The Bedside Book of Psychology: From Ancient Dream Therapy to Ecopsychology: 125 Historic Events and Big Ideas to Push the Limits of Your Knowledge - Wade E. Pickren 2021

1969 Attachment Theory

John Bowlby (1907—90)

BY THE END OF WORLD WAR II, thousands of infants and young children had been separated from their parents during the bombing of London and other English cities, with grave psychological consequences. In 1946, John Bowlby, a young psychiatrist who studied how children’s experiences within their families influenced personality development, became the head of London’s Tavistock Clinic Department for Children and Families. Bowlby became dissatisfied with psychoanalytic theories about children’s anxieties related to separation. At this time, he became acquainted with the work of ethologists Niko Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz, who studied parent-offspring behavior in a variety of species.

The comparative approach gave Bowlby a new framework with which to study a child’s ties to its primary caregiver. By using an ethological framework, Bowlby theorized that infant attachment to its caregiver served the evolutionarily adaptive function of protection, thus enhancing the likelihood of the child’s survival. The early formulations of the theory were tested in research by Bowlby and his colleagues. The research conducted by developmental psychologist Mary Ainsworth proved most important, as she developed an extensive body of findings that established our current typology of secure, avoidant, ambivalent, and disorganized attachment.

Bowlby and others extended the theory to encompass adolescents and adults. While numerous articles were published by Bowlby and others in the 1950s and 1960s, Bowlby published a fully developed theory of attachment in his 1969 book, Attachment and Loss. The work now rests on an impressive research foundation that has done much to elaborate our understanding of human development and the clinical implications when it goes awry. Briefly, the theory holds that safety and protection are the core of attachment. Once a child knows it is secure, then it is possible to explore the immediate environment. Once interiorized, such security creates optimal conditions for cognitive, social, emotional, and personality development over the life course. While Bowlby suggested that this model of attachment is universal to the human experience, recent research suggests that there are important cultural variations.

SEE ALSO Bees Dancing, Egg-Rolling Birds, and the New Science of Ethology (1952), Mother Love (1958)