In the event, it is clear, some of the ideas Freud advanced in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety fell on stony ground. This was a pity, since in that book, written at the end of his professional life, he was struggling to free himself of the perspective of his travels – defence, mourning, separation anxiety – and instead to view the sequence from his new vantage point: the priority of separation anxiety. In his concluding pages he sketches out a new route: anxiety is a reaction to the danger of losing the object, the pain of mourning to the retreat from the lost object, defence a mode of dealing with anxiety and pain. This is the route we shall be following.
Principal Theories
No concept is more central to psycho‐analytical theory than the concept of anxiety. Yet it is one about which there is little consensus of opinion, which accounts in no small measure for the divisions between different schools of thought. Put briefly, all analysts are agreed that anxiety cannot be explained simply by reference to external threat: in some way processes usually thought of as internal and instinctive seem to play a crucial role. But how these inner forces are to be conceptualized and how they give rise to anxiety, that has always been the puzzle.
As a result of this state of affairs we find, when we come to consider how analysts conceive separation anxiety, some widely differing formulations; for each formulation is strongly influenced by the particular outlook regarding the nature and origin of anxiety which the analyst happens to have. Moreover, the place given to separation anxiety within the wider theory of anxiety varies greatly. For some, like Hermann and Fairbairn, separation anxiety is the most important primary anxiety; for others, like Freud in both his earlier and later work, it is only the shortest of steps removed from being so; for others again, like Melanie Klein and her associates, separation anxiety is deemed to be secondary to and of less consequence than other and more primitive anxieties. This being the present state of thought, inevitably the discussion has to touch on all aspects of the theory of anxiety. Yet it will be my plan to restrict the wider discussion as far as possible in order to concentrate on the task in hand, namely to understand separation anxiety and its relation to mourning.
A review 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 psycho‐analysts, they are: –
1 The first, advanced by Freud in Three Essays (1905), is a special case of the general theory of anxiety which he held until 1926. As a result of his study of anxiety neurosis (1894) Freud had advanced the view that morbid anxiety is due to the transformation into anxiety of sexual excitation of somatic origin which 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 the child’s libido remains unsatisfied and undergoes transformation. This theory may be called the theory of Transformed Libido. It resembles in many ways the sixth main approach, which is the one adopted here.
2 The anxiety shown on separation of young children 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] 1929) we can term it the Birth‐Trauma theory. It is the counterpart of the theory of return‐to‐womb craving to account for the child’s tie.
3 In the absence of the mother the infant and young child is subject to the risk of a traumatic psychic experience, and he therefore develops a safety device which leads to anxiety behaviour being exhibited when she leaves him. Such behaviour has a function: it may be expected to ensure that he is not parted from her for too long. I shall term this the Signal theory, employing a term introduced by Freud (1926) in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety. It is held in three variants according to how the traumatic situation to be avoided is conceived. They are: (a) that the traumatic situation is an economic disturbance which is caused when there develops an accumulation of excessive amounts of stimulation arising from unsatisfied bodily needs; (b) that it is the imminence of a total and permanent extinction of the capacity for sexual enjoyment, namely aphanisis (Jones, 1927). (When first advanced by Jones as an explanation of anxiety, the theory of aphanisis was not related to the anxiety of separation; two years later, however, he sought to adapt it so as to fit in with Freud’s latest ideas). Finally (c), there is the variant proposed by Spitz (1950) that the traumatic situation to be avoided is one of narcissistic trauma. It should be noted that in the history of Freud’s thought the Signal theory stems from, and is in certain respects the counterpart of, the theory which explains the child’s tie to his mother in terms of secondary drive.
4 Separation anxiety results from the small child, owing to his ambivalence to his mother, believing when she disappears that he has eaten her up or otherwise destroyed her, and that in consequence he has lost her for good. Following Melanie Klein ([1935] 1952) we can call it the theory of Depressive Anxiety.
5 Following the projection of his aggression, the young child perceives his mother as persecutory: as a result he interprets her departure as due to her being angry with him or wishing to punish him. for these reasons whenever she leaves him he believes she may either never return or do so only in a hostile mood, and he therefore experiences anxiety. Again following Melanie Klein, this can be termed the theory of Persecutory Anxiety.
6 Initially the anxiety is a primary response not reducible to other terms and due simply to the rupture of the attachment to his mother. I propose to call it the theory of Primary Anxiety. It is the counterpart to theories which account for the child’s tie to his mother in terms of component instinctual responses. It has been advanced by James (1890), Suttie (1935) and Hermann (1936), but has never been given much attention in analytic circles.
The hypothesis I shall be adopting is the sixth, since it stems directly from my hypothesis that the child is bound to his mother by a number of instinctual response systems, each of which is primary and which together have high survival value. Soon after birth, it is held, conditions of isolation tend to activate crying and a little later tend to activate both clinging and following also; until he is in close proximity to his familiar mother – figure these instinctual response systems do not cease motivating him. Pending this outcome, it is suggested, his subjective experience is that of primary anxiety; when he is close to her it is one of comfort.
Such anxiety is not to be conceived merely as a ‘signal’ to warn against something worse (though it might subsequently come to have this function). Instead, it is thought of as an elemental experience and one which, if it reaches a certain degree of intensity, is linked directly with the onset of defence mechanisms. It is because of this, and because I wish to distinguish it sharply from states of anxiety dependent on foresight, that I have termed it Primary Anxiety.5