Loss of a loved one is always painful and is a major challenge to an individual 's adaptive resources. Attachment is never given up voluntarily or completely. Grief and mourning are processes rather than behavior and they serve an adaptive function for the individual who experiences a significant loss. The process of grieving is not concluded when the crying stops.
Human infants lead an exceedingly complex cognitive and emotional life.
Early attachment relationships are prototypes of later love relationships. I t is important to distinguish Freud's genuine insights about human attachments from the psychodynamic metaphors and models used to express them and knit them together. Although psychodynamic formulations have almost no explanatory role in contemporary theory and research, Freud's descriptive insights remain at the heart of contemporary attachment theory. Having set so much of our current agenda, Freud, like Piaget, will be long remembered for his descriptive insights, even if cognitive and brain sciences eventually replace the motivational theory that tied them together. Genuine descriptive insights remain, even after explanatory devices and methods tied to particular moments in the history of science are replaced by more adequate ones.