If I am really going to imitate Sacks' method of beginning an argument (through genre), I need to come to a better clinical/psychological understanding of separation, loss, and anxiety. It should be minimal in detail, but accurate.
So here's a sort of outline of concepts:
separation
* protest
* despair
* detachment
mourning
* ?? transfer of affections ??
defense
Except this doesn't work for two reasons: 1) despair = mourning (for who? for Freud? or just for Bowlby?) Also, detachment is somewhat pathological, if I understand correctly. Is defense pathological or part of the normal grieving process? What does defense even mean?
So maybe a more accurate outline looks like this:
separation, as it conceived by Bowlby, is an event with duration rather than a specific moment. (?) But Freud seems to discuss the before and the after with little attention to the moment of trauma itself.
* separation anxiety (Bowlby: protest)
NB: Bowlby suggests that separation anxiety occurs before the event takes place. But how does this make sense with respect to his data, in which he observes separation anxiety in children who have already been taken away from their parents?
* mourning (Bowlby: despair)
* defense OR Bowlby: detachment
Also. . . for crying out loud. . . where in all of these chronologies is the event itself located?
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