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I describe my collaboration with Giovanni over the span of almost 15 years during which time we developed a multimotivational model that built on attachment theory and explored some of its clinical implications. I mention the many ways Giovanni influenced my thinking, and provide a few personal stories about Giovanni that give a sense of his generous, warm and creative nature. Throughout the article I describe how I developed some of the ideas we worked on together to provide a broad evolutionary and developmental outlook on human nature. We had planned to write a book together on this ambitious project, but personal circumstances got in the way.
Mauricio Cortina evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of Fromm's model of human nature and motivation by contrasting Freud's and Fromm's approach to the problem. Fromm provided a nonreductionistic model of motivation by exploring emergent (new) evolutionary properties that characterize the human species. This emphasis on what is evolutionarily new is the greatest strength of the model. However, the strength is associated with a significant weakness. While recognizing specifically new motivational structures, Fromm underestimates the importance of evolutionary and developmental continuity and transformation. The >eviction from paradise< biblical metaphor captures the essence of Fromm's view of the human condition. Fromm thought that a key factor in development was the struggle to overcome a regressive pull to return to the lost security provided by the mother figure or its symbolic equivalents such as blood ties, tribalism, and nationalism. Cortina presents an alternative evolutionary and developmental model that is in keeping with Fromm's emphasis on the importance of evolutionary transformations in humans, but does not accept Fromm's premise that as a species we are uprooted from nature. The evolutionary perspective accounts for the plasticity of human adaptation – that Fromm attributed to a combination of a relatively weak instinctive endowment and the development of the neocortex – as the result of a neotenic process (the retention of juvenile characteristics into adult life). This neotenic interpretation, together with a developmental perspective derived from attachment theory, questions the paradigm of symbiotic unity that informed Fromm's view of development and still remains an influential model of development in many other psychoanalytic schools of thought. Research based on attachment theory shows that under normal conditions security is never >lost< but rather it is found, or more precisely it is constructed (Sroufe 1986). This construction between the infant and its primary caregivers continues over a very protracted period of human development when it gradually becomes internalized, providing a sense of continuity in human development. Under favorable conditions ties with parents are never relinquished but become transformed as new intimate relationships to peers and lovers develop, supplying a new source of emotional security. The chapter concludes with some clinical implications of this >secure base< model of development.