Primary Affect Hunger is a concept created by David Levy to describe the impact
on young children who are deprived of the mother’s love. This goes onto create an adult who in or out of a relationship hungers for something or someone to satisfy the love hunger.

This hunger is not an acute starving but a low level yearning for something that cannot be had. Some have described it as an emptiness that underlies their lives that is not obvious but motivates the person to lead a life of hunger which cannot be assuaged.

Adults can drink alcohol, take drugs, enter into repeating unsatisfactory relationships to try and satisfy this emotional hunger. According to John Bowlby “the infant and young child should experience a warm, intimate, and continuous relationship with his mother (or permanent mother substitute) in which both find satisfaction and enjoyment” If this relationship is compromised in anyway then a love hunger will develop in the baby and continue into adulthood.
Primary Affect Hunger

This mother / carer relationship was formed in the first two and a half years of the child’s early life: if it had gone wrong it meant that there was a difficult life ahead for the adult.

It seems that the capitalist market place assumes that adults will be hungry for something that cannot be satisfied. Why else is the modern world made up of consumption of stuff that is wanted but not needed. The love in early life is what is needed, the distraction and filling up of the emptiness is what is wanted and what we get.
Primary Affect Hunger

Copyright Adrian Scott North London Counsellor Blog 2015
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