Attachment and Loss, Vol. 2: Separation: Anxiety and Anger

The second volume of Bowlby's trilogy Attachment and Loss turns from the attachment bond itself to what happens when it is threatened. Drawing on observations of young children separated from their mothers in hospitals and residential nurseries — the Robertsons' films and Heinicke and Westheimer's studies among them — and on Hinde's separation experiments with rhesus monkeys, Bowlby takes the sequence of protest, despair and detachment as his starting point and argues that anxiety at separation is a primary response to the loss, or threatened loss, of an attachment figure, not a by-product of some other danger such as unmet bodily needs. After reviewing earlier psychoanalytic theories of anxiety, including Freud's late recognition that missing a loved person is the key to anxiety, he builds an ethological account of fear: humans are disposed to fear certain natural clues to danger — strangeness, sudden change, darkness, rapid approach and, above all, being alone — which in the environment in which the species evolved went with heightened risk. Fear of separation is therefore neither childish nor irrational, and any frightening situation is worse when met alone. The book then asks why some people are far more prone to fear than others. Bowlby's answer is that each person builds working models of attachment figures and of the self, forecasting whether care will be available when needed; these expectations take shape during childhood, tend to persist, and reflect fairly accurately what the person actually experienced. Anxious attachment — what clinicians had called over-dependency and blamed on spoiling — is traced to uncertain access to the attachment figure: repeated separations, threats of abandonment or suicide used as discipline, and the inversion of roles in which a parent seeks care from the child. Anger is examined as a natural response to separation that can serve to restore and keep the bond but turns dysfunctional when separations persist. School refusal and agoraphobia are reinterpreted as expressions of anxious attachment within particular patterns of family interaction, rather than as fear of the places themselves. The book closes with personality development, describing how confident self-reliance grows from a secure base along developmental pathways that early experience helps to set.