No abstract

Each of us acquires a sense of everyday being implicitly through our engagement with the social milieu. Understanding this being from the usual individualistic psychological perspective suggests it originates from a subjective, internal private world. This position, descended from Cartesian dualism, bifurcates human experience, rendering an isolated subject and a decontextualized external world. Martin Heidegger rejected this idea and contended that our sense of being springs from a more basic and primordial engagement with the social world as a meaningful totality of being-in-the-world. However, he did not explain how human beings develop this everyday being. Attachment theory, espoused by John Bowlby, positions human beings from birth with the innate ability to form close relationships with others, which serve critical roles in early development and throughout the life span. This article integrates Heidegger's social ontology with Bowlby's attachment theory to establish a nondualistic theoretical grounding for human relational development, and provides the beginnings of an existentially based developmental ontology of human being that fits within the current movement of post-Cartesian thought.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract