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It is now time to draw together ideas regarding fear of separation and how it develops.
At the end of Chapter 1 it is pointed out that ‘presence’ and ‘absence’ are relative terms that can give rise to misunderstanding. By presence is meant ‘ready accessibility’, by absence ‘inaccessibility’. The words ‘separation’ and ‘loss’ as used in this work imply always that the subject's attachment figure is inaccessible, either temporarily (separation) or permanently (loss). Thus in what follows we are concerned with the developmental processes that lead a young child to respond with fear when he finds, or believes, his attachment figure to be inaccessible.
Among the many questions raised and not yet answered are the following:
Is inaccessibility of mother in itself a situation that arouses fear in human children without its being necessary for any learning to have taken place?
Or is such fear elicited in an individual only after he has come to associate her inaccessibility with a distressing or frightening experience?
If the latter, what is the nature of such distressing or frightening experience, and by what type of learning does it become linked with separation?
Whatever the answers to these questions may be, because being alone carries an increased risk of danger, especially for young individuals and others who are weak, the fear response to inaccessibility of mother can usefully be regarded as a basic adaptive response, namely a response that during the course of evolution has become an intrinsic part of man's behavioural repertoire because of its contribution to species survival.
If that is so, there is no a priori reason to assume that fear elicited by mother's inaccessibility can be explained only in terms of an individual's having experienced something distressing