No More Learning

At the least, Ainsworth's findings show that an infant whose mother is sensitive, accessible, and responsive to him, and accepts his behaviour and is cooperative in dealing with him, is far from becoming the demanding and unhappy child that some theories might suggest. Instead, mothering of this sort is evidently compatible with a child who is developing a limited measure of self-reliance by the time of his first birthday
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combined with a high degree of trust in his mother and enjoyment of her company.
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Self-reliance and reliance on others
In Chapter 14 three propositions regarding personality functioning and development are introduced. The first is that, whenever an individual is confident that an attachment figure will be available to him when he desires it, that person will be much less prone to either intense or chronic fear than will an individual who for any reason has no such confidence. The second postulates that confidence in the accessibility and responsiveness of attachment figures, or a lack of it, is built up slowly during all the years of immaturity and that, once developed, expectations tend to persist relatively unchanged throughout the rest of life. The third postulates that expectations regarding the availability of attachment figures that different individuals build up are tolerably accurate reflections of the experiences those individuals have actually had. It is only because each proposition is, or at least has been, so controversial that it has seemed necessary to display the evidence on which they rest in so much detail.
Although each proposition was derived initially from attempts to understand and treat disturbed children, especially those whose disturbance had developed after a separation, the propositions are seen to have a wider application. For not only young children, it is now clear, but human beings of all ages are found to be at their happiest and to be able to deploy their talents to best advantage when they are confident that, standing behind them, there are one or more trusted persons who will come to their aid should difficulties arise. The person trusted provides a secure base from which his (or her) companion can operate. And the more trustworthy the base the more it is taken for granted; and the more it is taken for granted, unfortunately, the more likely is its importance to be overlooked and forgotten.
Paradoxically, the truly self-reliant person when viewed in this light proves to be by no means as independent as cultural stereotypes suppose. An essential ingredient is a capacity to rely trustingly on others when occasion demands and to know on whom it is appropriate to rely. A healthily self-reliant person is thus capable of exchanging roles when the situation changes: at one time he is providing a secure base from which his companion(s) can operate; at another he is glad to rely on one or
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another of his companions to provide him with just such a base in return.
A capacity to adopt either role as circumstances change is well illustrated by a healthily self- reliant woman during the successive phases of her life running from pregnancy through childbirth and on into motherhood. A woman capable of coping successfully with these shifts is found by Wenner ( 1966) 1 well able, during her pregnancy and puerperium, both to express her desire for support and help and to do so in a direct and effective fashion to an appropriate figure. Her relationship with her husband is close and she is eager and content to rely on his support. In her turn she is able to give spontaneously to others, including her baby. By contrast, Wenner reports, a woman who experiences major emotional difficulties during pregnancy and puerperium is found to have great difficulty in relying on others. Either she is unable to express her desire for support or else she does so in a demanding and aggressive way; in either case her behaviour reflects her lack of confidence that support will be forthcoming. Commonly she is both dissatisfied with what she is given and is herself unable
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to give spontaneously to others. A study by Melges ( 1968) shows that women with these problems almost always have a deeply ambivalent relationship with their own mother.
Agreement on Some Basic Principles
The theoretical position adopted here has much in common with positions adopted by a number of other psychoanalysts, especially those who give substantial weight to the influence of the environment on development.
In the United Kingdom, for example, Fairbairn ( 1952), insisting that 'any theory of ego- development that is to be satisfactory must be conceived in terms of relationships with objects', postulates that during an individual's development 'an original state of infantile dependence . . . is abandoned in
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1 Wenner ( 1966) reports preliminary findings from a study of fifty-two married women
during and after a pregnancy. The subjects were middleclass, middle-income Americans, aged from twenty years upwards, and included both primiparas and multiparas. They had been referred to a psychiatrist during pregnancy because of possible emotional problems, and were seen in weekly therapeutic interviews until at least three months post-partum. Some of them showed major emotional difficulties during the period of study, but the majority did not.
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favour of a state of adult or mature dependence . . . ' In Winnicott's view:
Maturity and the capacity to be alone implies that the individual has had the chance through good-enough mothering to build up a belief in a benign environment. . . . Gradually the ego- supportive environment is introjected and built into the individual's personality, so that there comes about a capacity actually to be alone. Even so, theoretically, there is always someone present, someone who is equated ultimately and unconsciously with the mother . . . ( Winnicott 1958).
In the United States a similar tradition of theorizing has been influential for many years, and is well described in a recent paper by Fleming ( 1972). Benedek ( 1938; 1956) emphasizes how a person's confidence in the existence of helping figures derives from repeated gratifying experiences in his relationship with his mother during infancy and childhood and how, as a result, a strong ego develops, capable of maintaining integration and self-regulation during periods when no support is available. Mahler ( 1968), basing her views on studies of severely disturbed and psychotic children, reaches a similar conclusion. Selfconfidence, self-esteem, and pleasure in independence, she concludes, develop out of trust and confidence in others. This trust is built up during infancy and childhood through a child's experience of a mothering person who acts as a 'reference point' for his activities while at the same time giving him sufficient freedom to enable him to pass through the developmental phase that Mahler terms 'separation-individuation'. Fleming ( 1972), after spending many years studying the problems of adult patients who have suffered bereavement during childhood or adolescence, endorses these views and insists that, even in adult life, 'we are never completely independent of the need that a trusted helpful person exists and could be called if necessary'.
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Thus, though the sources of the observations on which different clinicians base their conclusions and the theoretical frameworks within which they describe them are often very different, and different again both from the sources of observation and from the theoretical model used in this work, on certain basic principles there is strong agreement. A well-founded selfreliance, it is clear, not only is compatible with a capacity to rely on others but grows out of and is complementary to it.
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Both, moreover, are alike products of a family that provides strong support for its offspring combined with respect for their personal aspirations, their sense of responsibility, and their ability to deal with the world. So far from sapping a child's self-reliance, then, a secure base and strong family support greatly encourage it.
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Chapter 22
Pathways for the Growth of Personality
Organism and environment are not two separate things, each having its own character in its own right, which come together with as little essential inter-relation as a sieve and a shovelful of pebbles thrown on to it. The fundamental characteristics of the organism are timeextended properties, which can be envisaged as a set of alternative pathways of development . . .
C. H. WADDINGTON ( 1957)
The nature of individual variation: alternative models
For most of the present century the model of personality development most favoured has regarded a personality as progressing through a series of stages on a single track towards maturity. The various forms of disturbed personality are then attributed to an arrest having occurred at one or another of these stages. Such an arrest, it is thought, can be either more or less complete. Most often, it is supposed, it is only a partial arrest. In such an instance development is conceived as continuing in an apparently fairly satisfactory way except that, in conditions of stress, it is liable to breakdown, in which case the personality is thought to regress to whatever stage in development the partial arrest, or fixation, is deemed to have occurred at. In some of the best-known theoretical systems based on that model, for example that of Abraham ( 1924), each form of personality disorder, of neurosis and of psychosis is held to be traceable to some measure of fixation that has occurred at one or another particular phase of development. It is from this model that application of the terms mature and immature to healthy and disturbed personalities, respectively, derives (see Chapter 14).
A theoretical system more recently outlined by Anna Freud ( 1965), although more elaborate than Abraham's, none the less retains the same essential features: individual differences are still measured in terms of the degrees of progression, fixation, and regression that are thought to be shown. The main new
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feature is that, whereas Abraham's model takes account only of phases in libido development, Anna Freud's model takes account of phases of development that are postulated to occur in each of a number of different areas of personality functioning, e. g. in the development of modes of eating or of object relationships. Thus the concept is introduced of a set of 'developmental lines' along all of which a healthy personality is expected to progress relatively evenly and harmoniously, and at a rate appropriate to chronological age. The different forms of psychological disturbance are then explained in terms of a profile in which some degree of fixation and regression is held to have occurred during development along one or more of these lines.
Alternative models of personality development have been little discussed in clinical circles. One alternative that, it is now maintained, fits presently available evidence far closer than does the traditional one conceives of personality as a structure that develops unceasingly along one or another of an array of possible and discrete developmental pathways. All pathways are thought to start close together so that, initially, an individual has access to a large range of pathways along any one of which he might travel. The one chosen, it is held, turns at each and every stage of the journey on an interaction between the organism as it has developed up to that moment and the environment in which it then finds itself. Thus at conception development turns on interaction between the newly formed genome and the intra- uterine environment; at birth it turns on interaction between the physiological constitution, including germinal mental structure, of the neonate and the family, or non-family, into which he is born; and at each age successively it turns on the personality structure then present and the family and, later, the wider social environments then current.
At conception the total array of pathways potentially open to an individual is determined by the make-up of the genome. As development proceeds and structures progressively differentiate, the number of pathways that remain open diminishes.
These two, alternative, theoretical models can be likened to two types of railway system. The traditional model resembles a single main line on which are set a series of stations. At any one of them, we may imagine, a train can be halted, either temporarily or permanently; and the longer it halts the more
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prone it becomes to return to that station whenever it meets with difficulty further down the line.
The alternative model resembles a system that starts as a single main route which leaves a central metropolis in a certain direction but soon forks into a range of distinct routes. Although each of these routes diverges in some degree, initially most of them continue in a direction not very different from the original one. The further each route goes from the metropolis, however, the more branches it throws off and the greater the degree of divergence of direction that can occur. Nevertheless, although many of these sub-branches do diverge further, and yet further, from the original direction, others may take a course convergent with the original; so that ultimately they may even come to run in a direction close to, or even parallel with, routes that have maintained the original direction from the start. In terms of this model the critical points are the junctions at which the lines fork, for once a train is on any particular line, pressures are present that keep it on that line; although, provided divergence
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does not become too great, there remains a chance of a train taking a convergent track when the next junction is reached.
The implications of these different models for research and practice are far-reaching. In regard to research the traditional model postulates that every form of personality disorder found in adults is patterned on a form of personality structure that is normal and healthy at some (appropriate) phase of life, usually thought to occur during the early years, or even months. In keeping with this assumption, a scheme is advanced that attributes to successive phases of healthy childhood features of a kind that are characteristic of one or another form of disordered personality of later life. Thus a developmental psychology is constructed that takes as its primary data for each phase of early development observations of how one or another form of disturbed personality is found to perform at some point later in the life-cycle.
The implications for research of the alternative model, which postulates a range of diverging developmental pathways, are very different. As was argued at the end of Chapter 14, this model disputes the notion that disordered states of adult personality are reflections of early states of healthy development and it regards as seriously mistaken any attempts to build a developmental psychology on that basis. What is required instead, it holds, is that the many and often divergent developmental pathways potentially available to humans should each
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be mapped, together with those organismic and environmental variables that constrain an individual to take one pathway rather than another. Such mapping, it insists, can be done only by studying personalities as they develop in the particular environment in which they happen to be developing. Only in this way is it possible to gain understanding of the interactional sequences of personality and environment that result in that personality growing along that particular pathway.
Developmental pathways and homeorhesis
This alternative model, which sees differences in personality structure as being a result of growth having proceeded along different and divergent developmental pathways, is patterned on the theory of epigenesis proposed by Waddington (1957) and now widely adopted by developmental biologists. In this theory the processes that determine an organism's development, and in particular the extent to which each feature of development is sensitive or insensitive to environmental variation, are seen as governed by the genome. Any feature of development that is relatively insensitive to changes of environment can be termed 'environmentally stable'; any feature that is relatively sensitive can be termed 'environmentally labile' (see Chapters 3 and 10 of Volume I).
The advantages and disadvantages, in terms of survival, that ensue for a species according to the greater or lesser degree of sensitivity to environmental change during development with which its members are endowed are discussed by Waddington. On the one hand, a low degree of sensitivity to environmental change may ensure adaptive development within a great variety of environments but at the price of a total inability to adapt should the environment change beyond certain limits. On the other, a high degree of sensitivity enables an organism to vary its development according to the particular environment in which development happens to be taking place, with a good prospect of the adult's being better adapted to that environment than it would otherwise be. It also ensures a reserve of adaptability within the species's gene
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pool so that, should there be great fluctuations in the environment, there are likely always to be some members of the population capable of adapting and surviving. Such flexibility, however, is bought at the risk that in a number of environments the development of many individuals may go badly astray and the resulting forms may be seriously maladapted to any or perhaps all
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environments. Because of this danger no species can afford its members more than a limited degree of sensitivity to environmental fluctuation during their development.
In their evolution different species have adopted very different strategies in regard to the degree of sensitivity to environment that is permitted during development. Because either extreme, whether of sensitivity or of insensitivity, has serious dangers for survival every species comes to have some balance of the two properties. Probably in all species such epigenetic sensitivity as it possesses is greatest during early life and then diminishes.
In order to limit epigenetic sensitivity and so ensure consistent development despite fluctuations of environment, physiological and behavioural processes are evolved that buffer the developing individual against the impact of the environment. Acting in concert, these processes tend to maintain an individual on whatever developmental pathway he is already on, irrespective of most of the fluctuations that might occur in the environment in which further development will be taking place. The strong self-regulative property of which these processes are agents Waddington terms 'homeorhesis'.
When Waddington's concepts are applied to the development of human personality, the model proposed postulates that the psychological processes that result in personality structure are endowed with a fair degree of sensitivity to environment, especially to family environment, during the early years of life, but a sensitivity that diminishes throughout childhood and is already very limited by the end of adolescence. Thus the developmental process is conceived as able to vary its course, more or less adaptively, during the early years, according to the environment in which development is occurring; and subsequently, with the reduction of environmental sensitivity, as becoming increasingly constrained to the particular pathway already chosen.
Ordinary experience suggests that the sensitivity to environment present during the early phases of personality development commonly results in an adaptive outcome, in the sense that the resultant adult personality is able to perform well in any of the culturally determined range of family and social environments in which he is likely to find himself. Nevertheless, as we have seen, such early sensitivity provides no guarantee of an adaptive outcome; for, when the environment of development lies outside certain limits, an organism's sensitivity to
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environment may result in a developing personality's not only taking a maladaptive pathway but, because of increasing homeorhesis, becoming confined more or less permanently to that pathway. Psychopathic personality, a consequence of development having occurred in a severely atypical family environment during the first three or so years of life, can be regarded as an example of this mode of personality maldevelopment.
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Another mode by which personality development can take a course that leads to a maladapted outcome in adult life is when development takes a pathway that results in a growing personality that is reasonably well adapted to the environment in which development is actually taking place but that ceases to be so in the range of environments in which the adult is likely to find himself. A strongly conforming obsessive personality who flourishes in a well-structured social environment but is unable to adapt to change is an example of this other mode of maldevelopment.
Homeorhetic Pressures on Personality Development
We turn next to consider briefly the nature of the processes that tend to keep a developing personality on whatever pathway it is already on. Pressures are of two kinds, those that derive from the environment and those that derive from within the organism. Because of their constant interaction the combined effect of these pressures is immense.
Environmental pressures are due largely to the fact that the family environment in which a child lives and grows tends to remain relatively unchanged, as Peck & Havighurst, among others, report. This means that whatever family pressures led the development of a child to take the pathway he is now on are likely to persist and so to maintain development on that same pathway. This is why attempts to change a child's personality structure by means of psychotherapy without attempts simultaneously to change the family environment by means of family therapy tend to be unavailing.
Yet it is not only environmental pressures that tend to maintain development on a particular pathway. Structural features of personality, once developed, have their own means of self- regulation that tend also to maintain the current direction of development. For example, present cognitive and behavioural structures determine what is perceived and what ignored, how a new situation is construed, and what plan of
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action is likely to be constructed to deal with it. Current structures, moreover, determine what sorts of person and situation are sought after and what sorts are shunned. In this way an individual comes to influence the selection of his own environment; and so the wheel comes full circle. Because these strong self-regulative processes are present in every individual, therapeutic measures aimed at changing the family or social environment of a patient, whether schoolchild, adolescent, or adult, without attempts simultaneously to change the personality structure of the patient himself, tend also to be unavailing.
Thus, because homeorhetic pressures of the two kinds, environmental and organismic, are constantly reinforcing one another, and thereby maintaining development on its present pathway, the therapeutic measures most likely to effect a change are those designed to deal with both kinds of pressure simultaneously. It is in fact to the improvement of combined therapeutic techniques of this kind that many dynamically oriented psychiatrists are today devoting attention.
The psychological processes and the forms of behaviour that constitute the organism's contribution to homeorhesis are, of course, among those long known in the psychoanalytic tradition of theorizing as 'defensive'. In the third volume it is planned to examine defensive processes and defensive behaviour from this point of view.
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One person's pathway: some determinants
The fundamental characteristics of personality, we may say, adapting Waddington, are time- extended properties that can be envisaged as a set of alternative pathways of development. Which one of that great and private set initially open to each one of us is taken turns on a near infinity of variables. Yet among those many variables some are more easily discerned than others because their effects are so far-reaching. And no variables, it is held, have more far- reaching effects on personality development than have a child's experiences within his family: for, starting during his first months in his relations with his mother figure, and extending through the years of childhood and adolescence in his relations with both parents, he builds up working models of how attachment figures are likely to behave towards him in any of a variety of situations; and on those models are based all his expectations, and therefore all his plans, for the rest of his life.
Experiences of separation from attachment figures, whether
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of short or long duration, and experiences of loss or of being threatened with separation or abandonment -- all act, we can now see, to divert development from a pathway that is within optimum limits to one that may lie outside them. In terms of the railway analogy, those experiences so act that the points at a junction are shifted and the train is diverted from a main line to a branch. Often, fortunately, the diversion is neither great nor lengthy so that return to the main line remains fairly easy. At other times, by contrast, a diversion is both greater and lasts longer or else is repeated; then a return to the main line becomes far more difficult, and it may prove impossible.
It must not be supposed, however, that separations, threats of separation, and losses are the only agents that divert development from an optimum pathway to a suboptimum one. If the thesis presented here is correct, very many other limitations and shortcomings of parenting can do the same. Furthermore, diversions can follow any life-event that is classifiable as a stressor or crisis, especially when it strikes an immature individual or one already on a suboptimum pathway. Thus, as events capable of diverting development along one pathway rather than another, experiences of separation and loss, and threats of being abandoned, are only a few of a much larger class of events that are usefully described as major changes in the life-space ( Parkes 1971b). Included in that category also are events that in certain conditions may influence development for the better.
Reasons for concentrating attention on experiences of separation and loss, and of threats of being abandoned, to the exclusion of other events are manifold. In the first place, they are easily defined events that have easily observable effects in the short term and can also, when development continues on a seriously divergent pathway, have easily observable long-term effects. Thus they provide research workers with a valuable point of entry from which to plan projects aimed at casting light on the immensely complex and still deeply shadowed field of personality development and the conditions that determine it.
In the second place, and partly because the effects of these events are not confined to man but are seen also in other species, opportunity is offered for attempting a reformulation of the theory of personality development and its deviations in which are incorporated ideas
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stemming both from the psychoanalytic tradition and from ethology and developmental biology.
In the third place, these events occur so commonly in the
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lives of children, adolescents, and adults, and constitute so large a proportion of the major stressors about which we know, that a clear understanding of their effects is of immediate help to clinicians whose task it is to understand psychiatric disability, to treat it and, whenever possible, to prevent it.
Yet, however useful this enterprise may prove, it is only a beginning. Human personality is perhaps the most complex of all complex systems here on earth. To describe the principal components of its construction, to understand and predict the ways in which it works and, above all, to map the multitude of intricate pathways along any of which one person may develop, these are all tasks for the future.
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Appendices
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Appendix I
Separation Anxiety: Review of Literature 1
A STUDY of the literature shows that there have been six main approaches to the problem of separation anxiety: three of them are the counterparts, though not always the necessary counterparts, of theories regarding the nature of the child's attachment to his mother. In the order in which they have received attention by psychoanalysts, they are as follows.
1. The first, advanced by Freud in Three Essays ( 1905b), is a special case of the general theory of anxiety which he held until 1926. As a result of his study of anxiety neurosis ( 1895) Freud had advanced the view that morbid anxiety is due to the transformation into anxiety of sexual excitation of somatic origin that cannot be discharged. The anxiety observed when an infant is separated from the person he loves, Freud holds, is an example of this, since in these circumstances a child's libido remains unsatisfied and undergoes transformation. This theory may be called the theory of 'transformed libido'.
2. The anxiety shown by young children on separation from mother is a reproduction of the trauma of birth, so that birth anxiety is the prototype of all the separation anxiety subsequently experienced. Following Rank ( 1924) it can be termed the 'birth-trauma' theory. It is the counterpart of the theory of return-to-womb craving to account for the child's tie.
3. In the absence of his mother an infant or young child is subject to the risk of a traumatic psychic experience, and he therefore develops a safety device which leads to his exhibiting anxiety behaviour whenever she leaves him. Such behaviour has a function: it may be expected to ensure that he is not parted from her for too long. This is usually referred to as the 'signal' theory, a term introduced by Freud in 1926. It is held
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1 A version of this review was published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry,
Vol. I, 1961. Only few changes have been made; papers published since 1960 are not as systematically considered as those published earlier.
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in many variants according to how the traumatic situation to. be avoided is conceived.
Principal variants are: (a) the traumatic situation is an economic disturbance that is caused when there develops an excessive accumulation of stimulation arising from unsatisfied bodily needs ( Freud 1926a); (b) it is the imminence of a total and permanent extinction of the capacity for sexual enjoyment, namely aphanisis ( Jones 1927) (when first advanced by Jones as an explanation of anxiety, the theory of aphanisis was not related to the anxiety of separation; two years later, however, he sought to adapt it to fit in with Freud's latest ideas); (c) a variant proposed by Spitz ( 1950) and presented within a new theoretical model by Joffe & Sandler ( 1965) is that the traumatic situation to be avoided is one of narcissistic injury. In the history of Freud's thought the signal theory stems from, and is in certain respects the counterpart of, the theory that explains the
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child's tie to his mother in terms of secondary drive. The variant that regards narcissistic
injury as the trauma threatened also stems from the secondary-drive tradition.
4. Separation anxiety results from a young child's believing when his mother disappears that he has eaten her up or otherwise destroyed her, and that in consequence he has lost her for ever. That belief, it is held, arises from the ambivalent feelings a child has for his mother, an ambivalence made inevitable by the existence within him of a death instinct. Advanced by Melanie Klein ( 1935), the theory can be called, following her terminology,
that of 'depressive anxiety'.
5. As a result of projecting his aggression, a young child perceives his mother as
persecutory, and this leads him to interpret her departure as due to her being angry with him or wishing to punish him. For this reason, whenever his mother leaves him he believes she will either never return or do so only in a hostile mood, and he therefore experiences anxiety. Again following Melanie Klein ( 1934), this can be termed the theory of 'persecutory anxiety'.
6. Initially the anxiety is a primary response not reducible to other terms and due simply to the rupture of a child's attachment to his mother. This can be called the theory of 'frustrated attachment'. It is the counterpart of theories that regard a child's pleasure in his mother's presence as being as primary as his pleasure in food and warmth. A theory of this sort has been
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advanced by James ( 1890), Suttie ( 1935), and Hermann ( 1936), but has never been given much attention in psychoanalytic circles. It is a theory of this type that I advanced in an earlier paper ( Bowlby 1960a) linked to yet another variant of the signal theory. The theory advanced in this work (Chapter 12) is also a combination of the sixth and the third types. It regards separation of a young child from an attachment figure as in itself distressing and also as providing a condition in which intense fear is readily aroused. As a result, when a child senses any further prospect of separation some measure of anxiety is aroused in him.
In Chapter 5 of this volume attention is drawn to the fact that almost all psychoanalytic theorizing about anxiety and fear is conceived in terms of a biological paradigm that antedates modern evolution theory. This accounts, it is believed, for the numerous competing, complex, and contradictory theories to be found in the literature.
Views of main contributors Sigmund Freud
We have seen that it was not until 1926, when Freud was seventy, that in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety he gave systematic attention to separation anxiety. Prior to this, having paid insufficient attention to the child's attachment to his mother, as he himself affirms ( Freud 1931), he had paid correspondingly little to the anxiety exhibited on separation from her. Nevertheless, he had been far from blind to it. In both the Three Essays ( 1905b) and the Introductory Lectures ( 1917b) he had drawn attention to it and in both had treated it as of much importance.
1
In Three Essays, after a section concerned with early object relations, he gives a paragraph to 'infantile anxiety' ( SE 7:224). In it he advances the view that 'anxiety in children is originally nothing other than an expression of the fact that they are feeling the loss of the person they
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love'. This view he readily aligns with his hypothesis regarding neurotic anxiety in adults. At that time Freud still held the view that, when a powerful
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1 Separation of child from mother as a central and recurrent theme in Freud's thinking about
anxiety is clearly brought out in Strachey's valuable introduction to the Standard Edition of Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety ( Strachey 1959).
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sexual excitation is insufficiently discharged, libido is transformed directly into anxiety. It is the same in children, he believes. Because 'children . . . behave from an early age as though their dependence on the people looking after them were in the nature of sexual love', and because in a separation situation the child's libido goes unsatisfied, Freud concludes that a child deals with the situation just as an adult would, namely 'by turning his libido into anxiety'. Four years later this is also his explanation of the separation anxiety that was Little Hans's first symptom: 'It was this increased affection for his mother which turned suddenly into anxiety . . . ' ( SE 10: 25).
He follows the same reasoning in the Introductory Lectures ( 1917b). After once again drawing attention to the anxiety exhibited when mother is missing, he concludes that 'infantile anxiety has very little to do with realistic anxiety, but, on the other hand, is closely related to the neurotic anxiety of adults. Like the latter, it is derived from unemployed libido . . . ' ( SE 16: 408). This, it will be observed, is tantamount to identifying neurotic anxiety of adults with separation anxiety of infants, a resemblance on which he had already remarked in 1905. 1
Although in the Introductory Lectures, for reasons which appear inadequate, Freud complicates his theory by postulating that the core of anxiety is a repetition of the affect experienced at birth ( SE 16: 396), it is none the less anxiety arising on separation from mother, as observed empirically, which throughout his writings on infantile anxiety from 1905 onwards holds the centre of the theoretical stage. Anxiety arising at birth, which had first been postulated some years earlier ( 1910, SE II: 173), starts by being only a rather speculative addition to his theory. Although it gradually acquires an equal status, it never usurps the place of anxiety arising on separation from mother. This is important since more than one analyst has tended to give it precedence in his theorizing. 2
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1 '. . . an adult who has become neurotic owing to his libido being unsatisfied behaves in his
anxiety like a child: he begins to be frightened when he is alone . . . and he seeks to
assuage this fear by the most childish measures' ( SE 7: 224).
2 In Introductory Lectures Freud describes a child missing 'the sight of a familiar and
beloved figure -- ultimately of his mother' as the 'situation which is the prototype of the anxiety of children' ( SE 16: 407). However, he thinks that in this situation there may be in addition a reproduction of birth anxiety. In Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, on the other hand, it
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The next reference to separation anxiety occurs in Beyond the Pleasure Principle ( 1920) where Freud relates the well-known cotton-reel incident which Jones ( 1957: 288) tells us he
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had witnessed five years previously in Hamburg. His eighteenmonth-old grandson took all sorts of small objects and threw them away into corners and under the bed with an expression which seemed to signify 'gone'. This appeared to be confirmed when later the boy had a cotton reel on the end of a string and played the double game of throwing it away with an expression of 'gone' and pulling it back again with a joyful 'da'. This simple game, coupled with the fact that the boy 'was greatly attached to his mother', led Freud to an
interpretation of the game . . . it was related to the child's great cultural achievement -- the instinctual renunciation (that is, the renunciation of instinctual satisfaction) which he had made in allowing his mother to go away without protesting. He compensated himself for this, as it were, by himself staging the disappearance and return of the objects within his reach ( SE 118: 14-15).
How well established this cultural achievement was we shall never know, but if Freud's grandson followed a common course of development it is unlikely to have been maintained. There are many infants who are able to permit their mother to leave them for an hour or so without crying when they are eighteen months old, but who in the succeeding months find this less tolerable and may make a great fuss. However that may be, the observation of the incident, and no doubt of others like it, seems to have clarified Freud's perception of the child's
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is birth anxiety that is described as the prototype. Nevertheless, in one of the addenda to this work he explains how he could make no headway with Rank's ideas on the primary role of birth trauma and, referring to his own conclusions, remarks that the significance of birth is 'reduced to this prototypic relationship to danger' ( SE 20: 162). This is also the position he takes in the New Introductory Lectures ( 1933)where he repeats his view that 'a particular determinant of anxiety (that is, situation of danger) is allotted to every age of development as being appropriate to it' ( SE 22: 88). The danger situation of birth and the danger of loss of object or of love seem here to be assigned equal status. See also the discussions by Jones ( 1957: 274-6) and by Strachey ( 1959: 83-6). Strachey points out that, in Freud's later work, it is only the form taken by anxiety that is to be understood as stemming from the experience of birth.
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tie to his mother and to have led him to reflect further on the theory of anxiety -- an early example of the value of direct observation.
It was the publication of Rank Trauma of Birth in 1924, Freud relates in an addendum to Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety ( 1926a), that 'obliged me to review the problem of anxiety once more'. In this work Rank had taken up the suggestion which, as we have seen, had first been thrown out by Freud, 'that the affect of anxiety is a consequence of the event of birth and a repetition of the situation then experienced . . . But', Freud continues, 'I could make no headway with his idea that birth is a trauma, states of anxiety a reaction of discharge to it and all subsequent affects of anxiety an attempt to "abreact" it more and more completely' ( SE 20: 161). Instead, what Freud does in his courageous re-examination of theory is to return to the safe ground of empirical observation -- which brings him back once more to separation anxiety.
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In reading Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety we find that Freud wrestled with the theoretical problems of anxiety through seven chapters, in the course of which he abandons a favourite hypothesis, namely that anxiety represents a direct transformation of libido. His reason for doing so lies in his recognition that, whereas formerly he had supposed anxiety to be the product of repression, an examination of clinical material suggests that, on the contrary, repression is a consequence of anxiety ( SE 20: 109). As a result of this, at the beginning of the eighth chapter he concludes ruefully: 'Up till now we have arrived at nothing but contradictory views about it [anxiety]. . . . I therefore propose to adopt a different procedure. I propose to assemble, quite impartially, all the facts that we do know about anxiety without expecting to arrive at a fresh synthesis' (p. 132 ). After a brief diversion he proceeds:
Only a few of the manifestations of anxiety in children are comprehensible to us, and we must confine our attention to them. They occur, for instance, when a child is alone, or in the dark, or when it finds itself with an unknown person instead of one to whom it is used -- such as its mother. These three instances can be reduced to a single condition, namely that of missing someone who is loved and longed for. But here, I think, we have the key to an understanding of anxiety . . . anxiety appears as a reaction to the felt loss of the object (pp. 136 -7).
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Up to this point Freud is working from empirical data, data moreover which are now amply confirmed. Nevertheless he still remains puzzled, as others have also been, as to how to explain his observations. Why should there be this reaction of anxiety? It 'has all the appearance', he remarks, 'of being an expression of the child's feeling at its wits' end, as though in its still very undeveloped state it did not know how better to cope with its cathexis of longing' (p. 137 ). Today we can draw on a more sophisticated theory of instinctive behaviour to frame a hypothesis which regards the 'cathexis of longing' as the essence of the problem. Fifty years ago, however, such ideas on instinctive behaviour were unknown; instead, Freud was under the impression that the child's attachment could be understood only in terms of secondary drive and that the only primary needs are those of the body.
Freud therefore proceeds:
'The reason why the infant in arms wants to perceive the presence of its mother is only because it already knows by experience that she satisfies all its needs without delay. The situation then, which it regards as a 'danger' and against which it wants to be safeguarded is that of non-satisfaction, of a growing tension due to need, against which it is helpless. '
This, he continues, is 'analogous to the experience of being born . . . What both situations have in common is an economic disturbance caused by an accumulation of amount. 3 of stimulation which require to be disposed of. It is this factor, then, which is the real essence of the "danger" . . . ' and which he terms the 'traumatic situation'. To avoid this, an infant, by a process of learning, displaces 'the danger it fears . . . from the economic situation on to the condition which determined that situation, viz. the loss of object. It is the absence of the mother that is now the danger; and as soon as that danger arises the infant gives the signal of anxiety, before the dreaded economic situation has set in' (pp. 137 -8).
In considering Freud's every approach to the problem of anxiety it is necessary constantly to bear in mind that, from the earliest days of his psychoanalytic theorizing onwards, he adopts as his basic postulate that the nervous system has the function of getting rid of stimuli and that
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the greatest catastrophe that can befall it is that of being overwhelmed by stimuli (see this volume, Chapter 5). Such theorizing constitutes what Freud describes as the economic viewpoint, and is cast sometimes in
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terms of a psychical energy that builds up and is either discharged in action or else becomes dammed up, and sometimes in terms of excitation or stimulation that similarly varies in quantity. The 'dreaded economic situation' that Freud believes threatens an infant who is separated from his mother is none other than the damming up of psychical energy that cannot be discharged.
As a consequence of his re-examination of the problem, Freud concludes that anxiety has two sources. Anxiety from the first source arises as 'an automatic phenomenon', with physiological features that he believes may well be part of a response appropriate to the situation of birth. Such anxiety occurs whenever a traumatic situation 'is established in the id', that is in 'situation[s] of non-satisfaction in which the amounts of stimulation rise to an unpleasurable height without its being possible for them to be mastered psychically or discharged . . . ' ( SE 20: 137-41). Such traumatic situations are always characterized by helplessness. In Freud's formulation of this source of anxiety we see a direct descendant of his earliest theory, that advanced in his paper on the 'Anxiety Neurosis' ( 1895), in which he postulated that anxiety is developed when the nervous system is incapable of dealing with a mass of excitation.
Anxiety from the second source, Freud suggests, constitutes 'a rescue signal' designed to indicate that danger is impending. Since it requires foresight, such anxiety can 'only be felt by the ego' ( SE 20: 140). It is indeed the task of the ego so to imagine the danger situation in advance that it can restrict 'that distressing experience to a mere indication, a signal' (p. 162 ). Freud proceeds to list a number of danger situations, each corresponding to a particular developmental phase, which, if allowed to develop, would result in a traumatic situation: among these are birth, loss of object (namely mother), fear of father, and fear of superego (pp. 146 -7).
In his account of this second source of anxiety Freud lays much emphasis on the elements of foresight and expectation: 'The individual will have made an important advance in his capacity for self-preservation if he can foresee and expect a traumatic situation . . . which entails helplessness, instead of simply waiting for it to happen' (p. 166 ). Before anxiety can arise from this source, therefore, a fair degree of cognitive development is necessary.
Although, as has been indicated, Freud conceives of separation anxiety itself as no more than a signal and as being
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developed through a process of learning, as indeed is necessary if it is based on foresight, it is evident that he is not entirely satisfied with that conclusion. At the end of the book ( SE 20: 168) he returns yet again to 'the puzzling phobias of early childhood' and hazards that perhaps, as in other species, the fear of loss of object may be a built-in response: thus he refers to an 'archaic heritage' and 'vestigial traces of the congenital preparedness to meet real dangers'. These reflections, and also the similar ones in regard to the child's tie that are found in the Outline ( 1940), which were noted in the appendix to the first volume of the present work,
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suggest that towards the end of his life Freud was moving towards a formulation not very different from that advanced here.
It is far more important, however, that in this late work Freud finally clarifies what is held here to be the true relatedness of separation anxiety to mourning and defence. Previously, as he candidly admits, he had been confused. Not only had he supposed that repression is antecedent to anxiety, but he had also found it difficult to believe that anxiety as well as grief can be a response to loss of object. Now he sees that sequence clearly: anxiety is the reaction to the danger of loss of object, the pain of mourning is the reaction to the actual loss of object, and defences protect the ego against instinctual demands which threaten to overwhelm it and which can occur all too readily in the absence of the object ( SE 20: 164-72). This formula has not commonly been adopted by later theorists.
Ernest Jones
When Jones ( 1927) first advanced his theory of aphanisis it is evident, from the absence of references to Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, that he was unaware of Freud's latest train of thought. Furthermore, there is evidence also that he was still unaware of the importance of the attachment to mother (irrespective of the child's sex). It must therefore be noted that Jones's theory of aphanisis -- that 'the fundamental fear is [of] the total and of course permanent extinction of the capacity (including opportunity) for sexual enjoyment' -- was advanced without any reference to the present topic. The only mention of separation anxiety is in reference to weaning as a pregenital precursor of castration and to a girl's fear of separation from her father.
Two years later, however, Jones ( 1929) strives to integrate his own theory of aphanisis with Freud's theory of signal
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anxiety. The union is uneasy and the resulting theory appreciably more complex than either taken singly. One of several difficulties is that Jones is still not aware of the tie to the mother irrespective of the child's sex. 1 Since the combined theory has been little called upon, to delineate it is unnecessary. As a broad generalization, it may be said that Jones accepts Freud's view regarding signal anxiety, believing it to be 'purposely provoked by the ego so as to warn the personality' of the possible approach of serious dangers, and then, in describing these serious dangers, adds to Freud's conception of what constitutes the 'traumatic situation' his own notion of aphanisis.
Melanie Klein
Whereas Jones developed his theory of anxiety independently of Freud's and later attempted to marry the two, Melanie Klein not only developed hers independently of Freud's but has frequently underlined the differences between them. Anxiety, in her judgement, is to be understood in terms of the death instinct, to which Freud never referred in this connection, and therefore in terms of aggression. Her views in regard to anxiety in general, which were taking shape between 1924 and 1934, and to separation anxiety in particular, are set out fully in her paper 'On the Theory of Anxiety and Guilt' ( 1948b, in Klein et al. 1952). They represent the only formulation made by a psychoanalyst which is both substantially different
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from the formulations discussed by Freud and has had significant influence on theory and practice.
In Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, following a line of argument already advanced in Introductory Lectures ( SE 16: 407-8), Freud explicitly rejected the notion that fear of death is a primary anxiety and concluded instead that it is a later and learnt fear. 2 Melanie Klein differs: 'I do not share this view because my analytic observations show that there is in the unconscious a fear of annihilation of life. ' This she assumes must
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1 See, for instance, his reference to the external danger arising from withdrawal of object,
'e. g. the mother in the boy's case' (p. 311, my italics).
2 It is interesting to note that Sylvia Anthony ( 1940) in her study of the genesis of children's
ideas of death reached a similar conclusion. Furthermore, she believes that it is through its equation with separation that death acquires its emotional significance: 'Death is equated with departure. . . . To the young child death means, in the departure context, its mother's death -- not its own. '
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be the response to the death instinct: 'Thus in my view the danger arising from the inner working of the death instinct is the first cause of anxiety' ( Klein et al. 1952: 276). This, she suggests, is felt by an infant 'as an overwhelming attack, as persecution', and a persecution, moreover, which is first experienced at birth: 'We may assume that the struggle between life and death instincts already operates during birth and accentuates the persecutory anxiety aroused by this painful experience. ' From this argument she draws an important conclusion regarding the infant's first object relations: 'It would seem', she says, 'that this experience [i. e. birth] has the effect of making the external world, including the first external object, the mother's breast, appear hostile' ( 1952: 278). In another paper ( 1946) she summarizes her view in a sentence: 'I hold that anxiety arises from the operation of the death instinct within the organism, is felt as fear of annihilation (death) and takes the form of fear of persecution' ( Klein et al. 1952: 296). It is against this backcloth -- that anxiety is the result of the perpetual activity of the death instinct and that the newborn infant is already burdened with persecutory anxiety -- that Klein presents her views on separation anxiety.
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
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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.