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We are moulded and remoulded by those who have loved us; and though the love may pass, we are nevertheless their work, for good or ill.
If the satisfactory development of attachment is as important for mental health as is claimed, there is urgent need to be able to distinguish favourable development from unfavourable and also to know what conditions promote the one or the other. Unfortunately there are no simple answers to such questions.
There are, in fact, four separate classes of problem to be solved:
What, descriptively, is the range of variation in attachment behaviour at any particular age, and in terms of what dimensions are variations best described?
What antecedent conditions influence the development of each variety of pattern?
How stable is each pattern at each age?
How is each pattern related to subsequent personality development and mental health?
Although there is a wealth of studies aimed to answer these and related questions (see the able review by Caldwell, 1964), conclusions are difficult to draw. The truth is that the issues are extremely complex, and no one investigation can expect to throw light on more than a fraction of them. Most of the studies undertaken hitherto, moreover, have not been adequate to the tasks they have set themselves—whether at a theoretical or an empirical level.
At a theoretical level, concepts of attachment, usually thought of as ‘dependency’, have been unsatisfactory. For example, the various measures of dependency that Sears has used in his research on the assumption that ‘overt dependency behaviour’ in young children reflects ‘a unitary drive or habit structure’ have shown practically no intercorrelation; and this has led Sears himself to conclude that ‘the notion of a generalised