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 -i- 1 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 -ii- 2 Contents Foreword page vii Preface xi Acknowledgements xvii PART I: SECURITY, ANXIETY, AND DISTRESS 1 Prototypes of Human Sorrow 3 Responses of young children to separation from mother 3 Conditions leading to intense responses 6 Conditions mitigating the intensity of responses 16 Presence or absence of mother figurer: a key variable 22 2 The Place of Separation and Loss in Psychopathology 25 Problem and perspective 25 Separation anxiety and other forms of anxiety 30 A challenge for theory 30 3 Behaviour with and without Mother: Humans 33 Naturalistic observations 33 Experimental Studies 39 Ontogeny of responses to separation 52 4 Behaviour with and without Mother: Non-human Primates 57 Naturalistic observations 57 Early experimental studies 60 Further 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 Anxiety allied to fear 77 Models of motivation and their effects on theory 79 Puzzling phobia or natural fear 83 6 Forms of Behaviour Indicative of Fear 87 An empirical approach 87 Withdrawal behaviour and attachment behaviour 89 Feeling afraid and its variants: feeling alarmed and feeling anxious 92 -iii- 7 Situations that Arouse Fear in Humans 96 A difficult field of study 96 Fear-arousing situations: the first year 99 Fear-arousing situations: the second and later years 105 Compound situations 118 Fear behaviour and the development of attachment 119 Natural clues to potential danger 124 Fear behaviour of non-human primates 127 Compound situations 134 Fear, attack, and exploration 136 3 9 Natural Clues to Danger and Safety 138 Better safe than sorry 138 Potential danger of being alone 142 Potential safety of familiar companions and environment 146 Maintaining a stable relationship with the familiar environment: a form of homeostasis 148 10 Natural Clues, Cultural Clues, and the Assessment of Danger 151 Clues of three kinds 151 Real danger: difficulties of assessment 153 'Imaginary' dangers 156 Cultural clues learnt from others 158 Continuing role of the natural clues 161 Behaviour in disaster 166 11 Rationalization, Misattribution, and Projection 169 Difficulties in identifying situations that arouse fear 169 Misattribution and the role of projection 172 The case of Schreber: a re-examination 174 12 Fear of Separation 178 Hypotheses regarding its development 178 Need for two terminologies 182 PART III: INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IN SUSCEPTIBILITY TO FEAR: ANXIOUS ATTACHMENT 13 Some Variables responsible for Individual Differences 187 Constitutional variables 187 -iv- Experiences and processes that reduce susceptibility to fear 191 Experiences and processes that increase susceptibility to fear 196 14 Susceptibility to Fear and the Availability of Attachment Figures 201 Forecasting the availability of an attachment figure 201 Working models of attachment figures and of self 203 The 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 mother figure 215 Anxious attachment after a period of separation or of daily substitute care 220 Anxious attachment following threats of abandonment or suicide 226 16 'Overdependency' and the Theory of Spoiling 237 Some contrasting theories 237 Studies of 'overdependency' and its antecedents 240 17 Anger, Anxiety, and Attachment 245 4 Anger: a response to separation 245 Anger: functional and dysfunctional 246 Anger, ambivalence, and anxiety 253 78 Anxious Attachment and the 'Phobias' of Childhood 258 Phobia, pseudophobia, and anxiety state 258 'School phobia' or school refusal 261 Two classical cases of childhood phobia: a reappraisal 283 Animal phobias in childhood 289 19 Anxious Attachment and 'Agoraphobia' 292 Symptomatology and theories of 'agoraphobia' 292 Pathogenic 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 -v- 21 Secure Attachment and the Growth of Self-reliance 322 Personality development and family experience 322 Studies of adolescents and young adults 328 Studies of young children 330 Self-reliance and reliance on others 359 22 Pathways for the Growth of Personality 363 The nature of individual variation: alternative models 363 Developmental pathways and homeorhesis 366 One person's pathway: some determinants 369 APPENDICES I Separation Anxiety: Review of Literature 375 II Psychoanalysis and Evolution Theory 399 III Problems of Terminology 404 Additional Notes 409 References 415 Additional References 436 Index 439 -vi- 5 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 -vii- 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 6 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.