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A Study of the literature shows that there have been six main approaches to the problem of separation anxiety: three of them are the counterparts, though not always the necessary counterparts, of theories regarding the nature of the child's attachment to his mother. In the order in which they have received attention by psychoanalysts, they are as follows.
The first, advanced by Freud in Three Essays (1905b), is a special case of the general theory of anxiety which he held until 1926. As a result of his study of anxiety neurosis (1895) Freud had advanced the view that morbid anxiety is due to the transformation into anxiety of sexual excitation of somatic origin that cannot be discharged. The anxiety observed when an infant is separated from the person he loves, Freud holds, is an example of this, since in these circumstances a child's libido remains unsatisfied and undergoes transformation. This theory may be called the theory of ‘transformed libido’.
The anxiety shown by young children on separation from mother is a reproduction of the trauma of birth, so that birth anxiety is the prototype of all the separation anxiety subsequently experienced. Following Rank (1924) it can be termed the ‘birth-trauma’ theory. It is the counterpart of the theory of return-to-womb craving to account for the child's tie.
In the absence of his mother an infant or young child is subject to the risk of a traumatic psychic experience, and he therefore develops a safety device which leads to his exhibiting anxiety behaviour whenever she leaves him. Such behaviour has a function: it may be expected to ensure that he is not parted from her for too long. This is usually referred to as the ‘signal’ theory, a term introduced by Freud in 1926. It is held
A version of this review was published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, Vol. I, 1961. Only few changes have been made; papers published since 1960 are not as systematically considered as those published earlier.
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