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Viewed In the perspective of this work, most persons described by clinicians as dependent or overdependent are ones who exhibit attachment behaviour more frequently and more urgently than the clinician thinks proper. Inherent in the terms, therefore, are the norms and values of the observer using them. This leads to many difficulties. One is that norms and values differ greatly not only between individuals but from culture to culture and from subculture to subculture. To take a crude example, behaviour that in some parts of the East might pass unnoticed, or even be encouraged, might in the West be condemned as childishly -dependent. Another difficulty is that, even within a single culture, no useful evaluation of the behaviour can be made without knowledge of the conditions, organismic and environmental, in which it is shown. Ignorance of a child’s age, of whether he is well or ill, of whether or not a person has recently experienced a shock, can play havoc with an observer’s judgments. Individuals who are notoriously apt to be wrongly judged as overdependent are children who look older than they are, who are tired or unwell, or who have recently acquired a new sibling, and adults recently bereaved. Another example is a young woman during pregnancy or while caring for small children. In all such instances attachment behaviour is likely to be shown more frequently and/or more urgently than would otherwise be the case. In other words, in the conditions obtaining the behaviour may be well within normal limits and no adverse conclusions on the personality development of the individuals concerned would be appropriate. There are, however, persons of all ages who are prone to
show unusually frequent and urgent attachment behaviour and who do so both
persistently and without there being, apparently, any current conditions to
account for it. When this propensity is present beyond a certain degree it
is usually regarded as neurotic. |
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