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IT has been said repeatedly that attachment behaviour does not disappear with childhood but persists throughout life. Either old or new figures are selected and proximity and/or communication maintained with them. Whereas outcome of behaviour continues much as before, means for achieving it become increasingly diverse.
When an older child or adult maintains an attachment to another person he does so by diversifying his behaviour so that it includes not only the basic elements of attachment behaviour present at the first birthday but, in addition, an increasingly varied array of more sophisticated elements. Compare, for example, the degree of behavioural organisation underlying the actions of a schoolboy when he seeks and finds his mother in a neighbour's house, or pleads with her to include him on a visit she intends to pay to relatives the following week, with that of the same individual when as an infant he first attempted to follow his mother out of the room.
All these more sophisticated elements of attachment behaviour are organised as plans with set-goals. Let us consider what these set-goals are.
During the first three-quarters of his first year, it seems probable that a child makes no planned attempt to bring into being whatever the conditions may be that would in fact terminate his attachment behaviour. Either the necessary conditions obtain, in which case he is content, or they do not, in which case he is distressed. Whatever attachment behaviour he may then exhibit is not yet goal-corrected; though in the ordinary home it is very likely to have proximity to mother amongst its predictable outcomes.
As a child passes eight months and nears his first birthday,1