Concept
Separation anxiety
Anxiety at the threat or the fact of being parted from a person one is attached to, above all a young child's distress at separation from the mother. Freud came to place the danger of losing the loved object at the root of anxiety; Bowlby treated separation anxiety as a primary response that arises whenever the attachment system is active and the attachment figure is out of reach, and described the sequence of protest, despair and detachment seen in young children separated from their mothers.
- Related
- Eight-month anxiety
developed by
- John Bowlby 1959 In 'Separation Anxiety' (1959) and in the second volume of Attachment and Loss (1973), Bowlby recast separation anxiety as the response of an activated attachment system to the absence of the attachment figure, building on James Robertson's observations of protest, despair and detachment.
diverged into
- Eight-month anxiety Spitz explained the infant's distress at a stranger by the mother's absence, but the two anxieties have been held to be clinically distinct, since each can appear without the other.