ABSTRACT
As a clinician, John Bowlby had taken an interest in the impact of the separation of parents and children even before World War Two. The state was labelled separation syndrome or abandonment syndrome, and Bowlby described it as involving three stages: protest, despair, and temporary detachment. The child’s initial response to separation is protest. This may last anything from a few hours to a week or even longer. The despair behaviour suggests a growing degree of hopelessness, although there are indications that the child continues to focus on the missing caregiver. Detachment is often erroneously viewed as an improvement in the child’s condition. In the framework of attachment theory, detachment represents the young child’s immature attempts at putting the attachment system “on standby”, since the most important person in the world, from the child’s point of view, has become unavailable.
