Anxious Attachment and Some Conditions that Promote it

If there are quarrels between the parents or if their marriage is unhappy, the ground will be prepared in their children for the severest predisposition to a disturbance of sexual development or to a neurotic illness.

In the opening pages of this volume vignettes are given (quoted from Burlingham & Freud 1944) of children, aged between two and four years and resident in the Hampstead Nurseries, who showed intensely possessive behaviour towards one or another nurse. Jim, for example, who had been in the nursery since the age of seventeen months, is described as having formed ‘strong attachments’ first to one young nurse and then to another who had successively looked after him. Towards each he was intensely clinging and possessive, and he refused to be left by them for a minute. Numerous other observers, including my colleagues Robertson and Heinicke, have also noted this type of behaviour whenever small children in a nursery setting are given opportunity to make an attachment to a member of staff, and the same behaviour is shown towards mother after they return home.

Clinging behaviour, either literal or figurative, can be seen at every age, during childhood, during adolescence, and during adult years. It goes by many names. Among adjectives used to describe it are ‘jealous’, ‘possessive’, ‘greedy’, ‘immature’, ‘overdependent’, and ‘strong’ or ‘intense’ attachment. For scientific and clinical purposes, it is argued, each word has drawbacks: because it derives from and implies obsolescent theory, or because it is ambiguous, or, and perhaps most important of all, because it carries with it an adverse value judgement that is held to be inappropriate and unhelpful.

Both ‘jealous’ and ‘possessive’, though accurate, are apt to be