Schafer And Emerson's Four Stages Of Attachment

Attachment is defined as the emotional bond between two persons. The definition is easy to be grasped by anyone and its examples are found every day in our society. In our society where the father has to go out and earn living for his family, we see how children’s are more attached to the mother who looks after them and feeds them. This is the most common example of attachment in our society, emotional attachment between the mother and her children. According to John Bowlby who was a British psychologist, attachment of an infant with his/her mother creates an impact on their later life as well. Attachment helps the infant to survive. It also plays a key role in their mental functioning in future.
There are four phases of attachment according to the researchers Rudolph Schafer and Peggy Emerson who conducted a longitudinal research which involves looking at the subject over the course of many years, with 60 infants. Based on this research, Schafer and Emerson came up with four stages of attachment.
1) Pre-attachment Stage The very first stage pre-attachment stage (from birth to three months), is of the result that the infant does not shows attachment to a specific caregiver. To put this statement in more simple words, the
"Due to the lack of experimentation, hypotheses about the central way of fondness have developed at the level of perception, instinct, and perceiving mystery, whether these have been proposed by analysts, sociologists, anthropologists, doctors, or psychoanalyst," he noted. A significant number of the current speculations of adoration focused on the thought that the soonest connection between a mother and tyke was just a methods for the tyke to acquire nourishment, assuage thirst, and maintain a strategic distance from agony. Harlow, nonetheless, trusted that this behavioral perspective of mother-youngster connection was a deficient