The bonding between an infant and the primary caregiver (usually the mother) is thought by many psychologists to be an important step for building future relationships and personality (LaFreniere, 1998). Psychologists originally believed that attachment was a secondary drive, the primary drive being hunger, and it was thought that the infant became attached to the mother because she was the infant's food supplier. John Bowlby developed modern attachment theory as a variation on the object-relations theory derived from Freud's theory that the infant's ties to the mother are the major influence on the development of the infant's personality. Bowlby believed attachment was an innate process, and evidence for this came from a series of experiments with monkeys separated from their mothers at birth and raised by two types of surrogates, one of which was soft and cuddly but provided no food, and one of which was made of stiff wire, but had a bottle for feeding. The young monkeys overwhelmingly chose the soft monkey over the one which supplied food, particularly when threatened. This showed that comfort was preferred over food by the infant monkeys, so food was not the driving force for attachment.
Bowlby proposed that attachment is a behavioral system which can be activated when a threat is perceived, and remains active until the infant re-establishes contact with the caregiver (LaFreniere, 1998). In this system, several behaviors can function as attachment, but no one behavior has primacy. Attachment refers to how these behaviors are organized with respect to a specific caregiver in a specific context, and must be distinguished from the appearance of attachment.
According to Bowlby, there are different stages in the development of attachment (LaFreniere, 1998). A pre-attachment phase takes place from birth to six weeks, and is characterized by indiscriminate sociability, with no special response given to the primary careg...