John Bowlby

Bowlby was born in London on 26 February 1907, the fourth of six children of an upper-middle-class family. His father, Sir Anthony Bowlby, was surgeon to the King's Household. As was usual in their class, the children were brought up by a nanny in a separate nursery and saw their mother for about an hour a day after tea. The nursemaid who had been his main early caregiver left when he was nearly four, a departure he later compared to the loss of a mother. During the First World War his father was away on military service and came home only once or twice a year. Bowlby was sent away to boarding school at seven; from 1915 he attended Abberley Hall. He went on to the naval college at Dartmouth (1921–1924) and spent a further year at sea on HMS Royal Oak.

From 1925 to 1928 he read natural sciences at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he became interested in developmental psychology and turned to psychology in his final year. His father had steered him towards medicine, but before taking it up Bowlby taught, first at Bedales and then, from Christmas 1928, at Priory Gate, a school for disturbed children. He later described the months he spent there as the most valuable of his life.

In 1929 Bowlby entered the medical school of University College Hospital in London. At the same time he began his training at the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, in analysis with Joan Riviere. He qualified in medicine in 1933 and spent 1933–1934 at the Maudsley Hospital, where he studied the personalities that precede psychotic and neurotic breakdown. He then held posts in psychological medicine at University College Hospital and, from 1937 to 1940, at the London Child Guidance Clinic.

He became an associate member of the British Psycho-Analytical Society in 1937 and a full member in 1939. In 1938–1939 he was supervised in the analysis of a child by Melanie Klein. Over the case of a three-year-old boy, Klein stressed the child's phantasies about his mother, while Bowlby wanted to attend to the actual history of the relationship. The difference prefigured his later quarrel with the Kleinian emphasis on unconscious phantasy. In 1938 he married Ursula Longstaff, with whom he had four children.

In the first winter of the Second World War Bowlby began work on Forty-Four Juvenile Thieves: Their Characters and Home-Life². It appeared in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis in 1944 and was reissued as a monograph in 1946. The study compared forty-four children who stole with forty-four controls. Seventeen of the thieves had suffered a prolonged separation from their mother early in life, against only two of the controls. Twelve of the fourteen thieves whom Bowlby classed as "affectionless" characters had such a history. In her history of the theory's origins, The Origins of Attachment Theory³, Inge Bretherton traces one of its roots to this child guidance work, and to Bowlby's conviction that actual experiences of loss and deprivation shape personality.

From 1940 to 1945 Bowlby served as a psychiatrist in the Royal Army Medical Corps, with the temporary rank of lieutenant colonel. Much of his work concerned the selection of officers. That research fed into the War Office Selection Boards and brought him into contact with members of the Tavistock Clinic. From 1944 to 1947 he was also Training Secretary of the British Psycho-Analytical Society, where he helped to build its two parallel training schemes.

After the war he became deputy director of the Tavistock Clinic. From 1946 to 1972 he was consultant psychiatrist in child and family psychiatry at the Tavistock Clinic and the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, and he headed its department for children until 1968. In 1948 he set up a research unit there. One of its members, James Robertson, documented the responses of young children separated from their parents in hospitals and residential nurseries. Robertson's 1952 film A Two-Year-Old Goes to Hospital helped drive a campaign to change hospital visiting rules. When it was shown to the British Psycho-Analytical Society that year, analysts attributed the child's distress to unconscious phantasies rather than to the separation itself. Bowlby adopted Robertson's method of naturalistic observation.

In 1950 Mary Ainsworth joined the team. The partnership continued, largely by correspondence, after her studies took her to Uganda and then to Baltimore, and it lasted until Bowlby's death.

In 1949 the World Health Organization commissioned Bowlby to report on the mental health of homeless children in post-war Europe, and from 1950 he served as its mental health consultant. He visited France, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States, and in 1951 published Maternal Care and Mental Health. Its central claim was that the infant and young child should experience "a warm, intimate, and continuous relationship" with the mother or a permanent mother-substitute. It proposed maternal deprivation as a more exact term than the "broken home", and noted that deprivation might be partial or, as in many institutions, almost complete.

The report gathered three kinds of evidence. The first was direct observation of young children, by René Spitz and Katherine Wolf, William Goldfarb, Dorothy Burlingham and Anna Freud, and others. The second was retrospective studies, among them Bowlby's own study of the thieves, and the third was follow-up studies. From these it argued, by analogy with rubella and vitamin D, for critical periods in emotional development. In its account, the child forms a bond with an identified mother by about six months and needs her as an ever-present companion until about three, and mothering begun after about two and a half years is of little use.

It concluded that children fare better in bad homes than in good institutions, and that deprived children may grow into parents who deprive their own. It recommended help for families to stay together, early adoption, supervised foster care, small family-like homes, and the admission of mothers to hospital with children under three. It also remarked that "to await certainty is to await eternity".

Bowlby's theoretical departure came in a series of papers to the British Psycho-Analytical Society between 1957 and 1959. The first, The Nature of the Child's Tie to His Mother⁴, was read in a shorter form in 1957 and published in 1958. It weighed four accounts of the tie. On the first, the "cupboard love" theory, the tie is a secondary drive arising from the satisfaction of bodily needs. The other three posit a primary need: to suck the breast, to cling to a human being, or to return to the womb. In his reading, Freud, Anna Freud, Spitz and most other analysts treated the tie as secondary, and Klein oscillated. The Budapest school of Imre Hermann and Michael and Alice Balint, together with Ian Suttie, came closest to his own view.

He proposed instead that the tie is built from component instinctual responses. Sucking, clinging, following, crying and smiling mature during the first year and become focused on the mother, who supplies the conditions that bring them to an end; integrated, they make up "attachment behaviour". The model followed the component instincts of Freud's theory of sexuality, but was conceived in ethological terms rather than as the discharge of energy. He supported it with comparative evidence: infant primates cling before they suck, and young birds follow parents that never feed them. The paper is commonly regarded as the first statement of attachment theory.

Through the 1950s Bowlby was in contact with the ethologists Niko Tinbergen, Konrad Lorenz and Robert Hinde. Julian Huxley directed him to Tinbergen's The Study of Instinct, and Lorenz's work on imprinting in goslings inspired him. The ethological evidence allowed him to reject the cupboard-love account of the bond.

A paper on separation anxiety (1959) and Grief and Mourning in Infancy and Early Childhood⁵ (1960) completed the series. Bowlby described the young child's response to removal from the mother as protest, despair and detachment, three phases of a single process. He linked protest to separation anxiety, despair to grief and mourning, and detachment to defence.

Comparing separated children with studies of bereaved adults, he concluded that the young child's responses to losing the mother figure differ in no material respect from adult mourning, except probably in their consequences. He presented this as an elaboration of the closing pages of Freud's Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety⁶, where anxiety answers the danger of losing the object and pain answers its actual loss.

The same paper re-examined the clinical basis of Klein's early cases and questioned Winnicott's extension of "weaning" and "breast" to cover the whole of early mothering. It argued that the significance of losing the breast had been exaggerated. The principal potential trauma of early childhood, in Bowlby's view, is the loss of the mother or of her love, and the processes Klein placed in the depressive position extend from about six months into and beyond the fourth year.

The trilogy Attachment and Loss gave the theory its full form. Attachment⁷ (1969; revised 1982) replaced Freud's model of psychic energy and drive discharge with a theory of behavioural systems drawn from ethology, evolutionary biology and control theory. Such systems pursue set-goals, are switched on and off by particular conditions, and are adapted to the environment in which the species evolved. The child's tie to the mother is the outcome of a distinct attachment system whose biological function is protection. Attachment develops in four phases, ending from about the third year in a goal-corrected partnership. It tends to focus on one principal figure, while a small hierarchy of others can also form, and it is complementary to exploration, which the child undertakes from the attachment figure as a secure base. The child builds internal working models of the attachment figure and of the self, a notion Bowlby adapted from Kenneth Craik's The Nature of Explanation (1943).

Separation: Anxiety and Anger⁸ (1973) treated anxiety at separation as a primary response, not one derived from unmet bodily needs. It grounded fear in natural clues to danger, being alone above all. It reinterpreted what clinicians had called over-dependency as anxious attachment, rooted in uncertain access to attachment figures through repeated separations, threats of abandonment and the inversion of roles between parent and child. Anger at separation can serve to restore the bond but becomes dysfunctional when separations persist. School refusal and agoraphobia were recast as anxious attachment within particular family patterns. A third volume, Loss: Sadness and Depression, followed in 1980.

The papers of 1957–1960 provoked sharp opposition. Joan Riviere, his former analyst, objected when he read the paper on the child's tie to the Society in 1957. Anna Freud published a critical discussion alongside the 1960 paper on grief and mourning in The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, contesting his view that young children mourn much as adults do.

Bowlby in turn criticised Spitz. Spitz had observed infants' social responsiveness closely, yet in theory gave primacy to food and warmth; he also called the syndrome he saw in separated infants anaclitic depression rather than mourning. Against Klein, Bowlby held that what actually happens in the family, above all separation and loss, is a main cause of emotional disturbance, and he described his own outlook as alien to the Kleinian one. He has been described as effectively ostracised by the psychoanalytic community, although he remained active in the Society: he was its Deputy President in 1956–1957 and again in 1958–1961.

Alongside his Tavistock post, Bowlby was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford in 1957–1958 and served on the external scientific staff of the Medical Research Council from 1963 to 1972. He was president of the International Association for Child Psychiatry from 1962 to 1966 and Freud Memorial Professor at University College London in 1981.

A Secure Base⁹ (1988) collected lectures from late in his career. It presented the theory to clinicians and parents, defended psychoanalysis as an art that must answer to natural science, and examined violence in the family and the pressure on children to disown what they have seen and felt. In psychotherapy, the lectures argue, the therapist offers the patient a secure base from which to explore painful experience and revise outdated models of self and others.

His last book was a biography of Charles Darwin that examined whether Darwin's long illness was psychosomatic. Bowlby died on 2 September 1990, aged 83, at his summer home on the Isle of Skye.

Maternal Care and Mental Health was both controversial and influential. Critics questioned whether the evidence supported its claims, and Michael Rutter faulted its blurring of privation with deprivation. Governments used it to discourage mothers from going out to work. At the same time Rutter credited Bowlby with showing that children's relationships are central to their psychological development. In 1962 the WHO published a reassessment, to which Ainsworth contributed with Bowlby's approval. Social workers took up his ideas readily and paediatricians came round after early hostility, while adult psychiatrists long remained uninterested.

His influence on the sciences of behaviour ran in both directions. He spurred Hinde's work on separation in primates and shaped Harry Harlow's research. Bretherton argues that much of the theory's later reach owes to Ainsworth's methods. Her studies in Uganda and Baltimore, and the Strange Situation procedure she devised, gave attachment research its empirical footing and its patterns of attachment. Mary Main's Adult Attachment Interview later extended the study of working models to adults and to transmission between generations. In a 2002 survey in the Review of General Psychology Bowlby ranked forty-ninth among the most cited psychologists of the twentieth century, and attachment theory has been called the dominant approach to understanding early social development.

Relational psychoanalysts later drew on his work. In Relationality: From Attachment to Intersubjectivity¹⁰ (2000), Stephen Mitchell traced relational thought through Hans Loewald, Ronald Fairbairn and Bowlby. Mitchell took attachment theory as evidence that the need for connection is primary rather than derived from drives, a claim central to the object-relations and relational traditions.

Bowlby's principal writings begin with Forty-Four Juvenile Thieves: Their Characters and Home-Life (1944) and Maternal Care and Mental Health (1951). They continue with The Nature of the Child's Tie to His Mother (1958), the paper on separation anxiety (1959) and Grief and Mourning in Infancy and Early Childhood (1960). The trilogy Attachment and Loss comprises Attachment (1969; second edition 1982), Separation: Anxiety and Anger (1973) and Loss: Sadness and Depression (1980). His late lectures were collected in A Secure Base (1988), and his last book was a biography of Charles Darwin (1990).