23rd November 2023

When Attachment Goes Wrong

So, we need responsive caregivers who are physically and emotionally present for good attachment to develop. What happens when we don’t ever have a secure attachment figure? What happens when we are separated from our caregivers or we lose our primary attachment figure?

Bowlby did a lot of work about the physical separation of children from their caregivers during early childhood, particularly in relation to children admitted to the hospital due to physical illness. Films by Bowlby, Robertson and Spitz highlighted the importance of parents being allowed into children’s hospital wards (which they previously hadn’t been allowed to attend!) and hugely improved their wellbeing moving forward.

Rutter described the terms privation and deprivation to describe two broad ways that attachment can be disrupted:

Privation – The child never has the chance to develop a secure attachment, for example, to an emotionally unavailable parent, abuse or neglect.

Deprivation – When the child has had the opportunity to develop a secure attachment, but this is lost through separation.

Privation

In Harlow’s experiments with monkeys, discussed briefly earlier in the chapter, the monkeys often had no contact with their own mothers from early in life. They were then bred from a young age and found to be incapable of being mothers themselves. They bit and hit their own babies and neglected them, so the researchers had sole responsibility for feeding and nurturing them. Despite this maltreatment, the babies still clung to their mothers.

Bowlby recognised a similar phenomenon in human parenthood – mothers who had suffered in their early lives themselves were more likely to develop as less-responsive parents. He showed that family therapy was an effective intervention for children showing challenging attachment behaviours. In his early work, he also studied ‘Forty-four Juvenile Thieves’ who were adolescent delinquents who had spent their lives institutionalised. He described an ‘affectionless psychopathy’ in these boys and theorised that it had been the lack of any significant attachment in early life that had led to this. Studies by Rutter into privation have replicated this finding, although termed this as ‘attachment difficulties’ or ‘quasi-autistic features’.

Deprivation

Bowlby’s work on the separation of securely attached children from their parents was made possible by the myriad of ways this could happen at the time: by children separated from parents during admissions to the hospital (as parents were not allowed to visit!), by World War Two and the evacuation of children, as well as the loss of parents and resultant institutionalisation of their children. He studied the effect of this and identified stages a child separated from their attachment figure will go through, which may be sequential, as shown here, or intermingled.

The impact of repeated separations can be to develop this ‘affectionless character’ that Bowlby described, as well as being ‘exploitative’, ‘heartless’ or ‘destructive’. In more recent years, we would term these as conduct disorders or attachment disorders. Bowlby also noted higher rates of emotional disorders and personality disorders.

References

• Bretherton, I. (1992). ‘The origins of attachment theory: John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth’. Developmental Psychology. 28:5. 759-775.
• Gomez, L. (1997). An Introduction to Object Relations. Free Association Books.
• Rutter, M. (2001). ‘Specificity and heterogeneity in children’s responses to profound institutional privation’. British Journal of Psychiatry. 179. 97-103.