Separation: Anxiety and Anger (Attachment and Loss, Volume 2)
E. J. Bowlby
Language: English
Pages: 415
ISBN: B00Y2QG7S2
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Publish Year note: First published in 1972
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Separation, the second volume of Attachment and Loss, continues John Bowlby's influential work on the importance of the parental relationship to mental health.
Here he considers separation and the anxiety that accompanies it: the fear of imminent or anticipated separation, the fear induced by parental threats of separation, and the inversion of the parent-child relationship.
Dr Bowlby re-examines the situations that cause us to feel fear and compares them with evidence from animals. He concludes that fear is initially aroused by certain elemental situations - sudden movement, darkness or separation - which, although intrinsically harmless, are indicative of an increased risk of danger.
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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
finally, for a third minute, she gently approached the infant showing him a toy. Meanwhile mother sat quietly. Episode 4 began with mother leaving the room unobtrusively, leaving her handbag on the chair. If the infant was playing happily the stranger stayed quiet; but if he was inactive she tried to interest him in a toy. Should an infant become distressed she did what she could to distract him or comfort him. Like the previous two episodes, this one lasted three minutes; but if an infant was
tendency to seek mother, starting usually as soon as they realized she had gone. Eleven followed mother to the door or struggled to do so; the others either looked at the door frequently or for long periods, or else searched for mother in the chair on which she had been sitting. There was also much crying and other signs of distress. For the group as a whole there was four times as much crying during mother’s absence as there had been during episode 3. A dozen infants cried practically the whole
strangers; fear of calamities such as fire, wars, floods, and murders; fear of a member of the family falling sick, having an accident, or dying; fear of falling sick oneself.1 For each of these situations there were between 42 and 57 per cent of families in which mother reported her child as unafraid and the child reported otherwise. By contrast, in respect of these situations there were never more than 10 per cent of families in which the child claimed he was not afraid when his mother reported
quarters than in others. To psychoanalysts who adopt an object-relations theory of personality the first proposition is familiar enough: in terms of that theory, a person’s confidence, or lack of it, in the availability of an attachment figure is regarded as resulting from his having either introjected, or failed to introject, a good object. By contrast, to those unfamiliar with object-relations theory, or perhaps alternatively with ethology, the proposition may be novel and even surprising.