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From the foregoing it will be clear that, according to the hypothesis advanced, separation anxiety is initially a form of primary anxiety, with or without the addition of fright, and that, as the infant develops, anxiety based on learning comes to be added. The reasoning behind this hypothesis has already been presented. My confidence in it springs from my belief that it provides a better explanation of observations of infants and young children than do other hypotheses and is enhanced by the fact that it seems also to fit comparable observations of the young of other species. These will be reviewed.

In very many species of bird and mammal the young show signs of anxiety when removed from their parents. The ‘lost piping’ of young ducklings who have become attached to and have temporarily lost a mother figure is a familiar example. The behaviour of infant chimpanzees in such situations is well recorded. Since it resembles closely, though in slightly exaggerated form, what we see in humans and seems almost certainly to be homologous, it is instructive to examine it. I shall draw on three accounts. Two (Kellogg & Kellogg, 1933; Hayes, 1951) give detailed information about two infant chimpanzees who were ‘adopted’ and brought up in a human home; the third, that by Yerkes (1943), who had prolonged experience of young chimpanzees living in captivity with their own parents, presents generalizations based on many cases. All three agree on the intensity of protest exhibited and, by implication, the anxiety experienced when a baby chimpanzee loses its mother‐figure.

Mrs. Hayes recounts how Vicki, a female whom she adopted at 3 days, would, when aged 4 months, cling to her foster‐mother ‘from the moment she left her crib until she was tucked in at night. … She sat on my lap while I ate or studied. She straddled my hip as I cooked. If she were on the floor, and I started to get away, she screamed and clung to my leg until I picked her up. … If some rare lack of vigilance on her part let a room’s length separate us, she came charging across the abyss, screaming at the height of her considerable ability.’

The Kelloggs, who did not adopt their female chimp, Gua, until she was 7 months old and who kept her for 9 months, report identical behaviour. They describe ‘an intense and tenacious impulse to remain within sight and call of some friend, guardian, or protector. Throughout the entire nine months … whether indoors or out, she almost never roamed very far from someone she knew. To shut her up in a room by herself, or to walk away faster than she could run, and to leave her behind, proved, as well as we could judge, to be the most awful punishment that could possibly be inflicted. She could not be alone apparently without suffering.’

It is of course possible to assume that such behaviour always contains an element of foresight – foresight that physiological needs will not be met. Its strength and immediacy, together with what we know about the primacy of clinging, make this, however, seem unlikely. Furthermore, as was stressed in the previous paper, such a theory is unnecessary.

Except for being less mobile, human infants during the second half of their first year seem to respond similarly to the lower primates. By this age they have become much more demanding of their mother’s company. Often when she leaves the room they are upset and do their utmost to see that contact with her is resumed, either by crying or following her as best they can. Such protest behaviour, I am postulating, is accompanied initially only by primary anxiety.

Later, in both humans and chimpanzees, conditioned and expectant anxiety develop as a result of learning. Their development in chimpanzees is of course well attested. Comparing Gua with their son, who was 2½ months older than she, the Kelloggs report: ‘Both subjects displayed what might be called anxious behaviour (i.e. fretting and crying), if obvious preparations were being made by the grown‐ups to leave the house. This led (in Gua) to an early understanding of the mechanism of door closing and a keen and continual observation of the doors in her vicinity. If she happened to be on one side of a doorway, and her friends on the other, the slightest movement of the door toward closing, whether produced by human hands or by the wind, would bring Gua rushing through the narrowing aperture, crying as she came.’ From this account, it seems clear, by a process of learning Gua was able to anticipate and so to avoid the danger of separation.

Similarly with human infants: it is signs that mother is going to leave them that come to evoke conditioned and expectant anxiety most commonly. At what period during the infant’s first year the capacity for foresight develops is difficult to say. Experiment, however, should be easy. If Piaget’s views are confirmed we should expect it to be present from about 9 months.

Not only do attachment behaviour and anxiety responses appear similar in humans and other species, but the same is true of fright responses in the absence of the mother. In such circumstances the young of many species freeze. Robertson noted this in young children soon after starting observations in 1948. Before a child had got to know him and whilst therefore he was still a frightening stranger, a young child in hospital would occasionally respond to his approach by suddenly becoming immobile, as if trying not to be there, though watching him intently the while. In the course of observations made in connexion with his film study, Robertson (1953a) was able to record this response on two occasions when a strange male colleague approached Laura (he himself by this time having become a familiar and reassuring figure). On each occasion Laura reacted by lying down with eyes closed and failed to respond as she usually did to Robertson’s friendly words: indeed only a flicker of the eyelids showed she was not asleep. When told that the man had gone, however, she at once sat up.

Comparable behaviour in infant rhesus monkeys has recently been reported by Harlow and Zimmermann (1954). In the course of their experiments with model mothers they introduced eight baby monkeys for three‐minute periods ‘into the strange environment of a room measuring 6 feet by 6 feet by 6 feet and containing multiple stimuli known to elicit curiosity‐manipulatory responses in baby monkeys. The subjects were placed in this situation twice a week for eight weeks, with no mother surrogate present during alternate sessions and the cloth mother present during the others. … After one or two adaptation sessions, the infants always rushed to the mother surrogate when she was present and clutched her, a response so strong that it can be adequately depicted only by motion pictures. After a few additional sessions, the infants began to use the mother surrogate as a source of security, a base of operations. They would explore and manipulate a stimulus and then return to the mother before adventuring again into the strange new world. The behaviour of these infants was quite different when the mother was absent from the room. Frequently they would freeze in a crouched position.’ Experimental work has also been done with goats and with similar results.¹⁶

If now we return to our account of chimpanzees it is especially to be noticed that, as in the case of Vicki, Gua became strongly attached to a particular figure. In her case it was the male foster‐parent, who in fact did most for her: ‘Her attachment became so strong that she had been in the human environment for fully a month before she would let go of the trouser leg of her protector for any length of time, even though he might sit quietly at a table for as long as an hour. Almost without respite she clung to him in one way or another. If through a temporary lapse in her vigil he should succeed in taking a step or two away from her, it would surely precipitate a frantic scramble after the retreating trousers, to which she would thereafter hang on determinedly.’ Furthermore, it was only when her ‘protector’ was making preparations to leave the room that fretting and crying were exhibited.

These reports draw our attention afresh to the pronounced tendency for instinctual responses to become focused on a particular individual and not merely on a class of individuals. This was emphasized in the previous paper, where I proposed the term monotropy to describe it, and again earlier in this paper when we were discussing how the escape responses of animals tend also to become directed towards a particular object – in this case either a person or a place. Plainly, in the cases of both Vicki and Gua, the crying, clinging, following, and escape responses were fairly narrowly monotropic. Any mother‐figure would not do: it always had to be someone who was known and trusted and, with decided preference, one particular person who was best known and most trusted. As every mother knows, human infants are no different: after a certain age mothering from any kind person will not do.

It seems almost certain in fact that every child who has not been institutionalized develops during his first year a clear preference for one person, namely the person who cares for him and whom I am calling ‘mother’, and this remains the case even though, in addition, he is likely to include a few others to whom he will turn as second best if mother is absent. It is because of this marked tendency to monotropy that we are capable of deep feelings; for to have a deep attachment to a person (or place or thing) is to have taken them as the terminating object of our instinctual responses. It is probably when these responses include those mediating attachment and escape that there exists what Erikson (1950) and others have described as ‘basic trust’.

Unless this high degree of selectivity of the object terminating the response systems mediating attachment and escape behaviour is understood, reactions to separation from loved objects will remain a closed book. This is where, on occasion, formulations stemming from the theory of secondary drive break down. So long as the caretaker ministers efficiently to the child’s physiological needs, it is sometimes reasoned, the child has nothing to grumble about: and so he ought not to grumble. This outlook would be ridiculous were it not so tragic – both for the child and for the well‐intentioned caretaker.

As presented here, separation anxiety is the inescapable corollary of attachment behaviour – the other side of the coin. As soon as the instinctual response systems mediating such behaviour have matured and, by a process of learning of a simple kind, become oriented towards any object whatsoever, the child will become prone to experience primary anxiety at separation from it. Plainly this formulation implies that there is a period early in the infant’s life during which he is not prone to separation anxiety as a specific form of anxiety. This needs discussion.

In my previous paper I discussed the perceptual and cognitive aspects of the child’s tie to his mother and pointed to the evidence that prior to about 6 months the infant’s differentiation, as measured by his responsiveness, between familiar mother‐figure and stranger is present but only evident on careful observation. After about 6 months, however, differential responses are very striking. In particular I referred to the recent work of Schaffer, who observed the responses of twenty‐five healthy infants aged under 12 months to admission to hospital for elective surgery. Of those over 28 weeks of age all but one fretted piteously, exhibiting all the struggling, restlessness, and crying with which we are familiar in rather older children. On the other hand, of those aged 28 weeks and under all but two are reported to have accepted the new environment without protest or fretting; only an unwonted silence indicated their awareness of change. Similarly, infants in the two age‐groups exhibited very different responses both to visitors during the period of separation and also to their mothers on return home. Those over 28 weeks behaved negatively to strangers, but to their visiting mothers were demanding and clinging: those under 28 weeks, on the other hand, seemed hardly to differentiate between stranger and mother (though it was noticed that they became more vocal during their mother’s visit).¹⁷ On return home those over 28 weeks clung tenaciously to their mother and cried and were distressed if left alone by her: those under this age showed no such behaviour but instead appeared bewildered, scanning their surroundings with a blank expression (Schaffer 1958; Schaffer & Callender, 1959).

These observations, if confirmed, strongly suggest that separation anxiety on losing mother is not exhibited before about 28 weeks. As Schaffer points out, this is strikingly in keeping with a prediction made by Anthony (1956) on the basis of Piaget’s findings.¹⁸

To conclude, as I am inclined to, that human infants younger than about 28 weeks do not experience differentiated separation anxiety on losing mother is not to suppose that they experience no anxiety whatever before this age. Though during these weeks the selection of a loved object may still be only embryonic, the instinctual responses comprising attachment behaviour are not. We know that crying and sucking (and in less degree clinging also) are fully active in this period and, in so far as a terminating situation is not quickly established for them, we may presume that primary anxiety is experienced. Moreover, sucking becomes monotropic fairly early, in as much as the infant quickly comes to prefer a particular object to suck – breast, bottle, or dummy. When he loses it he is upset. How significant for later personality development these primitive forms of separation anxiety are seems to me an unsolved problem. Though of great theoretical and practical interest, it is however one which is not of central concern to this paper and will therefore not be pursued further.

Let us now turn to the course of events which follows this early and controversial period. After the age of 6 months variations in the intensity of attachment behaviour, and pari passu in the intensity of separation anxiety, occur both in the short term and in the long. As regards short‐term changes, every mother discovers that her child varies considerably from day to day and week to week. Some days he is intensely ‘mummyish’, on others much less so. It may help reconcile her to it to know that infant chimps are no different. Of Gua the Kelloggs write: ‘During her fifteenth month, when she seemed to be in an “accelerating” phase of her cycle of affection for the chosen experimenter, she would scream and rush after him whenever he opened the door of the house. If left behind, she would run from one window to another pounding upon them and wailing’, despite the presence of a familiar substitute. ‘In the same stage of development she began to cry again to be carried by the individual of her preference and nothing would calm her till she had her way.’ Although the Kelloggs seem unable to account for all the variations, some of them were obviously the result of particular conditions. Thus ‘after a brief sickness, during which her dependency necessarily increased, Gua behaved again for some weeks almost as she had at the beginning, even though she was then many months older.’

The very close connectedness of the response systems mediating escape and those mediating attachment has already been emphasized. Inevitably anything which frightens the primate infant serves to intensify his attachment behaviour and, in the absence of his mother, to magnify his anxiety. Yerkes, generalizing about infant chimps brought up with their mothers in captivity, describes how ‘even at 2 years of age, after it can feed itself and move about independently, the youngster will rush to its mother or to other adults in any emergency.’

Human mothers are familiar with such patterns of behaviour. Just as the child in his second or third year seems to be becoming more independent, he has a phase when he becomes more demanding again. Sickness, fright, or a period of separation often account for it. So too does the mother’s own mood. As often as not when a young child becomes fretful and anxious it is because his mother has been upset, either with him or with someone or something else, and has consequently been brusque and irritable with him. She is less patient, her tone of voice changes, her expression is different: these are the things to which young children are keenly sensitive. Furthermore, it is not uncommon for mothers to use the fear of separation – or withdrawal of love which is substantially the same thing – as a sanction to enforce good behaviour. Sometimes this is done as a deliberate policy, more often almost unconsciously. No matter how expressed, however, it is a powerful sanction and, as Fairbairn and many others have emphasized, inevitably increases the child’s proneness to separation anxiety. It is this aspect of the theme that Sullivan picked on almost exclusively, thereby making his views in the weight he gives to parental influence in the genesis of neurotic anxiety the counterpart of Klein’s in the weight she attributes to constitutional factors. This debate is referred to again in the next section where we consider why one child rather than another becomes prone to excessive separation anxiety.

Nevertheless, even though experiential factors of one kind or another can frequently be seen to account for short‐term variations in intensity of attachment behaviour, on some occasions it is very difficult to trace the reasons. Perhaps in human children it is the same as it was with Gua, whose ‘attachment would wax and wane in a slow irregular rhythm’ during the nine months she was with the Kelloggs. Systematic records are obviously required.

As regards the long‐term changes, both in chimps and humans the instinctual response systems mediating attachment and escape behaviour slowly modify. Not only do they become less readily activated and, when activated, active at a lower level of intensity, but they come to be organized around an increasing range of objects. These two kinds of change appear to be taking place during the same period of the life span and consequently are not always easy to differentiate.

The processes underlying the long‐term reduction in the frequency and intensity of their activation, with its concomitant reduction in separation anxiety, are unknown. As we have seen, their ready activation in early childhood is easily accounted for by their survival value. Since as the child grows older they become less necessary, it may well be that there is operative a maturational process designed to restrict their activity, as sexual activity is restricted at the menopause. Nevertheless experience and learning certainly play a considerable part also. As time goes on, the better grounds a child has to believe that his parents love him and will return to him, the less apprehensive will he be both before their departure and whilst they are away; the weaker the grounds, the more anxious on these occasions.

Although I believe such views to be theoretically plausible and, so far as there are relevant data, empirically well based, it must be recognized that they are not those which have been advanced by leading psycho‐analysts, many of whom have thought that the growth of independence is impossible without the frustration of earlier needs. Freud held that it is possible to give a child too much affection and that it is this which prolongs the phase of dependence and promotes increased separation anxiety; a critique of this view is postponed to the next section. Melanie Klein shares the same outlook but invokes a different mechanism. In questioning how the child ever detaches himself from his mother, she suggests that ‘the very nature of this overstrong attachment … tends to drive him away from her because (frustrated greed and hatred being inevitable) it gives rise to the fear of losing this all‐important person, and consequently to the fear of dependence upon her’ (Klein & Riviere, 1937). Although a process of this kind is well known as one which underlies a premature development of independence,¹⁹ I believe it to be the result of avoidable frustration and to lead to independence of a special and often pathological kind. I know of no reason to suppose it is responsible for its healthy growth.

As regards the second component of the long‐term changes, the increasing range of objects toward whom attachment behaviour is directed, probably this is also a result both of maturational change and of learning. Thus the very capacity to include, even at a lower level of preference, a number of different people is something which may well become increased between, say, 18 months and 3 years by maturational processes. Even so, precisely who is included is obviously learned, and the number who become trusted by any particular child, whilst always limited, is evidently in large part the result of experience.

Once again it is instructive to hear of comparable changes in chimpanzees. Reading Yerkes’s account, one gains the impression that, in chimps, initially the shift may be entirely one of object and that intensity of response remains unchanged. Generalizing again from his observations of chimps in captivity, he writes of the developing infant: ‘Gradually a striking change in behaviour becomes evident. The initial specific clinging dependence upon the mother gives place rapidly to a generalized dependence on the extending social environment. … Need for social stimulation, such as is provided by companions, becomes so strong during late infancy and early childhood that isolation causes varied symptoms of deprivation.’ As the chimpanzee child grows older, however, the intensity of the attachment responses themselves seems to diminish: ‘Maternal dependence normally is outgrown during infancy, and similarly, extreme social dependence tends to be outgrown during childhood and adolescence.’

Primary anxiety arising from separation either from mother‐figure or companions is thus a function of age. The period when the individual is especially vulnerable is whilst the response systems mediating attachment and escape are not only easily activated at high intensity but are narrowly directed towards one, or at most a few, figures. Once there is a diminution in the readiness with which the response systems are activated, or the growing child, chimp or human, becomes able to accept temporary substitutes more readily, vulnerability decreases. So far as my own observations go, I have the impression that in humans these changes do not often take much effect until the child has reached about 2 years 9 months, though the age varies considerably from child to child.