No More Learning

Starting from Freud's distinction between objective anxiety (arising in connection with a known external danger) and neurotic anxiety (arising in connection with an unknown and internal one) ( Freud 1926a, SE 20: 165 and 167), Klein (1948b) sees both as contributing to the infant's fear of loss. She describes their nature as follows: objective anxiety arises from 'the child's complete dependence on the mother for the satisfaction of his needs and the relief of tension'; neurotic anxiety 'derives from the infant's apprehension that the loved mother has been destroyed by his sadistic impulses or is in danger of being destroyed, and this fear . . . contributes to the infant's feeling that she will never return'. Were Klein to postulate that this depressive anxiety only developed in later infancy, she would not be diverging materially from Freud's view but only expanding it at an important point. This, however, is not her position. She emphasizes that in her view both sources of anxiety are present from the beginning and are constantly interacting. Because of this, 'no danger-situation arising from external sources could ever be experienced by the young child as a purely external and known danger' ( Klein et al. 1952: 288). On this her own statements and those of her colleagues are consistent. In discussing the cotton-reel incident Klein dissociates
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herself explicitly from Freud's view and concludes, 'when [an infant] misses [his mother], and his needs are not satisfied her absence is felt to be the result of his destructive impulses' (pp. 269 -70). In the same volume it is claimed by Susan Isaacs that always 'mental pain has a content, a meaning, and implies phantasy. On the view presented here, "he behaves as if he were never going to see her again" 1 means his phantasy is that his mother has been destroyed by his own hate or greed and altogether lost' ( Klein et al. 1952: 87).
These passages seem to make it clear that in their explanations of separation anxiety Melanie Klein and her colleagues see depressive anxiety as virtually its sole component. This, however, is not so since elsewhere they emphasize that the relationship to the mother is itself 'a first measure of defence . . . The dependence on the mother and fear of loss of her, which Freud regards as the deepest source of anxiety, is from our point of view (the self- preservative) already a defence against a greater danger (that of helplessness against destruction within)' ( Joan Riviere in Klein et al. 1952: 46-7). 'From the very beginning,' she writes, 'the internal forces of the death instinct and of aggression are felt to be the cardinal danger threatening the organism' (p. 44 ). Since these forces are let loose during a separation experience, in the final analysis separation anxiety is seen as a response to the threat of destruction within. Clearly, this theory is very different from that of Freud and also from that advanced here. Whereas Freud gives primacy to anxiety that arises from 'an accumulation of amounts of stimulation' that he conceives as resulting from separation, Melanie Klein and her colleagues give primacy to persecutory anxiety.
It should, however, be added that in various passages Klein refers also to birth as constituting an anxiety-provoking trauma, and seems at times to subscribe to the birth-trauma theory of separation anxiety. Thus, following a passage already quoted above ( 1952: 296), she writes: 'Other important sources of primary anxiety are the trauma of birth (separation anxiety) and frustration of bodily needs. ' Nevertheless, although postulating these additional sources of anxiety, she quickly brings them within the ambit of persecutory anxiety by attributing to an infant a tendency always to suppose fear to be aroused by an object. After having earlier expressed the opinion that 'the fear of the destructive impulse seems to attach itself at once to
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1 Isaacs quotation, from Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, is from the 1936 English
translation ( London: Hogarth, p. 167). -386-
an object', she completes her statement regarding the trauma of birth and the frustration of bodily needs thus: 'and these experiences too are from the beginning felt as being caused by objects. 1 Even if these objects are felt to be external, they become through introjection internal persecutors and thus reinforce the fear of the destructive impulse within' (p. 296 ).
In evaluating Melanie Klein's views it is essential to realize that her main theoretical outlook was formed in the years preceding the publication of Freud Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, and that, unlike Freud, who in the final formulation of his theory took anxiety arising from separation experiences as his point of departure, Klein had already developed her theory of anxiety before she gave any attention to separation from mother as a situation that provokes
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anxiety. The first occasion she discusses it is in 1935 in her paper on 'The Psychogenesis of Manic-depressive States'.
When we look back on the early papers of Melanie Klein we remain impressed by her observation that anxiety and unconscious aggression often coexist, particularly when there is an unusually anxious and intense attachment of one person to another. In my judgement, however, she assumed too readily that aggression both precedes and causes anxiety so that, instead of recognizing conscious and unconscious aggression as a common response to separation and as constituting an important and frequent condition for the exacerbation of separation anxiety, she came to see aggression as the single source of anxiety; and furthermore, by identifying the child's tie to his mother with orality, was led into making implausible assumptions about the mental life of infants during their early months and thence into creating a theoretical superstructure that is far from convincing. This has had two unfortunate results. On the one hand, some of her critics have failed to appreciate the value of certain parts of her contribution; on the other, her followers have been slow to recognize that, significant though depressive and persecutory anxieties may sometimes be, the origin of separation anxiety cannot be understood in such terms, and, more important, that disturbances of the mother--child relationship that arise during the second and many subsequent years can have a far-reaching potential for pathological development.
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1 Freud is not favourable to this type of theory. He writes: 'A child who is mistrustful in this
way and terrified of the aggressive instinct which dominates the world is a theoretical construction that has quite miscarried' ( SE 16: 407).
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Anna Freud
Whereas Melanie Klein has written much about separation anxiety but has recounted few observations of how infants and young children actually behave in situations of separation, Anna Freud was one of the first to record such observations but until recent years has discussed their theoretical implications singularly little. As in the case of Klein, it looks as though a main reason was that her theoretical orientation was already set before Freud's fresh appraisal of the nature and genesis of anxiety appeared. Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety is not referred to in her book The Psycho-analytical Treatment of Children ( 1946), which dates from 1926, 1927, and 1945; and, though a chapter is given to processes of defence in relation to the source of anxiety or to danger, there is no reference in The Ego and Mechanisms of Defence ( 1936) either to separation anxiety or to loss of object. Until her experiences with babies and young children in the Hampstead Nurseries during the war, Anna Freud seems to have given little attention to these problems.
In the two modest volumes published with Dorothy Burlingham ( Burlingham & Freud 1942; 1944), observation is sharp and description telling. Of children aged between one and three years they write: 'Reactions to parting at this time of life are particularly violent . . . This new ability to love finds itself deprived of the accustomed objects and his greed for affection remains unsatisfied. His longing for his mother becomes intolerable and throws him into states of despair' ( 1942:51). Yet, despite this clear understanding of the distress that is implicit in these responses, neither in these two volumes nor in the papers published by Anna
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Freud during the subsequent decade are such manifestations related in any systematic way to anxiety in general or to separation anxiety in particular.
Instead, one has the impression that Burlingham & Freud were unprepared for the intensity of the responses they saw in the Nurseries and puzzled how to explain them. For instance, there is a passage ( 1942: 75-7) where they express the belief that perhaps if separations could be arranged more gradually all would be well: 'It is not so much the fact of separation to which the child reacts as the form in which the separation has taken place. ' In another passage (p. 57 ) the distress of a child between three years and five years seems to be attributed, entirely, to his belief that separation is a punishment--'To overcome this guilt he overstresses all the love which he has ever
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felt for his parents'--a comment which suggests that in their view there would be no distress at this age were there not guilt and persecutory anxiety. Perhaps they get nearer the truth when in these same passages they refer to 'the natural pain of separation' and to the fact that 'unsatisfied longing produces in him a state of tension which is felt as shock'.
Whenever during that period Anna Freud broaches a theoretical interpretation of these responses or of the long-term results of separation (e. g. 1952; 1953), she takes for granted that the child's tie to his mother is to be accounted for by the theory of secondary drive. Since the infant has no needs but those of his body, his interest is at first confined to anyone who meets those needs; in so far as there is anxiety at separation from mother, it is a result of the fear that bodily needs will go unmet. Her views are perhaps most clearly expressed in an address to medical students ( 1953). After describing her conception of how attachment grows in the well-cared-for child she proceeds:
On the other hand, in cases where the mother has carried out her job as provider indifferently, or has allowed too many other people to substitute for herself, the transformation from greedy stomach-love to a truly constant love attachment is slow to come. The infant may remain too insecure and too worried about the fulfilment of his needs to have sufficient feeling to spare for the person or persons who provided for them [my italics].
This conclusion is a logical outcome of the secondary-drive theory of the child's tie and of Freud's version of the signalanxiety theory of separation anxiety.
More recently, in a book published in 1965, Anna Freud describes several 'forms' taken by anxiety during the early years, each of which she believes to be characteristic of a particular phase in the development of object relations. The sequence of forms runs as follows: 'archaic fears of annihilation, . . . separation anxiety, castration anxiety, fear of loss of love, guilt . . . ' Separation anxiety (and also fear of annihilation) is held to be characteristic of, and confined to, the first phase in the development of object relations; that is described as a phase of 'biological unity between the mother--infant couple, with the mother's narcissism extending to the child, and the child including the mother in his internal "narcissistic milieu" . . . '. During subsequent phases, forms of anxiety other than separation anxiety are thought to occur. For example, the third
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phase, described as that of object constancy, is believed to be characterized by fear of the loss of the object's love. ?
Contributions by Other Exponents of Ego Psychology
The theories advanced by Anna Freud during earlier years are subscribed to also by Nunberg ( 1932), Fenichel ( 1945), and Schur ( 1953; 1958). In his two carefully reasoned studies of anxiety, Schur makes the commonly held assumption that in man the biologically given components of behaviour are strictly limited. In the later paper, in which he draws extensively on ethological data and concepts, he details what he believes they comprise. On the one hand, he postulates the presence of fight and flight reactions characteristic of the phase of development which begins with the ability to perceive external objects. On the other, he postulates an earlier phase ('the undifferentiated phase') during which 'all danger is, due to the infantile development specific for man, "economical", inner danger', namely danger arising from an accumulation of excitation that springs from unmet bodily needs. It is from this, specifically human, source of anxiety that he regards separation anxiety as developing as a learnt derivative: 'The realization that an external object can initiate or end a traumatic situation displaces the danger from the economic situation to the condition which determines that situation. Then it is no longer hunger that constitutes danger for the child but it is the absence of the mother. ' Although he discusses various dangers which he thinks 'may be based on innate givens', nowhere does he consider the possibility that loss of mother may be one of them.
After he has come to recognize the importance of separation anxiety Kris ( 1950) makes a serious effort to incorporate it in his theorizing. But his views are based more on inference from previous theory than on a reassessment of the data; in particular he is concerned, like Schur, to cast them in a form compatible with Hartmann's ego psychology. This leads him to place great emphasis on a distinction between the danger of losing the love object and the danger of losing the object's love. Although this distinction was referred to briefly by Freud ( 1926a), the way that Kris elaborates it is his own. On theoretical grounds he postulates that the danger of losing the love object is concerned solely with anaclitic (namely bodily) needs and is not concerned with a particular love object. Conversely, the development of a 'relationship to a permanent personalized love object that can no longer easily be replaced' he postulates
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to occur synchronously with the development of responsiveness to the danger of losing the object's love; it represents, in his opinion, 'a decisive step in ego development'.
This hypothetical association is not, however, borne out by observation. Anxiety reactions to the loss of a particular love object are to be seen some months before it is reasonable to credit a human infant with awareness of the danger of losing the object's love and before the twelve- month age-limit suggested by Kris ( 1950). As is emphasized in the previous volume (Chapter 15), the responses mediating attachment behaviour both in man and in lower species tend quickly to focus on a particular figure; and there can be no reason to suppose that their doing so represents an important step in ego development. In the event, therefore, the theoretical distinction advanced by Kris must be regarded as mistaken.
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The crucial connection between anxiety as the reaction to the danger of losing the object and the pain of mourning as the reaction to its actual loss, which Freud arrives at in the final pages of Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, has been little recognized. Only in the work of Melanie Klein and Therese Benedek is it given much place. Helene Deutsch ( 1937) explicitly divorces the two: anxiety is an infantile response, she holds, grief and mourning more mature ones. 'The early infantile anxiety', she writes, 'we know as the small child's reaction to separation from the protecting and loving person. ' When the child is older, on the other hand, 'suffering and grief [are] to be expected in place of anxiety' (p. 14, my italics). Moreover, separation anxiety in the older individual is to be understood always as a regression to infancy, and occurs in situations where 'grief . . . threaten[s] the integrity of the ego, or, in other words, if the ego [is] too weak to undertake . . . mourning' (p. 14 ). This differentiation by maturity does not stand examination, however. In the responses of infants and young children to loss of mother, elements of grief are undoubtedly present. Conversely, as Therese Benedek among others has recorded, anxiety is the rule even in adults when they are separated for any length of time from someone they love.
For many years Therese Benedek has been concerned with problems of separation from, and reunion with, loved persons, and with responses to loss and bereavement; and as a result of her clinical work she has had a lively awareness of the farreaching significance of separation anxiety and of its close relatedness to anxiety and mourning. In describing responses to
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separations, reunions, and bereavements occurring during wartime, she frequently speaks of separation as a trauma in itself, and she generalizes boldly: 'The universal response to separation is anxiety' ( Benedek 1946: 146). She also recognizes that the experience of being separated, or the expectation of being separated, from a loved person leads to a sharp increase in longing for his company. In a later paper ( 1956) she notes that a crying fit in an infant is by no means always caused 'by a commanding physiologic need such as hunger and pain, but by the thwarting of an attempt at emotional (psychologic) communication and satisfaction'.
All these observations can be parsimoniously explained in terms of the theories regarding attachment, separation anxiety, grief and mourning that are advanced in the present work. Nevertheless, although her original training took place in Budapest (see Appendix to Volume I), Benedek does not accept these simpler hypotheses. Instead, in all her theorizing she is committed to a secondary-drive theory of the child's tie to his mother with all its complications and disadvantages. Thus the increase in longing evident in adults at separation, which can hardly be considered other than a natural and normal response, is explained as due to a regression to oral dependency. Indeed, as in so much theorizing deriving from the concept of dependence, Therese Benedek tends at times to theorize as though all attachments to loved persons were undesirable regressions to an infantile state.
Nowhere in Benedek's writings is there any systematic discussion of separation anxiety; but, in the later paper ( 1956) referred to above, two separate theories appear to be adumbrated. The first is similar to Freud's signal-anxiety theory; the second is concerned with the danger of ego disorganization.
Still struggling with the same problem that Freud was wrestling with thirty years earlier, she asks why an infant should respond to 'the frustration of a "dependent" wish' by crying. Reverting to the belief that crying is related intrinsically only to the experiences of hunger and
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pain, she concludes that 'he responds to the lack of participation from the adult as to a complete interruption of the symbiosis, as if he were abandoned and hungry' (p. 402, my italics).
Since, however, she is not altogether confident that crying is to be understood as anxiety, and believes that anxiety proper is a response to the danger of ego distintegration, Benedek advances another view. This is that the young child has to turn
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to his mother to preserve his ego integration when faced with the 'anxiety, humiliation and shame of failure'. In the case of the older child, 'his ego can maintain itself by its own resources' (pp. 408 -9). Thus, although the clinical data she presents are consistent with the theory advanced here, Benedek's interpretations remain firmly embedded within the traditional paradigm.
In much of her theorizing, especially in her use of the concept of symbiosis, Margaret Mahler ( 1968) follows Therese Benedek; and in attributing a distinct form of anxiety to each phase of the development of object relations she follows Anna Freud. Nevertheless, despite the similarity of their postulated phases, the phase of development to which Mahler attributes separation anxiety is not the same as the one to which Anna Freud attributes it. Whereas Anna Freud regards separation anxiety as a response specific to 'infringements of the biological mother-infant tie' during the first phase of development, Mahler holds that separation anxiety is attributable properly only to a later phase, namely the phase 'after the beginning of object constancy has been achieved'. This she puts in the third and fourth years. The form of anxiety that Mahler attributes to the first phase of development, the symbiotic phase, is a fear of self- annihilation, the reasoning being that at that phase 'loss of the symbiotic object' is thought to amount 'to loss of an integral part of the ego itself'. This mode of theorizing is close to that of Spitz.
Although, like most other analysts, Spitz is an adherent of the secondary-drive theory to account for the child's tie to his mother and endorses Freud's version of the signal-anxiety theory of separation anxiety ( 1950), he advances, in addition, a variant of that theory. This is a theory of 'narcissistic trauma'. After outlining his views on the development of object relations from a phase of narcissism (first three months) through a phase of pre-objectal relations (second three months) to a phase of true object relations (third three months), he proceeds:
It is in the third quarter that true objects appear for the first time. They now have a face, but they still retain their function of a constituent part of the child's recently established Ego. The loss of the object is therefore a diminution of the Ego at this age and is as severe a narcissistic trauma as a loss of a large part of the body. The reaction to it is just as severe.
From other passages, in which he insists on the warning function
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of anxiety and its dependence on learning and foresight, it is clear that in Spitz's view anxiety is a signal to warn against the danger of a narcissistic trauma. This is a fresh variant of the
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signal-anxiety theory: the traumatic situation to be avoided is, this time, one in which narcissism is threatened.
It should be noted that much of Spitz's theorizing about anxiety turns around his concern to explain the anxiety exhibited by an infant of seven or eight months when confronted by a stranger, which he was the first to term eight-months' anxiety; the anxiety exhibited at separation from a loved object is less in his mind. In view of his empirical work this may seem surprising, until we realize that his observations of deprived infants were not concerned with the immediate responses to separation, namely protest, distress, and anxiety, or with responses after reunion, but were largely concentrated on responses seen during the later phases of separation, namely grief and depression. As a result he had no opportunity to observe the continuum of response from separation anxiety to grief and mourning.
The approach of Sandler & Joffe to these problems follows fairly closely the approaches of Kris and Spitz. The traditional theory of secondary drive is adopted to account for the child's tie to his mother, together with the concept of dependency. In keeping with their basic model, moreover, they place almost exclusive emphasis on the feeling states produced in a child by the presence or absence of his mother and make little attempt to relate these feeling states either to instinctive behaviour or to the survival value of mother's presence and the increased risk attendant on her absence. Thus they describe 'the role of the object' in a child's life as 'that of a vehicle for the attainment of the ideal state of well-being'. Conversely, 'loss of the object signifies the loss of an aspect of the self', i. e. that 'part of the self-presentation which . . . reflects the relation to the object' ( Joffe & Sandler 1965, their italics).
For Sandler & Joffe, therefore, as for Freud, the situation at all costs to be avoided is not so much the actual loss as the traumatic overwhelming of the ego to which loss leads. In terms of the Sandler & Joffe model, the traumatic situation to be avoided is described as a 'disruption of the individual's feeling state' ( Sandler & Joffe 1969).
Summing up the differences they see between their theoretical interpretation and my own, Joffe & Sandler ( 1965) conclude:
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Object loss may bring about acute mental pain through creating a wound in the self. This view coincides with what Abraham and others have described as the 'severe injury to infantile narcissism' which object loss entails. And although Bowlby has maintained ( 1960b) that such a statement misses the true significance of object loss, we take the view that it contains its essence.
Such contrasting positions are, of course, a simple consequence of our having adopted different paradigms.
Other Contributors
In view of Sullivan's insistence that psychiatry is the study of interpersonal relationships, it is not unexpected that he sees all anxiety as a function of the child's relationship to his mother and other significant people. Nevertheless his position is different from that advanced here, especially in the primacy that he gives to the role of learning; for he regards anxiety as being exclusively a product of the mother's attitude. When mother is approving, her child is content;
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when she is disapproving, her child is anxious. Despite his great emphasis on 'need for contact' and 'need for tenderness' and the strong terms in which he refers to the experience of loneliness -- 'really intimidating' and 'terrible' ( 1953: 261) -- that separation from a loved object can of itself induce anxiety appears to be explicitly ruled out. Thus, in a final chapter, he indicates features that man has in common with other species, namely bodily needs and 'even our recurrent need for contact with others'. These he contrasts with features 'restricted to man and some of the creatures he has domesticated', which include 'the experience of anxiety' (p. 370 ). His assumption that anxiety is confined to domesticated species follows from his assumption that it results from processes of training and learning: 'there is nothing I can conceive in the way of interpersonal action about which one could not be trained to be anxious' (pp. 370 -1). Even 'the experience of intense anxiety' which gives rise to repression is conceived as resulting from ill-conceived educational methods (p. 163 ). 1
Although in Sullivan's view the induction of anxiety remains
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1 Dr Mabel Blake Cohen has emphasized that Sullivan did not regard such 'training' as a
product only of conscious parental attitudes: ' Sullivan recognized that unconscious attitudes or tensions in the parents' interactions with the child were of considerably more importance than conscious planned behaviour' (personal communication).
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something of a mystery -- 'the character of situations which provoke anxiety is never completely to be grasped' (p. 190 ) -- it is nevertheless evident that in effect he sees it as always connected with processes of child-training. Since he believes that a main anxiety- inducing sanction used by a mother is restriction or denial of tenderness (p. 162 ), he comes at times near to my own concept of separation anxiety and its exacerbation by threats of abandonment. What seems to escape Sullivan, however, is that distress and anxiety can be and often are direct consequences of lack of tenderness and of separation per se; and that threats to restrict tenderness would be ineffective were that not so. While aware that loneliness can be a devastating experience for adolescents and adults. Sullivan seems unaware that it is even more distressing for infants and young children; indeed, there are passages in which he seems specifically to exclude that that is so: 'Loneliness, as an experience which has been so terrible that it practically baffles clear recall, is a phenomenon ordinarily encountered only in preadolescence and afterwards' (p. 261, my italics).
Reading Sullivan's work one gets the impression that he had never observed young children and that he was only partially aware of the close attachment they form to particular people and of the sense of security that mere proximity to a loved figure brings. The 'need for contact with others, often felt as loneliness', is identified, not with need for a genital or a parent-child relationship, but with gregariousness in animals (p. 370 ); his conviction that 'no action of the infant is consistently and frequently associated with the relief of anxiety' (p. 42 ), which overlooks the relief an infant commonly exhibits when clutching his mother, is a main plank in his theorizing. Because of this, he seems never to have grasped the reality of separation anxiety and, therefore, despite his close attention to the problems to which it gives rise, it remains almost impossible to attribute to him any particular theory of its nature and origin. It is probably for the same reasons that neither grief nor mourning plays any significant part in his system of psychopathology.
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In the theorizing of Phyllis Greenacre ( 1952) separation anxiety, and grief and mourning seem also to be omitted. Instead, experiences during the birth process and the first weeks of postnatal life are advanced as major variables to account for a later differential liability to neurosis (see Chapter 16 of this volume).
Rank's views regarding birth trauma have already been
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referred to. In his early papers Fairbairn, who sees separation anxiety as the mainspring of all psychopathology, follows Rank closely in regard to its origins: Fairbairn's postulate ( 1943) that birth anxiety is 'the prototype of all the separation anxiety which is subsequently experienced' is the counterpart of his postulate that a return-to-womb craving accounts for the child's tie. It should be added, however, that these views are peripheral to Fairbairn's main theoretical position ( Fairbairn 1952), which is in all other respects consistent with the theory of frustrated attachment advanced here. In a late paper ( 1963) in which he gives a synopsis of his views he writes: 'The earliest and original form of anxiety, as experienced by the child, is separation anxiety.
'
Others have also founded their psychopathology on the central role of separation anxiety and some have adopted a frustrated attachment theory to account for it. For instance, as long ago as 1935, Suttie, holding the view that the child's attachment to his mother is the result of a primary 'need for company', saw anxiety as 'an expression of apprehension of discomfort at the frustration, or threatened frustration, of this all-important motive'. A year later Hermann ( 1936) expressed an almost identical view. He relates anxiety to the urge to seek and cling to mother: 'Anxiety is basically the feeling of being left on one's own in the face of danger. Its expression is a seeking for help and at the same time a seeking for mother. . . . Anxiety develops in the sense of an urge to cling. . . . '
Odier ( 1948) appears to adopt the same position. Taking Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety as his starting-point, he criticizes Freud's view on the ground that the infant in the second year cannot conceptualize danger. As an alternative he postulates that 'during the second year this affect [i. e. anxiety] indicates that a particular state has become differentiated: the state of subjective insecurity', and concludes, 'originally the cause of the insecurity of the infant is, above all else, the absence of the mother (or her substitute) or separation from her at the time when the infant most needs her care and protection. This state is the basic theory of anxiety as it relates to insecurity' (pp. 44 46 ). In most respects Odier's view is consistent with that advanced in the present work. Where it differs is in his holding that separation anxiety starts only in the second year, a view that may have arisen because its obtrusive exhibition after the first birthday had misled him into supposing that it does not begin until then.
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Winnicott makes no such mistake. Although in several papers (e. g. 1941; 1945; 1955b) he might be thought to favour the Kleinian view that separation anxiety is nothing but depressive anxiety, in his brief contribution 'Anxiety Associated with Insecurity' ( 1952) he takes a line consistent with that favoured here. He refers to 'the well-known observation that the earliest anxiety is related to being insecurely held', and to anxiety that is caused by 'failure in the technique of infant care, as for instance failure to give the continuous live support that
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belongs to mothering'. In his judgement 'it is normal for the infant to feel anxiety if there is a failure of infant care technique'.
This is also the view of William James who many years ago wrote simply: 'The great source of terror in infancy is solitude' ( James 1890).
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Appendix II Psychoanalysis and Evolution Theory
SINCE it is not always realized that the paradigm Freud employed throughout in his metapsychology is pre-Darwinian in its assumptions, it is of interest to consider how that should have been so.
During the latter part of last century two separate debates were being held, the first about the historical reality of evolution and the second about how evolution, should it prove to have occurred, comes about. Not infrequently the adjective 'Darwinian' is used to refer to a belief in the historical reality of evolution. That, of course, is mistaken. Many others besides Charles Darwin advocated the historical reality of evolution, though it is true that none organized and displayed the evidence so cogently as he. Nevertheless the adjective Darwinian should not be applied in a general way to the occurrence of evolution but must be kept strictly for the theory that it has been brought about by a particular biological process, the one Darwin named 'natural selection', which is best described in terms of the differential breeding success, or failure, of naturally occurring variants that transmit their characteristics to their offspring.
Freud was certainly an evolutionist, but there is no evidence that he was ever a Darwinian. No doubt it is largely because a belief in evolution is so often regarded as Darwinian that it is easy to overlook how deeply Freud was committed to a preDarwinian standpoint. In his Autobiographical Study ( 1925) Freud describes how, as a student in the 1870s, 'the theories of Darwin, which were then of topical interest, strongly attracted me' ( SE 20: 8); and we learn from Jones ( 1953) that in his first year at the University of Vienna ( 1872-3) Freud took a course on 'Biology and Darwinism'. Such references, combined with Freud's enthusiasm for evolution in general and his occasional and always favourable references to some others of Darwin's ideas, e. g. the primal horde and the expression of emotions, are deceptive and lead easily to the supposition that Freud adopted Darwin's theory of the evolutionary process, even though he did not always apply it. Such a view, however,
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is incompatible with the historical record, as a reading of Ernest Jones's biography clearly shows (see especially Volume 3, 1957, Chapter 10).
Now that the explanatory powers of the principle of natural selection proposed by Darwin are become firmly established and universally accepted by biologists, it is easy to forget that this was far from the case during the formative years of psychoanalysis. Eiseley ( 1958) has described the scientific climate of the final quarter of last century, by which time belief in the historical reality of evolution was becoming well established whereas ideas on the means by which it is brought about remained in the hottest dispute. In particular, he describes how the
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authoritative yet mistaken criticism of Darwin's theory by Lord Kelvin had given great encouragement to Darwin's critics and to advocates of Lamarckian ideas. 1 So much so, in fact, that in later editions of the Origin Darwin modified his position by incorporating Lamarck's theory of the inheritance of acquired characters into his own theory of evolution by means of natural selection. The to and fro of heated controversy as it reached Freud in Vienna during the 'seventies and 'eighties, mainly through the professor of zoology, Claus, is described by Ritvo ( 1972). In 1909, the centenary year of Darwin's birth, the status of his theory of natural selection was still so doubtful that the celebrations to mark the event were little more than perfunctory. Throughout the first quarter of the present century, indeed, theories of evolution continued to be in 'a state of chaos and confusion' ( De Beer 1963); and it was not until 1942, with the publication of Julian Huxley volume Evolution: The Modern Synthesis, that a definitive account of the theory established during the preceding decade became readily available. It is
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1 De Beer ( 1963) points out that history has treated Lamarck unfairly. As one of the first, in
1809, to advance a systematic theory of the evolution of living species from earlier ones, Lamarck made a substantial contribution; but because his account was eclipsed by Darwin's definitive work it has been forgotten, except perhaps in his native France. By contrast, Lamarck's unproductive ideas regarding the processes whereby evolution has come about -- he attributed it not only to the inheritance of acquired characters but to the powers of a 'tendency to perfection' and of 'an inner feeling of need' -- remain identified with his name. This is because they have been so identified throughout the debate on the nature of the processes causing evolution, a debate that began after the Origin was published (in 1859), continued into the early decades of this century, and is occasionally revived even today.
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significant that the turning-point came, during the 1920s, as soon as genetic analysis was applied not only to specimens in a laboratory but to wild populations living and propagating in their natural environment. 1
Once the key dates in the historical development of Freud's psychoanalytic ideas are set beside those of evolutionary theory, the absence in psychoanalysis (as in most other schools of psychology) of a Darwinian perspective ceases to surprise. On the contrary, it is clear that, not only as a young man but on into his middle and later years, Freud would certainly not have been alone among his generation had he been cautious and non-committal in his approach to theories of the evolutionary process, including Darwin's theory of natural selection.
Yet to be non-committal was hardly in Freud's character. Although he never explicitly rejected Darwinian principles, it is evident that his early, deep, and continuing commitment to pre-Darwinian concepts in theoretical biology left no room for them. Nowhere throughout Freud's writings is Darwin's theory of natural selection debated; instead it is passed by as though it had never been proposed ( Jones 1957: 332).
In Chapter 1 of the first volume of this work it is emphasized that the psychical energy model that Freud brought to psychoanalysis came, not from his clinical work with patients, but from ideas he had learnt many years earlier, especially when he was working in the laboratory of
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his admired professor of physiology, Bru? cke. Now these ideas long antedate Darwin's Origin, published in 1859. During the 1840s, Bru? cke had been one of a group of dedicated young scientists, of whom Helmholtz was the leader, who were determined to show that all real causes are symbolized in science by the word 'force'. Since the achievements of the Helmholtz school soon became famous, it was natural that Freud, working under one of their number, should have adopted their assumptions. As Jones ( 1953: 46) points out, the spirit and content of Bru? cke's lectures of the 1870s correspond closely to the words Freud always used to characterize psychoanalysis in its dynamic aspect: '. . . psychoanalysis derives all mental processes (apart from the reception of external stimuli) from the interplay of forces, which assist or inhibit one another, combine with one another, enter into compromises with one another, etc. ' ( Freud 1926b, SE 20: 265).
The limitations of that model for organizing the clinical
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1 For an account of present-day theories of the evolutionary process see Maynard Smith (
1966) and Alland ( 1967). -401-
phenomena to which Freud drew attention are already discussed in the first volume. The point now being emphasized is that the model is not only pre-Darwinian in origin but also remote from the biological concepts introduced by Darwin. For Freud and his colleagues, deep in Helmholtzian assumptions, the Darwinian perspective would, therefore, have been extremely difficult to reach. As Freud grew older, moreover, his increasing commitment to vitalist theories of the kind advocated by Lamarck made reaching it impossible. In his third volume Jones ( 1957) gives half a chapter to Freud's life-long adherence to Lamarckian explanations of the process of evolution, starting with the postulated heritability of acquired characters and progressing to a belief in the powers of a postulated 'inner feeling of need'.
During his early professional years Freud followed his colleagues of the Helmholtzian school in espousing what may now seem a rather nai? ve determinism. But at some time during the years before 1915 his views seem to have undergone radical change, since in 1917 he is expressing the greatest interest in Lamarck's ideas about the effects that an animal's 'inner feeling of need' is thought to have on its structure. During that year, Freud was in a mood of boundless enthusiasm for the whole of Lamarck's work and was in correspondence with Ferenczi and Abraham about an ambitious project to integrate psychoanalysis with Lamarck's theories of evolution. 'Our intention is to base Lamarck's ideas completely on our own theories and to show that the concept of "need", which creates and modifies organs, is nothing else than the power unconscious ideas have over the body . . . in short the "omnipotence of thoughts". Fitness would then be really explained psychoanalytically. . . . ' 1 This amounts, as Jones remarks, to the belief that 'need' enables an animal to bring about changes not only in its environment but in its own body. Moreover, causation is inextricably confused with function. Thus Freud's position in theoretical biology had by that date become wholly at variance with the biology that was about to dominate the twentieth century.
On reflection it becomes clear that Freud's increasingly deep commitment to a Lamarckian perspective, to the exclusion of Darwinian ideas about differential survival rates and the dis-
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1 Extract from Freud's letter to Abraham of November 1917, quoted by Jones ( 1957: 335). Although in his first volume Jones ( 1953: 50) claims that Freud 'never abandoned determinism for teleology', it is plain that that claim cannot be sustained.
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tinction between causation and function, has suffused the whole structure of psychoanalytic thought and theory. 1 With the remainder of biology resting firmly on a developed version of Darwinian principles and psychoanalysis continuing Lamarckian, the gulf between the two has steadily and inevitably grown wider. There are thus only three conceivable outcomes. The first, which is barely imaginable, is for biology to renounce its Darwinian perspective. The second, advocated here, is for psychoanalysis to be recast in terms of modern evolution theory. The third is for the present divorce to continue indefinitely with psychoanalysis remaining permanently beyond the fringe of the scientific world.
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1 Even Hartmann influential book, Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation ( 1939),
was conceived and written before knowledge of modern evolution theory had become disseminated.
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Appendix III Problems of Terminology
EARLY in this volume it is remarked that in discussions of fear and anxiety problems of terminology abound. In Chapters 6, 12, 18, and 20 some of them are discussed. Here we consider some others.
During this century countless efforts have been made to clarify terminology, and a number of writers have proposed specific usages for words in common currency. No solution will satisfy everyone; or at least no solution will do so unless everyone shares a common theory. For as often as not the terms adopted are a reflection of theory.
Danger of Reification
First, it is vital to note that the words 'fear', 'alarm', 'anxiety', and others like them can be used legitimately only with reference to the state of an individual organism. In this work they are used only in their adjectival forms to refer to the way an organism may be appraising a situation, the way it may be behaving, or the way it may be feeling, all of which are closely linked. Conversely, it is never legitimate to refer to 'a fear' or 'an anxiety', as though each were a thing in its own right. The pitfalls into which it is easy to stumble when feelings are reified are discussed in Chapter 7 of the previous volume and in Chapter 20 of this one.
Unfortunately there is a very pronounced tendency not only in common parlance but in psychological, psychiatric, and psychoanalytic literature to reify both fear and anxiety. Thus we find Jersild, whose empirical work is so valuable, not infrequently tabulating the number of fears a sample of children are reported to show -- 'fear of three specifically named groups of animals, such as dogs, horses, cats, received a tally of three' ( Jersild 1943) -- and
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expressing his results as percentages of the total fears counted. Fortunately, however, in others of his tables, his results are expressed as percentages of children who show fear in particular situations; those are the figures drawn upon in this volume.
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In the psychoanalytic tradition it was not until 1926 that Freud treated anxiety as the reaction of an organism to a situation. Prior to that anxiety had been regarded by him as a transformation of libido, and as such was explicitly reified. As Strachey points out in one of his editorial introductions, as late as 1920, Freud added the following in a footnote to the fourth edition of the Three Essays: 'One of the most important results of psycho-analytic research is this discovery that neurotic anxiety arises out of libido, that it is the product of a transformation of it, and that it is thus related to it in the same kind of way as vinegar is to wine' ( SE 7: 224n).
Even today this type of thinking is not dead; and, as I well know, it is very easy to slip into it.
'Anxiety', 'Alarm', 'Fear', 'Phobia'
Because the English word 'anxiety' and its German cousin Angst play such a great part in psychoanalysis and psychiatry let us begin by considering those two.
In this work the usage already adopted for the word anxiety is that it denotes (a) how we feel when our attachment behaviour is activated and we are seeking an attachment figure but without success (Chapter 6), and (b) how we feel when for any reason we are uncertain whether our attachment figure(s) will be available should we want one (Chapter 15). It may be asked, how does that usage fit into other usages and with the etymological origins of the words? There is no lack of authorities to help to answer these questions.
Freud's use of the German term Angst and the difficulties of translation into English to which it gives rise are discussed by Strachey ( 1959; 1962). The usage of the term anxiety by English-speaking psychoanalysts is discussed by Rycroft ( 1968b). And the uses in the fields of psychiatry and psychopathology not only of the English 'anxiety' but of its many relatives in other languages are discussed by Lewis ( 1967), who also examines their etymology. Certain trends in usage, far from consistent, emerge.
A feature of usage to which all three writers point is that, in technical works, both 'anxiety' and Angst tend to indicate fear the origins of which are not identified. For example, on the final occasion on which he discusses the problem, Freud ( 1926a) remarks that Angst 'has a quality of indefiniteness and lack of object. In precise speech we use the word "fear" [ Furcht]
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rather than "anxiety" [ Angst] if it has found an object' ( SE 20: 165). Rycroft ( 1968b) recommends that anxiety be defined as 'the response to some yet unrecognized factor either in the environment or in the self' and reflects that psychoanalysis is mainly concerned with anxiety evoked by 'the stirrings of unconscious, repressed forces in the self'. Lewis ( 1967) refers to anxiety as an emotional state akin to fear that is experienced when 'there is either no recognizable threat, or the threat is, by reasonable standards, quite out of proportion to the emotion it seemingly evokes'.
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There are a number of difficulties about this type of usage. Thus, it is unclear to whom the situation arousing fear is held to be 'indefinite', or by whom it is 'unrecognized'. Is it the anxious individual himself (as suggested by Freud and Rycroft) or is it the clinician treating him (as in Lewis's formulation)? The answer might be either or both. For, on the one hand, a patient is sometimes aware of what he is afraid of but for some reason does not divulge what he knows; or he may do so and not be believed by the clinician. On the other, a patient may be unaware of what is troubling him, but the clinician may believe, rightly or wrongly, that he can identify it. A further difficulty in this type of usage would arise should either patient or clinician, or both, later come to identify what the patient is afraid of. In that case are we to say that the patient's anxiety is no longer anxiety but fear? And, if so, what is to be done should either or both misidentify what the patient is afraid of? These are not trivial difficulties.
Two other features of the historical usage, in the technical field, of 'anxiety' and Angst to which one or another of these authorities refers are: (a) the words are sometimes used to indicate fear that is considered inappropriately intense for the situation that seems to arouse it; and (b) they are sometimes used to indicate fear of a situation foreseen as more or less likely to occur in the future rather than fear of a situation actually present. Neither criterion is satisfactory, however. In Chapters 9 and 10 it is emphasized how misleading it is to apply notions of reasonableness or appropriateness to fear and fear behaviour. In Chapter 10 it is argued that, more often than not, fear is aroused by situations that are forecast and not actually present, and that the time-scale of the forecast can vary on a continuum from the immediate to the remote future. How far distant in the future does the situation forecast have to be for an individual to be described as feeling anxious rather than
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feeling afraid? Does the future prospect of hell-fire make a believer afraid or anxious?
The convention adopted in this work, which is to use anxiety to refer especially to what is felt when separation is threatened, is, of course, a reflection of the theory advanced. Nevertheless, it remains in keeping with the etymological origins of anxiety (and related words) and also with the way in which Freud came to use the German Angst in his later writings.
According to Lewis ( 1967), the English anxiety and the German Angst have cousins in ancient Greek and Latin with meanings that centre on grief and sadness, a German cousin that in the seventeenth century could also mean longing, as well as two cousins in contemporary English: 'anguish' and 'anger'. Since separation from an attachment figure is accompanied by longing and often also by anger, and loss by anguish and despair, it is entirely appropriate to use the word anxiety to denote what is felt either when an attachment figure cannot be found or when there is no confidence that an attachment figure will be available and responsive when desired. Such usage is compatible also with Freud's thinking when he wrote that 'missing someone who is loved and longed for . . . [is] the key to an understanding of anxiety' ( 1926a, SE 20: 136-7).
The usage of 'alarm' in this work, where it is employed as complementary to anxiety and applied to what is felt when we try to withdraw or escape from a frightening situation, is again in keeping with the word's origins. 'Alarm' derives from sixteenth-century Italian meaning 'to arms! ' and implies, therefore, surprise attack ( Onions 1966).
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Although the usages adopted for both anxiety and alarm are well suited to their origins, it cannot be said that there is any etymological justification for using the word 'fear' in the general-purpose way proposed here. 'Fear' (French peur and German Furcht) has cousins in Old High German and Old Norse with meanings that include ambush and plague ( Onions 1966); as such fear is close to alarm. In defence of using it as a general-purpose term, however, it can perhaps be argued that in modern English fear is very commonly so used.
On the usage of the term 'phobia' there is widespread agreement, though in this work the term is not favoured. Marks ( 1969) discusses its history and defines a phobia 'as a special form of fear which 1. is out of proportion to demands of the situation, 2. cannot be explained or reasoned away, 3. is beyond voluntary control, and 4. leads to avoidance of the feared situation'.
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Rycroft ( 1968b) defines phobia as: 'The symptom of experiencing unnecessary or excessive anxiety in some specific situation or in the presence of some specific object. ' The term always smacks of pathology ( OED). The disadvantages of the term are as follows:
-- it tends to reify fear, as in the title of Marks book Fears and Phobias;
-- a principle criterion in the definition is the unreasonableness of fearing so intensely the situation in question; on this definition fear of the dark or of loud noises or of any other natural clue would qualify as phobic, and thence would become tarred with pathology;
-- when a clinician introduces the concept of phobia in trying to understand what a patient is afraid of, he is focusing attention (i) on a particular aspect of the situation to the neglect of others which may be more important, and (ii) on the escape component of fear behaviour to the neglect of the attachment component (see Chapters 18 and 19) because the meaning of the Greek word phobos centres on flight and escape;
-- when used today by psychoanalysts phobia always implies the result of a particular pathological process, namely that the object or situation is feared 'not on its own account but because it has become a symbol of something else, i. e. because it represents some impulse, wish, internal object, or part of the self which the patient has been unable to face' ( Rycroft 1968b); in Chapters 11, 18, and 19 reasons are given for believing that the processes in question are implicated far too readily.
Once the term phobia is abandoned it becomes easier to consider how the person concerned may have developed so that he has become more frightened and anxious in certain situations than are his fellows.
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Additional Notes Chapter 3
page 56, paragraph 2, line 8
The ways in which young children and their mothers behave in sessions before and after the children start part-time nursery school (at ages ranging from two years eleven months to four years three months) are well described in a recent paper by van Leeuwen & Tuma ( 1972). The authors, using measures derived from attachment theory, report that children who started school at or before the age of three years two months became noticeably more clinging fifteen days after starting than they had been before, and that when mother was absent some showed a marked decrease in their concentration on and enjoyment in play. Three boys who had spent from five to seven months in a previous nursery school, two of them starting at two years eight months and one at two years ten months, were especially disturbed during early weeks at their new school. Reviewing their findings the authors conclude that 'we should approach nursery school entry with much greater caution [than is commonly given to it] and possibly delay it until the child is older'.
Chapter 9
page 140, paragraph 2, line 7
When two or more natural clues are present together, their potential value as indicators of an increased risk of danger would be vastly enhanced were the brain to use the most efficient method of processing the information. Broadbent ( 1973) discusses the various ways in which unreliable or in other respects insufficient items of evidence can be utilized for purposes of decision-making and action. When a number of such items are received together there are two main ways in which they can be processed. One is to process them independently and serially, in which case maximum advantage for decision-making is unlikely to be obtained. Another is for the items to be processed simultaneously. In that case not only is maximum advantage obtained but the effects on decisiontaking, and therefore action, are likely to be dramatically different from those of the first method. In view of the data regarding the striking effects on behaviour of a combination of natural clues to
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an increased risk of danger, it seems probable that combinations are usually processed simultaneously.
Chapter 15
page 220, paragraph 2, line 10
Scepticism is sometimes expressed about whether a period in hospital or residential nursery has effects in the long term as well as the short. In this connection the findings of a recent analysis by Douglas ( 1975) of data collected some years ago in the course of a
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assessed during adolescence, those who had been in hospital before the age of five years, either for longer than a week or on two or more occasions, were found to differ from other children in the following four ways. They were:
-- more likely to have been rated by teachers as troublesome at ages thirteen and fifteen years.
-- more likely, in the case of boys, to have been cautioned by police or sentenced between the ages of eight and seventeen years
-- more likely to have scored low on a reading test
-- more likely, in the case of school-leavers, to have changed jobs four or more times between the ages of fifteen and eighteen years.
The tendencies to delinquency and unstable employment record are significantly increased for children who experienced a further period in hospital between the ages of five and fifteen. All these differences remain significant when the rather atypical backgrounds of children who are admitted to hospital before the age of five years--e. g. as regards health, large families--are taken into account.
Further findings are, first, that if for any reason a child was insecure at the time of admission to hospital he was particularly likely to have suffered long-term disturbance, and, second, that it was children who on return from hospital were reported by the mothers to have been clinging or to have shown other forms of difficult behaviour who were especially likely later to have been described by the teachers as troublesome.
The findings of this study tend to support the belief expressed earlier, in Chapter 4, that the effects of separations from mother during the early years are cumulative and that the safest dose is therefore a zero dose.
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page 226, paragraph 2, line 5
Moore data do not permit of any conclusions regarding the effects on a child of starting full- time day care during his third year of life, a matter about which there is still controversy. Clinical experience suggests that, whereas there are children who enjoy attending a very small playgroup towards the end of their third year, there are strong reasons for caution about full- time attendance, the more so when it begins soon after the second birthday. The case of Lottie, who started nursery school when she was two years and three months old and attended only two half-days a week (see Chapter 3), illustrates the danger. So also do the findings of van Leeuwen & Tuma ( 1972) referred to in the note to Chapter 3 above (p. 409).
In a recent study of children who spend many hours daily in day care, Blehar ( 1974) has thrown further light on the question. Blehar studied four sub-samples of middle-class children and their mothers by means of Ainsworth's strange situation procedure (see Chapter 3). Children in two of the sub-samples had been attending privately organized day nurseries 1 for between eight and ten hours a day for five days a week during the preceding four months: children in one of these sub-samples had begun attendance at age twenty-six months and were tested at thirty months; children in the other sub-sample had started at age thirty-five months and were tested at thirty-nine months.