Tag: attachment

In attachment theory psychology, attachment is a product of the activity of a number of behavioral systems that have proximity to a person, e.g. a mother, as a predictable outcome. The concept of there being an “attachment” behavior, stage, and process, to which a growing person remains in proximity to another was developed beginning in 1956 by British developmental psychologist John Bowlby. According to Bowlby, the concept of proximity attachment has its origins in Charles Darwin’s 1856 Origin of Species, which “sees instinctive behavior as the outcome of behavioral structures that are activated by certain conditions and terminated by other conditions”, Sigmund Freud’s 1905 Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and his 1915 Instincts and their Vicissitudes, which according to Bowlby “postulates part-instincts, differentiates the aim of an instinct, namely the conditions that terminate instinctive behavior, and its function, and notes how labile are the objects towards which any…