Interpersonal Dependency

Conceptualizing Dependency

The first influential theoretical model of interpersonal dependency came from Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic theory, wherein a dependent personality orientation was conceptualized as the product of “oral fixation”—continued preoccupation during adulthood with the events and developmental challenges of the infantile, oral stage. Thus, classical psychoanalytic theory postulated that the orally fixated (or oral dependent) person would: (a) continue to rely on others for nurtur-ance, protection, and support; and (b) exhibit behaviors in adulthood that mirror those of the oral stage (e.g., preoccupation with activities of the mouth, reliance on food and eating as a strategy for coping with anxiety).

Over the years, empirical support for Freud's classical psychoanalytic model of dependency was mixed, and gradually this perspective was supplanted by an object relations model, wherein dependency is conceptualized as resulting from the internalization of a mental image (sometimes called a mental representation or schema) of the self as weak and ineffectual. Retrospective and prospective studies of parent-child interactions confirm that overprotective and authoritarian parenting, alone or in combination, are associated with the development of a dependent personality in part because of the impact these two parenting styles have on the child's sense of self. Overprotective parenting teaches children that they are fragile and weak, and that they must look outward to others for protection from a harsh and threatening environment. Authoritarian (i.e., rigid, inflexible) parenting teaches children that the way to get by in life is to accede passively to others' demands and expectations. Both lead to the construction of a “helpless self-concept,” which is the core element of a dependent personality style.

During the 1960s and 1970s, behavioral and social learning models called psychologists' attention to the role that learning—including observational [Page 893]learning—may play in the etiology and dynamics of dependency. As social learning theorists noted, intermittent reinforcement of dependency-related behavior will propagate this behavior over time and across situation, and modeling—including symbolic modeling—can facilitate this learning/reinforcement process. Building on these initial social learning models, later researchers showed that traditional gender role socialization practices may help account for the higher levels of overt dependent behavior exhibited by women relative to men insofar as dependent responding is discouraged more strongly in boys than in girls in most Western societies. In both women and men, high levels of femininity are associated with elevated levels of self-reported interpersonal dependency, whereas high levels of masculinity are linked with low scores on a broad array of self-report dependency measures.

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