A Control Systems Approach to Attachment Behaviour

For a secondary drive type of theory the facts of attachment behaviour prove awkward and obdurate. For a control type of theory, by contrast, they present an interesting challenge. Once an approach of this sort is brought to bear, indeed, the broad outlines of possible solutions are not too difficult to see.

In Chapter 5 it was pointed out that much instinctive behaviour maintains an animal for long periods of time in a certain sort of relationship to certain features of the environment. Examples are brooding behaviour, which results in the maintenance of proximity to eggs and nest over a period of weeks, and territorial behaviour, which results in the maintenance of location within a certain bit of the environment over months and sometimes over years. It was pointed out also that behaviour having this kind of predictable outcome could be organised on less or on more sophisticated lines. A less sophisticated version, for example, could be organised so that movement towards a specified goal-object would become increasingly probable the greater the distance from the goal-object. A main proposition of this chapter is that attachment behaviour is organised in this kind of way.

The above formulation is, of course, no more than the bare bones of the theory to be proposed. To account for the behaviour that is actually seen much elaboration is required. In the first place, the intensity with which attachment behaviour is shown by a young child varies not only from day to day but from hour to hour and from minute to minute; thus it is