Attachment and dependence

Psychotherapy Attachment and dependence

psichoterapeia athina Psychotherapy Attachment and dependence: Being attached to someone else shows the need to be able to exist with someone else. This need is vital, that is, without it you fear you will die. This is a feeling we all have in infancy.

Attachment and dependence

If we had a figure available for attachment then surely we would have been able to one degree or another to exercise our spontaneous right to become psychologically attached to it through attachment. There the baby is fed, warmed, communicates, attacks, fears counterattack, gradually develops gratitude, also develops basic trust and considers this whole system to be an indivisible system. In other words, it cannot tell that it is different from the figure that cares for it. In the course of attachment, there are constantly various moments where the mother figure is absent for a while.

There the fear rises and becomes great. The comfort that comes with turning the figure is not only comforting, it not only gives the opportunity to reinvest physical needs, but at the same time creates a reserve of energy to be able to withstand the next “disappearance”. This “disappearance” becomes evident in the most characteristic way in the “cuckoo cha” where mother and baby play spontaneously with each other laughing, wanting to “exorcise” so to speak those painful moments when for a while the two parties are no longer together.

So attachment leads to dependence, and this dependence means that they need to be together. So around the sixth month, the so-called “separation anxiety” begins and develops. It is a normal anxiety that occurs typically in all normal babies and that continues for some time but with reduced intensity. Essentially, it never completely goes away, that’s why people seek to form relationships with each other in order to reduce the intensity of that archaic feeling of fear in case something bad happens. These feelings are of course pushed away, we don’t remember them.

But they exist within us and are activated in moments of danger in order to protect us from the energy of mental impulses that threaten our psyche. How do they do this? Activating again that “cuckoo cha” where the figure we attached to and to whom we felt safe, trusted, confident and certainly self-confident was lost for a while but found again.

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Mixalis Paterakis
Psychologist Psychotherapist
University of Indianapolis University of Middlesex
Karneadou 37, Kolonaki (next to Evangelismos)
I accept by appointment
Tel: 211 7151 801
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