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evening, the behavior he showed after his familiar nurse’s departure conforms to pattern.
On the night of her going he cried a great deal, was sleepless, and insisted on his mother
remaining with him. Next day he refused to let the new nurse feed him, and he reverted to
being wet and dirty. During each of the subsequent four nights his mother had to stay with
him and to assure him of her love, and his daytime behavior continued disturbed. Not until
the sixth day did much of his behavior return to normal and not until the ninth day did he
appear to be himself again. Although there was clear evidence that he was missing his familiar
nurse, he never once again mentioned her by name and seemed reluctant in any way to refer to
her absence.102
Bowlby very effectively establishes the importance of separation anxiety as a major factor in childhood and adult pathology, and he also shows that Freud himself eventually came to a very similar interpretation of the origin of our most basic anxiety. Bowlby summarizes his case103 by noting that Freud first linked separation and anxiety in a very brief discussion in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905). Here Freud gave the topic only one paragraph, and he wrote: “Anxiety in children is originally nothing other than an expression of the fact that they are feeling the loss of the person they love.”104 In 1917, in his Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, he again linked anxiety (in this case, infantile anxiety) with separation, in a three-page development. As Bowlby summarizes it, “a child missing ’The sight of a familiar and beloved figure — ultimately his mother’ [is] the ’situation which is the prototype of the anxiety of children.”105 But it was not until his major late work Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926) that Freud accorded separation the central place in what was to be his final theory of anxiety. Freud concluded then: “Missing someone who is loved and longed for … [is] the key to an understanding of anxiety.”106 Although earlier he had often postulated links between sexuality and anxiety, Freud ended up focusing on separation as the prototypical anxiety experience. (It is interesting to note, in this connection, that in his discussions of separation Freud tended to hedge the use of the actual word “mother,” using vaguer terms — e.g., “beloved figure,” “the person they love.”) Let us take it as established that separation anxiety is extremely important to the understanding of personality and that it is caused by separation, primarily in childhood, from the mother or mother-figure. What concrete evidence is there that Freud suffered from any degree of anxiety of this sort? Let us go back over some things we have looked at earlier: First, Freud described his nanny as the originator of his neuroses; second, his nanny, his “loved one,” disappeared suddenly; third, he uncovered this in his own psychoanalysis — in particular, he remembered a scene (the “casket scene”) in which he was “crying my heart out.”107 There is |