Outline two explanations of attachment and evaluate their ability to explain attachment

Authors Avatar

Outline two explanations of attachment and evaluate their ability to explain attachment.

One explanation of attachment was the psychoanalytic approach developed by Freud. He suggested that attachment was based on food and described children being born with an innate drive for pleasure, which he referred to as the pleasure principle. The idea was that everyone was motivated by this principle and that we demand immediate satisfaction. In infancy the pleasure is fulfilled through oral satisfaction or feeding. Freud then suggested that as an infant, you form a strong attachment with the person who provides you with the food. This implies that all attachments in infancy are explained by feeding and nothing else and may even suggest that a child isn’t specifically attached to its mother. This is strong evidence to suggest that attachment in childhood is driven by the demands for food and oral satisfaction.

However, this approach is unfalsifiable. The ideas we’re talking about are theoretical, hence they cannot be tested or measured. This means we can’t prove it right or wrong and therefore it questions how reliable it can be. It is suggesting that food is the main priority in attachments and allows no consideration for attention and care giving.

Join now!

Another explanation of attachment is the behaviourist approach or the learning approach. This was tested by Pavlov who conducted an experiment on the salivation of dogs to see if he could get an automated response. Each time he fed them, he would ring a bell before hand to see if it could form a new stimulus/response action. He found that eventually, the dogs salivated when they heard the bell and not when they saw the food because they had replaced the stimulus of food with the stimulus of the bell. Putting this into context of attachments, this experiment suggested ...

This is a preview of the whole essay