they are permanently ready for activation and also readily activated; secondly, when active they are often so at great intensity; and, finally, they are not completely terminated except by the preferred mother‐figure. In several of these respects they differ from other response systems, such for example as those mediating sucking behaviour. Thus the latter vary much in their readiness for activation, in many infants being inert after food has been taken and only becoming sensitive at intervals; they are often not exhibited at great intensity, and, as regards termination, are usually more easily provided for than are those mediating attachment and escape – a bottle, a thumb, or a comforter may suffice. By contrast the instinctual response systems mediating attachment and escape behaviour are permanently ‘at the ready’ for intense activation. Primary anxiety due to separation, sometimes suffused with fright, is thus immanently present from the time these response systems have become active and narrowly directed in the early months to the time when they diminish in intensity and/or the object becomes more easily replaceable (from around the third birthday). Probably at no other time in his life is the individual at risk of such intense primary anxiety and such ‘unterminatable’ fright.
In considering why separation anxiety can so easily reach pathological intensity two further aspects of these systems require emphasis. One is the readiness with which hostility is engendered when they are impeded. The exact conditions under which hostility is evoked require much more detailed study than they have yet been given, but it has long been common knowledge that separation from the mother, rejection by the mother, and a situation in which the mother is attending to some other individual – father, sibling, or visitor – are all apt to give rise to it.20 It is my belief that it is situations such as these, rather than the frustration of oral desires, that engender the most frequent and intense hostility in infants and young children, hostility, moreover, which is inevitably directed towards the loved object itself. This is of the greatest relevance when we come to consider why in some children expectant anxiety in regard to separation exists at a level above the normal.
The second is that the period when they are most active is also the period when patterns of control and of regulating conflict are being laid down. Our data demonstrate that when primary anxiety arising from separation is allowed to persist, defences of a primitive nature (such as those giving rise to detachment described earlier) come into play. There is reason to suppose that the early and intense activation of such defensive processes may create patterns which in later life are of pathogenic significance. This is a theme I have touched on in an earlier paper in connexion with critical phases of development (Bowlby, 1957) and which I hope to pursue further.
Whether or not these reasons prove to be the right ones, there can be little doubt that separation anxiety is an exceedingly common component of neurotic anxiety. This was early recognized by Freud. ‘One of the clearest indications that a child will later become neurotic’, he observed, ‘is to be seen in an insatiable demand for his parents’ affection’ (Freud, 1905, p. 223); this, of course, is another way of describing the child who exhibits, in excess, expectant anxiety in regard to separation and loss of love. Few would dispute this view today. There are, however, several hypotheses current in regard to why some children develop in this way and others do not; and it is in fact on this issue that the views advanced here differ most from those of Freud.
Hypotheses which have been advanced by psycho‐analysts not only give very varying weight to constitutional and environmental factors but also inculpate different and in some respects contradictory factors in each class. It is therefore useful to tabulate the five main hypotheses which have been advanced to account for why a particular individual suffers from an excess of separation anxiety. They are:
1 Constitutional FactorsSome ‘children have inherently a greater amount of libidinal need in their constitution than others,’ and so are more sensitive than others to an absence of gratification (Freud, 1917).Some children have inherently a stronger death instinct than others, which manifests itself in unusually strong persecutory and depressive anxiety (Klein, 1932).
2 Environmental FactorsVariations in the birth process and severe traumata occurring during the first weeks of post‐natal life may increase the (organic) anxiety response and heighten the anxiety potential, thereby causing a more severe reaction to later (psychological) dangers met with in life (Greenacre, [1941] 1952, [1945] 1952).Some children are ‘spoiled’ by excess of early libidinal gratification: they therefore demand more of it and, when not gratified, miss it more (Freud, 1905, 1917, 1926).Some children are made excessively sensitive to the possibility of separation or loss of love either through the experience of actual separation (Edleston, 1943; Bowlby, 1951), or through the use of separation or loss of love as a threat (Suttie, 1935; Fairbairn, [1941] 1952).
It should be noted that whereas hypotheses 1 (a), 2 (b) and 2 (c) are framed to account for the liability to an excess in particular of separation anxiety, 1 (b) and 2 (a) are intended to account for the liability to an excess of anxiety of any kind.
I do not believe there is any clear evidence in support of the first four of these hypotheses. Since with our present research techniques there is no way of determining differences in constitutional endowment, the first pair unavoidably remain untested (though of course not disproved). As regards the next pair, the evidence in regard to 2 (a) is far from clear; indeed in her paper Phyllis Greenacre is careful to explain that she regards it as no more than a plausible hypothesis. Evidence in regard to 2 (b) seems at the best equivocal: the subjection of a child to neurotic overprotection or to excessive libidinal demands from his mother sometimes appears like excess of affection but clearly cannot be equated with it. Evidence in regard to the fifth hypothesis, 2 (c), however, is abundant and affirmative. Therefore, without necessarily rejecting the first four, the fifth hypothesis, that an excess of separation anxiety may be due either to an experience of actual separation or to threats of separation, rejection, or loss of love, can be adopted with confidence. Probably a majority of analysts today utilize it in their work in some degree.
It is strange that in his writings Freud practically never invoked it. On the contrary, in addition to postulating hypothesis 1 (a), that some children have a constitutionally greater need of libidinal gratification than others, he committed himself early and consistently to hypothesis 2 (b), that an excess of separation anxiety is due to an excess of parental affection – in other words, the traditional theory of spoiling. Thus in the Three Essays (1905), after commending the mother who strokes, rocks, and kisses her child and thereby teaches him to love, he nevertheless warns against excess: ‘An excess of parental affection does harm by causing precocious sexual maturity and also because, by spoiling the child, it makes him incapable in later life of temporarily doing without love or of being content with a smaller amount of it’ (p. 223). The same theme runs through much of his theorizing about Little Hans (1909), though it is in his discussion of this small boy’s separation anxiety that he comes nearest the view adopted here: he attributes part of it to the fact that Little Hans had been separated from his mother at the time of his baby sister’s birth (pp. 114 and 132). However, both in the Introductory Lectures (1917, p. 340) and in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926, p. 167) he makes no reference to such origins and instead explicitly adopts the theory of spoiling.
Since in my view there is no evidence to support this theory, the question arises why Freud should have favoured it. One reason seems to be that in his early work he was misled by the show of affection and overprotection which is so frequently present as an over‐compensation for a parent’s unconscious hostility to a child. This is suggested by the passage in Three Essays immediately following that already quoted: ‘… neuropathic parents, who are inclined as a rule to display excessive affection, are precisely those who are most likely by their caresses to arouse the child’s disposition to neurotic illness’ (1905, p. 223). In fact, when we come to investigate such cases psycho‐analytically we find, I believe invariably, that the child’s heightened anxiety over separation and loss of love is not a reaction to any real excess of affection from his parents, but to the
