Separation
Anxiety and anger as responses to threatened separation rather than as pathology.
A young child when removed from his mother and placed with strangers is distressed; subsequently he often becomes despairing and, later still, detached.
Published in 1973 as the second volume of Bowlby's trilogy, Separation carries the attachment argument from the making of the bond into what happens when it is threatened. Bowlby sets out the conditions under which separation anxiety arises, and traces the young child's response through the successive phases of protest, despair and detachment. He treats fear not as a discrete symptom but as a behavioural system, activated by natural clues such as darkness, sudden movement, strangeness and being alone, that recruits proximity to a familiar figure. Anger, on this account, works in the service of the bond rather than against it, a protest that presses for reunion. From these foundations Bowlby follows a developmental line into phobia and agoraphobia, reading them as sequelae of disrupted or threatening attachment. For the clinician the volume supplies a grammar for anxious, angry and avoidant presentations, grounding them in a person's history of separation.
About the author
John Bowlby
John Bowlby (1907 to 1990) was a British psychiatrist and psychoanalyst based at the Tavistock Clinic in London. He founded attachment theory, drawing on ethology and evolutionary biology to argue that the child's bond with a caregiver is a biologically rooted survival system rather than a secondary drive. His Attachment and Loss trilogy sets out this framework, building on his earlier work on maternal deprivation. He collaborated closely with Mary Ainsworth, whose empirical studies extended and tested his ideas.
Details
- 1973
- English
- Pimlico
- Pimlico, 1973
- 9780712666213