When the child is unable to bond appropriately with a parent, he has difficulty understanding the parent’s or his own feelings. He has no healthy context on which to base emotions or behaviors. Object constancy cannot be sustained. The child develops abandonment fears or detaches from others. This developmental failure may arise either from the child’s temperament (biological or genetic limitations) or from the parent’s pathology, which may consist of physical or emotional abuse or abandonment, or inappropriate smothering of independence, or from both.
