Freud believed that childhood is the most important phase in the development of personality, and said that the way that attachments form in childhood influence all attachments in adult life. Freud argues that attachment occurs in the oral stage - the infant attaches to the mother because it receives oral gratification. The mother is the first "love object", and this forms the basis of all future relationships. As with most of Freud's theories, this is based on case studies, but it is interesting to note that Freud emphasises the importance of childhood.
Learning Theory explains attachment by saying that (in the case of classical conditioning): the pleasant sensation of feeding leads to an associated conditioned response of feeling good about being close to the mother. Operant conditioning says that the relationship with the mother is positively reinforced by the infant getting what it wants when it goes to the mother.
Both these approaches (psychodynamic and behaviourism) are essentially talking about cupboard love, i.e. the child is attaching because the care-giver is providing food.
Ethology is the study of the character or behaviour of animals, and where practised by psychologists refers to the way in which animal behaviour is used as a way of understanding human behaviour. Since infant animals appear to form attachments with their parents, and since human beings are animals, it is reasonable to suppose that by studying attachment in animals we might be able to form hypotheses about human attachment.
Lorenz (1935) showed that some animals (e.g. ducklings) form an automatic attachment with the first moving object that they see, whether this be the mother duck, or Lorenz himself, or an arbitrary object which happened to be in their line of sight. Whatever it was, they'd follow it around. Lorenze found that for ducklings, there was a critical period during which such an attachment could be formed, and during which they could be re-trained to attach to their proper mother. After the critical period, the effects of the attachment were irreversible. For ducklings, this period was 36 hours.
Lorenz's studies seem to explain the spontaneous and intense nature of attachment, in some cases despite the fact that the environment would not appear conducivce to it. But it is dangerous to apply the results of this study directly to humans.
Schaffer & Emerson (1964) conducted a longitudinal study of 60 infants and their mothers in Glasgow, in which they interviewed the mothers over a period covering the first 18 months of the babies' lives and asked them about how the babies were attaching. In their study, they concluded that attachment is not purely cupboard love, and that there is a correlation with the sensitivity of the care-giver.
Another study which undermines the "cupboard love" theory is one performed by Harlow (1959), in which he separated baby monkeys from their mothers and provided surrogate "mothers" - one of which was a furry doll, and the other a wire frame which dispensed milk from a bottle. Despite the fact that the furry doll provided no food, the monkeys appeared to form attachments to the doll rather than the wire frame.
(See Bowlby study sheet)
Bowlby was interested in the emotional relationships that children formed, and like Freud, believed that the early attachments strongly influenced later life. He argued the idea of monotropy, that is to say there babies are genetically programmed to form one significant attachment, and all subsequent attachments are based on this. The one significant attachment must occur during a critical period, which Bowlby said was between 6 months and 3.5 years. This is has parallels with Lorenz's conclusions.
Bowlby was interested in what happens when attachment isn't properly formed, and described two forms of damaged attachment:
Bowlby was mostly concerned with maternal deprivation, and argued that there are long term consequences of this. He formed this conclusion after studying children who had been brought up in the 1930s and 1940s in residential nurseries and orphanages.
Bowlby described the syndrome of distress - that is, the events that occur when a child is separated from its mother. The stages experienced may be referred to as PDD:
Since the whole experience is very distressing, the child, when in the detachment phase, is actually repressing the feelings of love for its mother. Bowlby says that this may cause long lasting effects as the feelings that are buried in the unconscious may re-emerge in later life. Bowlby thought that even short term separation can result in long term consequences.
Robertson & Robertson (1968) carried out a study of the PDD model by observing the effects of separation on mothers and children who were visiting hospital, and were forced to be apart. These studies confirmed the PDD model, and also confirmed Bowlby's suggestion that there were long term consequences of short term separation.
Robertson & Robertson studied what actions could be taken to reduce the distress in these situations, e.g. maintaining some sort of routine, allowing the child to keep familiar toys, maintaining as much contact as possible between mother and child.
Robertson & Robertson distinguished between :
Unlike Bowlby, who said that any form of deprivation is bad, R+R said that there were things you could do about it, and their research has had practical application - for example hospitals now typically have "mother and baby units".
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