Observations to Be Explained

From time immemorial mothers and poets have been alive to the distress caused to a child by loss of his mother; but it is only in the last fifty years that, by fits and starts, science has awoken to it.

Apart from a few early references, some of them by Freud, no series of observations of how infants and young children behave when separated from mother was on record until the early 1940s. Then the first observations, made in the Hampstead Nurseries during the Second World War, were reported by Dorothy Burlingham and Anna Freud (1942, 1944). They cover children in the age-range from birth to about four years who were healthy and who, after separation, were cared for in conditions as good as could be created in a wartime nursery. Because these were pioneer studies, reporting is not systematic and the exact conditions of care, which changed considerably during the years, are not always described. Nevertheless, much that is recorded is now known to be typical and the vivid accounts presented have become famous.

The second series of observations are those made by René Spitz and Katherine Wolf on about one hundred infants of unmarried mothers who were cared for in a penal institution (Spitz and Wolf, 1946). Except for a few infants observed up to the age of eighteen months, observations in this series are limited to behaviour occurring during the first twelve months of life. Until they were between six and eight months old all the babies studied were cared for by their own mothers. Then, ‘for unavoidable external reasons’, a separation occurred which lasted ‘for a practically unbroken period of three months, during which the child either did not see its mother at all, or at best once a week’. During this period the child was cared for either