Our innate core needs for attachment are based in the premise that in order to survive, and indeed to thrive within our environment, one needs connection, protection, autonomy, and belonging with communicative meaning-making.
Such needs drive our inherent motivation toward proximity-seeking and proximity-maintaining activity, actions, and acts – especially that which is focused upon a specific figure (i.e. the primary caregiver / attachment figure). Such a drive evolved primarily in service of safety from predation (Bowlby 1969 as cited in Main, 2000), shelter from the elements, defence against direct attack, as well as enabling a continued orientation toward the movements of the pack (Main, 2000).
Further to this such acts of proximity seeking and maintaining can be seen as emerging from epochs in time where “death was far more likely to result from one hour’s separation from caregiving figures than from a much longer period without food. For reasons such as these human and other ground-living primate infants evolved to continually monitor the accessibility of their attachment figures, and to attempt to maintain a reasonable degree of proximity even in relatively non- threatening situations.” (Main, 2000, p. 1069)
Indeed, the centrality of attachment lies in an infant’s survival-related internal and external repertoire’s (patterns of protection) that, throughout the lifespan, were established in the provision of one’s innate core needs for Connection, Protection, and Belonging with communicative meaning-making.
