Separation : anxiety and anger

Bowlby, John1998

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Summary

In this volume the author inquires why unwilling separation from an attachment figure should elicit anxiety and what the implications are for personality development. Finding traditional theory unsatisfactory, he re-examines the evidence regarding situations that arouse fear in humans and compares it with evidence for animals. The conclusion reached is that fear is aroused most often by situations that, intrinsically harmless, serve as indicators of an increased risk of danger. To some of these situations, which include separation from an attachment figure, there is a strong genetically determined bias to respond with fear. Fear is especially intense when several fear-arousing conditions are present simultaneously. Much pathological anxiety, including 'over- dependency', can be understood as anxious attachment, which develops as a result of a person's having had experiences that lead him to be anxious lest his attachment figures should be inaccessible or unhelpful. Evidence shows that threats by a parent to abandon a child, and inversions of the parent-child relationship due to a parent's own anxiety over attachment, play a principal part in the genesis of phobic conditions Volume Ill, Loss, in preparation, will apply this theoretical perspective to problems of mourning, depression, and defence, with special reference to the pathological forms they take. From 1946 to 1972 Dr. Bowlby worked full time as a consultant psychiatrist at the Tavistock Clinic and Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, for much of it under the joint auspices of the National Health Service and the Medical Research Council. He continues at both institutions in a research and teaching capacity. He has been Training Secretary and Deputy President of the British Psycho-Analytical Society and President of the International Association for Child Psychiatry and Allied Professions.