bowlby.htm
In
The mist of Avalon, by Marion Zimmer Bradly, Morgane, King Arthur’s sister, gives birth to Mordred in Scotland. The Queen Of Scotland (I forget her name) makes sure that Morgan doesn’t nurse the child, specificaly to prevent attachement. Of course this is a projection from a contemporary writer onto legendary medieval characters, but still. Isn’t this something well known. Samething for newborns destined for adoption; usually mesures are taken so the mother doesn’t even see the child. That is nature impaired by culture.
What is nature? When you put the seed of a carrotinto the ground, a carrot will grow. Not a brocoli, a carrot. Until recently that remainded one of the few certainies accessible to the vast majority of humans. Nature has also been for a long long time that when a child was born, it was put to the breast, and in the vast majority of cases that triggered attachement. That initial attachement is outside of culture and can only be prevented by culture or altered only afterwards by culture.
Finally, I don’t percieve the nature/culture debate as confusing, nor even as an opposition. Rather they complement one another in a dynamic exploration of the human cosmos. Sociologists and ethologists may like to argue in favor of their own respective field, but does that change much of anything. Right now, ethology is rather hot. In a hundred years it will be something else. So… I hope the matter is not closed.
- I swear 
