Separation: Anxiety And Anger (Attachment and Loss Vol 2)

325 Pages·1976·1.54 MB·English

by  John Bowlby

Attachment and Loss
VOLUME II
SEPARATION ANXIETY AND ANGER
John Bowlby
With Additional Notes by the Author

BASIC BOOKS
A Member of the Perseus Books Group

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To THREE FRIENDS
Evan Durbin Eric Trist Robert Hinde
Copyright © 1973 by The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 70-78464
ISBN: 0-465-07691-2 Cloth
ISBN: 0-465-09716-2 Paper
Printed in the United States of America 99 RRD-H 30 29 28 27 26 25 24
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Contents

F oreword page vii
P reface xi
Acknowledgements xvii
PART I: SECURITY, ANXIETY, AND DISTRESS

1 Prototypes of Human Sorrow 3
R esponses of young children to separation from mother 3
C onditions leading to intense responses 6
C onditions mitigating the intensity of responses 16
P resence or absence of mother figurer: a key variable 22
2 The Place of Separation and Loss in Psychopathology 25
P roblem and perspective 25
S eparation anxiety and other forms of anxiety 30
A challenge for theory 30
3 Behaviour with and without Mother: Humans 33
N aturalistic observations 33
E xperimental Studies 39
O ntogeny of responses to separation 52
4 Behaviour with and without Mother: Non-human Primates 57
N aturalistic observations 57
E arly experimental studies 60
F urther studies by Hinde and Spencer-Booth 69
PART II: AN ETHOLOGICAL APPROACH TO
HUMAN FEAR

5 Basic Postulates in Theories of Anxiety and Fear 77
A nxiety allied to fear 77
M odels of motivation and their effects on theory 79
P uzzling phobia or natural fear 83
6 Forms of Behaviour Indicative of Fear 87
A n empirical approach 87
W ithdrawal behaviour and attachment behaviour 89
Feeling afraid and its variants: feeling alarmed and feeling
a nxious 92
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7 Situations that Arouse Fear in Humans 96
A difficult field of study 96
F ear-arousing situations: the first year 99
Fear-arousing situations: the second and later years 105
C ompound situations 118
F ear behaviour and the development of attachment 119
N atural clues to potential danger 124
F ear behaviour of non-human primates 127
C ompound situations 134
F ear, attack, and exploration 136
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9 Natural Clues to Danger and Safety 138
B etter safe than sorry 138
P otential danger of being alone 142
P otential safety of familiar companions and environment 146
Maintaining a stable relationship with the familiar
e nvironment: a form of homeostasis 148
10 Natural Clues, Cultural Clues, and the Assessment of
Danger 151
C lues of three kinds 151
R eal danger: difficulties of assessment 153
' Imaginary' dangers 156
C ultural clues learnt from others 158
C ontinuing role of the natural clues 161
B ehaviour in disaster 166
11 Rationalization, Misattribution, and Projection 169
D ifficulties in identifying situations that arouse fear 169
M isattribution and the role of projection 172
T he case of Schreber: a re-examination 174
12 Fear of Separation 178
H ypotheses regarding its development 178
N eed for two terminologies 182
PART III: INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IN
SUSCEPTIBILITY TO FEAR: ANXIOUS
ATTACHMENT

13 Some Variables responsible for Individual Differences 187
C onstitutional variables 187
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E xperiences and processes that reduce susceptibility to fear 191
E xperiences and processes that increase susceptibility to fear 196
14 Susceptibility to Fear and the Availability of Attachment
Figures 201
F orecasting the availability of an attachment figure 201
W orking models of attachment figures and of self 203
T he role of experience in determining working models 207
A note on use of the terms 'mature' and 'immature' 209
15 Anxious Attachment and Some Conditions that Promote it 211
' Overdependency' or anxious attachment 211
Anxious attachment of children reared without a permanent
m other figure 215
Anxious attachment after a period of separation or of daily
s ubstitute care 220
Anxious attachment following threats of abandonment or
s uicide 226
16 'Overdependency' and the Theory of Spoiling 237
S ome contrasting theories 237
S tudies of 'overdependency' and its antecedents 240
17 Anger, Anxiety, and Attachment 245
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A nger: a response to separation 245
A nger: functional and dysfunctional 246
A nger, ambivalence, and anxiety 253
78 Anxious Attachment and the 'Phobias' of Childhood 258
P hobia, pseudophobia, and anxiety state 258
' School phobia' or school refusal 261
T wo classical cases of childhood phobia: a reappraisal 283
A nimal phobias in childhood 289
19 Anxious Attachment and 'Agoraphobia' 292
S ymptomatology and theories of 'agoraphobia' 292
P athogenic patterns of family interaction 299
' Agoraphobia', bereavement, and depression 309
A note on response to treatment 310
20 Omission, Suppression, and Falsification of Family Context 313
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21 Secure Attachment and the Growth of Self-reliance 322
P ersonality development and family experience 322
S tudies of adolescents and young adults 328
S tudies of young children 330
S elf-reliance and reliance on others 359
22 Pathways for the Growth of Personality 363
T he nature of individual variation: alternative models 363
D evelopmental pathways and homeorhesis 366
O ne person's pathway: some determinants 369
APPENDICES

I Separation Anxiety: Review of Literature 375
I I Psychoanalysis and Evolution Theory 399
I II Problems of Terminology 404
A dditional Notes 409
R eferences 415
A dditional References 436
I ndex 439
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Foreword

Truly revolutionary works that open up new conceptual vistas tend to straddle intellectual
worlds. Their originality makes them difficult to locate in the historical context in which they
are written, and their pervasive impact makes it difficult to appreciate just how formative they
were in generating subsequent developments that have come to take on the quality of great
obviousness.
John Bowlby was a psychoanalyst; he notes in his original preface that psychoanalysis
provided him his first inspiration as well as the only serviceable vocabulary for writing about
intense human experiences, trauma and separation. Retrospectively, we might imagine that his
work on the powerful emotional bonds between children and their mothers would have been
welcomed within the psychoanalytic world. It was not. It was certainly not ignored, however;
the persuasiveness of Bowlby's presentation made that impossible.
Bowlby's initial work on attachment was given an airing in the most influential
psychoanalytic publications of his day and was then attacked by the most prestigious analytic
authorities. That he was virtually exiled by the psychoanalytic community was, ultimately,
fortuitous. It led to the establishment around Bowlby's work of a research tradition into the
nature of emotional attachment, separation and loss that has generated some of the most
remarkable, reliable and provocative empirical data of the past fifty years.
What was it that got Bowlby into so much trouble? He introduced the project as a working out
of the implications of observations of the responses to loss young children. It was Bowlby's
commitment to the importance of his observations that was the problem. The psychoanalysis
of Bowlby's day was an interpretive system that was almost hermetically sealed. Freud had
provided the Rosetta Stone for deciphering the underlying structures of mind, and Melanie
Klein had extended his psychic excavations to the deepest recesses. Armed with their
decoding devices, psychoanalysts felt they could see beneath the superficial, behavioral levels
of human interaction to the underlying instinctual conflicts and fantasies that generated their
deeper meanings.
Bowlby had been asked by the World Health Organization in 1950 to study and offer advice
on the plight of homeless children, real children in the real world. The ravaging impact of
maternal deprivations and separations made an enormous impression on
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him -- to his surprise. It is a tribute to how much Bowlby's work has changed our
consciousness that we must strain to imagine why he would have experienced the magnitude
of such an impact as a surprise.
In the understanding of mid-twentieth century experts, small children had basic physical
needs that required tending; the complex emotional relationships involving a unique sense of
interpersonal connection evolved only later. In the conditioning paradigms that dominated
American psychology in those days, the caregiver was a "secondary-reinforcer," who became
important to the child only by virtue of being associatively linked with physical ministrations.
And in the language of the prevailing psychoanalytic theory the mother was, similarly, a
"need-gratifying object," whose significance developed gradually through her role in
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satisfying drive pressures. Separations from mothers shouldn't matter terribly much, as long as
the child's needs were taken care of.
But separations did matter, Bowlby discovered. Observations of actual children suggested that
maternal deprivation was extremely traumatic. Bowlby s position was a little like that of the
wife in the old story who discovers her philandering husband in bed with another woman.
"Darling" pleads the husband, "who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?" Bowlby
decided to believe his eyes.
Any good psychological theory applied cleverly can account for virtually any data. Surely the
instinct theory of Bowlby's day could be stretched to accommodate his observations. But for
Bowlby, the center of gravity of the data on trauma in real children in the real world did not
match up with the center of gravity of Freud's drive theory, privileging impersonal, body-
based needs and fantasies. So, as Bowlby announces in this work, a new instinct theory was
required, in which the powerful emotional attachment between child and mother is understood
not as derivative of more basic processes but as fundamental in itself.
This was no minor addition; it challenged psychoanalytic metapsychology at its core. Bowlby
liked to recount experiences formative for him as a student listening to case presentations that
emphasized unconscious, instinct-based fantasies at the British Psychoanalytic Society; he
remembered one conference at which he felt moved to rise and state emphatically, "But there
is such a thing as a bad mother!"
Bowlby was not working completely alone; he had conceptual fellow travelers, especially in
the Interpersonal Psychiatry of the American Harry Stack Sullivan and the psychoanalytic
contributions of other innovators like W. R. D. Fairbairn, Donald Winni-
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cott and Hans Loewald. Part of what drew so much fire in Bowlby's direction, however, was
his clarity. Sullivan was a tortured, blocked writer. Fairbairn was often tedious and difficult.
Winnicott was poetic and elusive. Loewald was extremely subtle and often obscure. Bowlby
wrote with lucidity and power.
It was amply apparent from the very beginning and throughout that Bowlby regarded his
contributions as a direct challenge to certain basic tenets of Freudian theory. And he had data
on children in the real world to back them up. And he identified himself very much as a
scientist, offering testable hypotheses. And, his links with other scientists, especially the
ethologists of his day, made his position extremely persuasive. For the psychoanalytic
establishment of the time, this was simply too much to bear. Bowlby became much more
interested than the average psychoanalyst in what actually goes on between people in the real
world, and the neighboring discipline of ethology provided powerful explanatory concepts for
understanding what he had been observing in children's reactions to separation and loss.
Both Freud and Bowlby were extremely involved with Darwin's contribution (one of
Bowlby's last works was a biography of Darwin), but their Darwins were very different.
Freud's Darwin was part of the first wave of reaction to the extraordinary implications of the
theory of evolution; one of Freud's projects was to work out the implications for human
psychology of Darwin's demonstration of the continuity between, so-called lower and so-
called higher forms of animal life. Freud's fascination with primitivism and his reliance on
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bestial metaphors are thematic throughout his writings. And Freud's structural model of the
psyche is a re-creation, on a microcosmic level, of Darwin's sweeping account of the
evolution of species: lower level, primitive energy of the id is transformed by the reality-
oriented ego into higher level, aim-inhibited resources for activities consistent with the
cultural values of the superego. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.
Bowlby draws on a different Darwin. Like the Ego psychologist Heinz Hartmann, Bowlby
was most interested in what Darwin taught about animal adaptation to environmental
conditions and niches. In this second volume of his Attachment and Loss trilogy, Bowlby
actually refers to Freud as pre-Darwinian because Freud did not grasp the importance of the
principle of "natural selection" in Darwin's theory of the evolution of species. Bowlby, like
Darwin, was interested in what animals do to maximize their chances for survival. Whereas
Freud's Darwin lent himself to the study of internality and unconscious, primitive states,
Bowlby's Darwin lent himself
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to a behavioral analysis of what small children and mothers actually do with each other. Thus,
among the most vivid of Bowlby's contributions is his account of the five component instincts
that insure the baby's proximity to the mother--the underpinnings for both healthy attachment
and traumatic separations and loss.
One advantage of this behavioral emphasis has been that Bowlby's ideas have been applied,
with extraordinary effectiveness, to the empirical research tradition that Mary Ainsworth and
Mary Main have done so much to develop. Another advantage is the ease with which
Bowlby's observations have been adopted by popular pediatric practice and social policy
planners to prioritize the personal, emotional dimensions of childcare. Despite our difficulties
as a society in investing the resources necessary for psychologically healthy child-
evelopment, we have come to take as axiomatic the principle of "bonding" between parents
and children and the importance of emotional warmth and security in caregiving. Bowlby's
work was central to this enriched understanding.
Until recently, the disadvantage of Bowlby's behavioral emphasis has been the relative
underdevelopment of the psychodynamic dimension within attachment theory, which has
made the bridge to other psychoanalytic theorizing more difficult. Bowlby's concept of
"working models" had an overly schematic, mechanistic feel to it, which lacked the richness
of psychoanalytic investigations of the inner world. But the more recent attachment literature
(Fonagy) has taken a more inward turn in exploring the concomitants of secure and insecure
attachments in the textures of conscious and unconscious subjectivity. And finally
psychoanalysis itself has begun to catch up with bowlby. The recent relational turn in
psychoanalysis ( Mitchell and Aron) has made bridges between Bowlby's work and
contemporary psychoanalytic thought much more compelling.
Part of what makes Bowlby's early work so inspiring thirty years later is his blend of openness
and persistence. His intellectual curiosity seems to have known no bounds, and he continued
to draw upon many diverse sources for ideas and conceptual tools, including child-
observation, ethology, systems theory, and information-processing. Bowlby also knew from
early on that he was onto something very important, and his integrity and perseverance in
pursuing what mattered, despite criticism, has benefitted us all.
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Attachment and Loss has been one of the most influential works of this century.
Stephen A. Mitchell New York City, October 1999
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Preface

IN the preface to the first volume of this work I describe the circumstances in which it was
begun. Clinical experience of disturbed children, research into their family backgrounds, and
an opportunity, in 1950, to read the literature and to discuss problems of mental health with
colleagues in several countries led me, in a report commissioned by the World Health
Organization, to formulate a principle: 'What is believed to be essential for mental health is
that the infant and young child should experience a warm, intimate and continuous
relationship with his mother (or permanent mother-substitute) in which both find satisfaction
and enjoyment' (Bowlby 1951). To support this conclusion evidence was presented for
believing that many forms of psychoneurosis and character disorder are to be attributed either
to deprivation of maternal care or to discontinuities in a child's relationship with his mother
figure.
Though the contents of the report proved controversial at the time, most of the conclusions are
now accepted. What has plainly been missing, however, is an account of the processes
through which the many and varied ill effects attributed to maternal deprivation or to
discontinuities in the mother-child bond are brought into being. It is this gap that my
colleagues and I have since striven to fill. In doing so we have adopted a research strategy that
we believe is still too little exploited in the field of psychopathology.
In their day-to-day work, whether with disturbed children, disturbed adults, or disturbed
families, clinicians have of necessity to view causal processes backwards, from the
disturbance of today back to the events and conditions of yesterday. Though this method has
yielded many valuable insights into possible pathogenic events and into the kinds of
pathological process to which they appear to give rise, as a research method it has grave
limitations. To complement it, a method regularly adopted in other branches of medical
research is, having identified a possible pathogen, to study its effects prospectively. If the
pathogen has been correctly identified and the studies of its effects in the short and long term
are skilfully executed, it then becomes possible to describe the processes set in train by the
pathogenic agent and also the ways by which they lead to
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the various consequent conditions. In such studies attention must be paid not only to the
processes set in train by the pathogen but also to the very many conditions, internal and
external to the organism, that affect their course. Only then can some grasp be had of the
particular processes, conditions, and sequences that lead from a potentially pathogenic
occurrence to the particular types of disturbance with which the clinician was in the first place
concerned.
In adopting a prospective research strategy my colleagues and I early became deeply
impressed by the observations of our colleague, James Robertson, who had recorded, both on
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paper and on film, how young children in their second and third years of life respond while
away from home and cared for instead in a strange place by a succession of unfamiliar people,
and also how they respond during and after return home to mother ( Robertson 1952; 1953;
Robertson & Bowlby 1952). During the period away, perhaps in residential nursery or
hospital ward, a young child is usually acutely distressed for a time and is not easily
comforted. After his return home he is likely to be either emotionally detached from his
mother or else intensely clinging; as a rule a period of detachment, either brief or long
depending mainly on length of separation, precedes a period during which he becomes
strongly demanding of his mother's presence. Should a child then come to believe, for any
reason, that there is risk of a further separation he is likely to become acutely anxious.
Reflecting on these observations we concluded that 'loss of mother figure, either by itself or in
combination with other variables yet to be clearly identified, is capable of generating
responses and processes that are of the greatest interest to psychopathology'. Our reason for
this belief was that the responses and processes observed seemed to be the same as those
found to be active in older individuals who are still disturbed by separations they have
suffered in early life. These comprise, on the one hand, a tendency to make intensely strong
demands on others and to be anxious and angry when they are not met, a condition common
in individuals labelled neurotic; and, on the other, a blockage in the capacity to make deep
relationships, such as is present in affectionless and psychopathic personalities.
From the start an important and controversial issue has been the part played in the responses
of children to separation from mother by variables other than that of separation per se;
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these include illness, the strange surroundings in which a child finds himself, the kind of
substitute care he receives while away, the kind of relations he has both before and after the
event. It is plain that these factors can greatly intensify, or in some cases mitigate, a child's
responses. Yet evidence is convincing that presence or absence of mother figure is itself a
condition of the greatest significance in determining a child's emotional state. The issue is
already discussed in Chapter 2 of the first volume, where a description is given of some of the
relevant findings, and is taken up again in the first chapter of this one, where attention is given
to the results of a foster-care project undertaken in recent years by James and Joyce Robertson
in which they 'sought to create a separation situation from which many of the factors that
complicate institutional studies were eliminated; and in which the emotional needs of the
children would be met as far as possible by a fully available substitute mother' ( Robertson &
Robertson 1971). 1 Study of the Robertsons' findings has led to some modification of views
expressed in earlier publications, in which insufficient weight was given to the influence of
skilled care from a familiar substitute.In parallel with the empirical studies of my colleagues, I
have myself been engaged in studying the theoretical and clinical implications of the data. In
particular, I have been trying to sketch a schema able to comprehend data derived from a
number of distinct sources:
observations of how young children behave during periods when they are away from
mother and after they return home to her;
observations of how older subjects, children and adults, behave during and after a
separation from a loved figure, or after a permanent loss;
observations of difficulties found during clinical work with children and adults who,
during childhood or adolescence, have either experienced a long separation or a loss or
had grounds to fear one; these include various forms of acute or chronic anxiety and
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