Attachment Theory and Research. Группа авторов

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Attachment Theory and Research - Группа авторов


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object‐mother firmly and substantially localized in space, as an organized reality. His separation feeling must therefore lack the quality of separations at a later stage.’

      19 19 See, for instance, Winnicott’s (1953) conception of the development of the false self and Balint’s (1952) of conditions which give rise to neurosis and the need for a ‘new beginning’.

      20 20 Analytic literature is full of references to hatred arising in such situations. That separation from mother itself provokes it has been used by Freud (1920, p. 16) as a possible explanation of the cotton‐reel incident: ‘Throwing away the object so that it was “gone”, ‘he suggests, ‘might satisfy an impulse of the child’s … to revenge himself on his mother for going away from him’. Dorothy Burlingham and Anna Freud (1944), Spitz (1953), Robertson (1953a, 1953b) and Heinicke (1956) have all reported first‐hand observations of intensely hostile behaviour following separation. It is Fairbairn’s ([1951] 1952) view that the origin of the infant’s aggression towards his libidinal object, and therefore of his ambivalence, lies in the trauma of separation from mother and the consequent libidinal deprivation and frustration.

      21 21 There is another situation which may lead a child to become excessively clinging and which may also masquerade as “spoiling.” It is when a mother, for unconscious reasons of her own, communicates to a child her desire that he should not leave her. This is a common finding in cases of so‐called school phobia (Johnson et al. 1941).

      22 22 In a comparison of twenty 6‐year‐old children reported as overdependent with twenty controls, Stendler (1954) found that six of the over‐dependent children were ‘over‐protected’ and eleven had suffered major disturbances in their lives between the ages of 9 months and 3 years.

      John Bowlby

       From the John Bowlby Archive, Wellcome Collections London, PP/Bow/H10

      This paper was transcribed by Tommie Forslund and Robbie Duschinsky from John Bowlby’s notes. Some of the text had already been written on a typewriter by Bowlby, but most was in the form of handwritten notes, with additions, deletions, rewordings, and various footnotes suggesting rounds of reworking the text.

      The thesis of this essay is that, in order to understand the conditions that elicit anxiety and fear, it is necessary first to consider basic biological principles. The principles concern (a) the nature of the states held relatively steady by a living organism (categories of homeostasis), and (b) the nature of the stable pathways along which development usually proceeds (categories of homeorhesis). Anxiety and fear are experienced, it is suggested, when some form of instability is appraised as being present or imminent and, especially, when instability is appraised as increasing and difficult to correct, or when risk of instability is appraised as increasing and difficult to reduce.

      These appraisal processes, like any others, may or may not reach a phase of being felt. Because traditionally the words ‘anxiety’ and ‘fear’ refer to something felt, it is thought wisest to restrict their use to occasions when appraisal processes actually reach the phase of being felt. The term ‘unconscious anxiety’, though somewhat contradictory, is of course in common use. If used, it would apply to those same appraisal processes when they are in a phase of not being felt.

      In order to survive in any environment, especially those undergoing changes, large or small, living organisms must maintain themselves in a comparatively steady state. Such steady state can be measured along numerous parameters, which can be grouped into a few major categories of homeostasis. Some refer to the organism’s interior state, some to its relation with the outside world.

      These three categories apply to all species of animal, and the first two apply also to plants. The biological control systems that maintain these categories of homeostasis are, for morphological homeostasis, physiological systems; for ecological homeostasis, behavioural systems; and for physiological homeostasis, both physiological and behavioural systems.

      These three categories of homeostasis are intimately linked: by maintaining an animal within its ecological niche, the behavioural systems maintaining ecological homeostasis are acting in ways that greatly facilitate maintenance of morphological and physiological homeostasis.

      I believe that at least two other categories of homeostasis can be recognised; they become increasingly evident in the higher animal phyla and play a great part in the lives of higher vertebrates and man. One of these categories refers to a special aspect of the organism’s interior state, the other to a special aspect of its relation to the environment. We start with the latter.

      Individuals of a species do not roam at random throughout the whole area of ecologically suitable terrain. On the contrary, they usually spend the whole of their lives within an extremely restricted segment of it. For example, a vole lives within a few square yards of thicket, a troop of baboons within a few square miles of prairie, human hunters and gatherers within a few hundred square miles of forest or plain. Even migrating birds, which may travel thousands of miles between nesting and wintering grounds, use only special parts of each; many nest each year at or very near the place they were born.

      Nor do animals of higher species mix indiscriminately with others of their kind. Individual recognition is the rule. With certain individuals close bonds may be maintained for long stretches of the life‐cycle. With a number of others there may be a less close but sustained relationship. Other animals may either be of little interest or else be carefully avoided.

      In order for an animal to maintain personal‐environmental homeostasis, and in order, too, for it to find its way to particular parts of that environment and to treat appropriately different individuals in it, the animal must have available two working models, one of the environment and the other of the self as agent. There is good reason to believe that working models of both these types are built in the brain. In addition, there is evidence suggesting that, once built, these working models remain relatively stable, namely, relatively impermeable to dissonant information.

      Maintenance of working models in a stable and relatively unchanging state I propose to term representational homeostasis. Representational stability appears to be maintained by cognitive processes that


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