According to the British psychoanalyst John Bowlby, infants start to establish and develop a bond of attachment with the person that takes care of them in their first few weeks of life.
The need for physical contact is more important than the feeding need, which can be proved with the famous Harlow’s test on the Rhesus monkeys, carried out in laboratory. The little monkeys, just after coming to the world, prefer the contact with a surrogate mother made of synthetic fur that gives off heat, instead of the feeding bottle given from a metal and cold surrogate mother.
Like the need …show more content…
Personality theories has been studied by different psychologist for a long time and in this paper will analyze three of them: attachment theory, …………………………………..
Attachment theories were developed firstly by doctor John Bowlby and were later on expanded by some of his colleagues. According to this theory, children’s attachment towards their caregiver is either secure, avoidant or resistant.
Secure attachment describes the situation when the infant is not comfortable without his mother, but they will become rapidly happy when she returns and the infant seeks immediate contact with her. The caregiver is always ready to help the baby when they need and this helps the infant feel secure without being exposed to any danger. Thanks to the good attention that the caregiver gave to the infant, it’s more likely that once grown, the child will be happier to explore the world around them feeling equally safe and happy. They learned that anywhere they’d go, there would always be a safe place to go back to if needed, which allows them to have good self respect and …show more content…
This happens when the infant doesn’t recognise the caregiver as a person to ask for help when they need because the caregiver seems untrustworthy. For this reason, the infant does not seek contact with the mother and they don’t cry when she lives. Their future interpersonal relations will be characterized by insecurity and mistrust. Once they become adults they will try to ignore most of the people because they don’t know how to feel at ease as they almost never had the opportunity to feel secure.
The last type of attachment, that is the anxious/ambivalent attachment, take place when the infant feel that the caregiver sometime is present but sometimes is not. The child will become upset when the caregiver leaves and angry when they return. Those infants feel that their are loved only half of the times that they need it and they often feel abandoned during future interpersonal