PERSONALITY DEVELOPMENT

Personality Development

Personality Development

a)

A complete exposition of attachment theory is beyond the scope of the present study, and satisfactory introductions are readily available elsewhere. The basic ideas upon which John Bowlby later elaborated in his 1,400-page trilogy on attachment and loss are presented more succinctly in an earlier series of three papers, and Robert Karen has written a lucid summary of attachment theory that is accessible even to a thoughtful lay audience. (Ainsworth, Bowlby, 2001 333-341)

Another essential aspect of attachment theory is that the secure affective connection with mother provides not only a haven for safety, but a base of operations for reconnaissance. A newly mobile infant, for example, does not stay always at mother's side. "On the contrary, he makes little excursions away from her, exploring other objects and people and, if allowed to do so, he may even go out of her sight. From time to time, however, he returns to her, as though to assure himself she is still there. (Ainsworth, Bowlby, 2001 333-341) Such confident exploration comes to an abrupt end if either of two conditions occur: (a) if the child is frightened or hurt; (b) if the mother moves away". Arguably, one of Bowlby's two greatest heroes was Charles Darwin, about whom Bowlby spent his last years composing a new biography, published June 8, just three months before Bowlby's death on September 2, 1990. Bowlby saw secure attachment, in a Darwinian sense, as enhancing species' chances for survival.

Personal Factor

Psychology of Cognitive ability

Attachment theory offers fertile application for the psychology of cognitive ability, as Lee Kirkpatrick demonstrated in his seminal dissertation, and which he and other investigators have continued to develop in subsequent works. As Kirkpatrick has noted, attachment theory is valuable for psychology of cognitive ability because it offers a link to a theoretical rationale recognized within the broader field of general psychology, and it has striking parallels with religious experience for which God is a kind of ultimate attachment figure. (Ainsworth, Bowlby, 2001 333-341)

Attachment theory finds a somewhat different application in psychology and cognitive ability than it does in the psychology of cognitive ability. Bowlby's two greatest heroes intellectually, the other would be Freud, although Bowlby's relationship with psychoanalysis was, from the publication of his three seminal papers until the conclusion of his later trilogy on attachment, especially ambivalent. (Ainsworth, Bowlby, 2001 333-341) The feeling was mutual. In a recent biographical essay, British psychoanalyst Jeremy Holmes quite correctly observed how, despite Bowlby's explicit interest in directing his theoretical work primarily toward his colleagues in psychoanalysis, "attachment theory was for two decades virtually airbrushed out of the psychoanalytic record--rather like some dissident in Stalinist times" (20). (Collins, Read, 2003 , 644-663)

This mutual ambivalence arose from competing views of how attachment relates to maturity. From Freud's initial formulations a century ago, and throughout subsequent amendment and revision by American ego psychologists and British object-relational theorists in the years since, a predominant assumption in psychoanalytic theory has been that infants begin from a state of psychological fusion, with ...