The Nature of the Child's Tie to His Mother

Bowlby's paper, read in shorter form to the British Psycho-Analytical Society in June 1957, asks what underlies the strong tie to a mother-figure that, he takes it, all analysts agree a child has formed by the end of the first year. He sorts the answers in the literature into four theories: secondary drive, in which the infant comes to value the mother because she meets its needs for food and warmth (the 'cupboard-love' theory, shared with Learning Theory); primary object sucking; primary object clinging; and a primary craving to return to the womb. 'Primary' here means inborn and 'secondary' learned. A long review traces how Freud recognised the early tie to the mother only late, accounted for it mostly as anaclitic, and hinted at the end at a phylogenetic foundation; how Anna Freud, Spitz, Ribble, Benedek and Sullivan theorise the tie as secondary to physiological needs although their own observations point elsewhere; how Klein oscillates between the primacy of the breast and, later, a longing for prenatal unity; and how the Budapest school (Hermann's instinct to cling, the Balints' primary object love) and Suttie came closest to a primary social bond. Drawing on ethology, Bowlby proposes instead a theory of component instinctual responses, modelled on Freud's component instincts in the Three Essays. Sucking, clinging, following, crying and smiling are species-specific behaviour patterns, each primary and at first independent of the others, maturing at different times in the first year. Through sucking, clinging and following the infant gains food or closeness by its own activity; crying and smiling are signals that release maternal behaviour. Each response is set off by particular stimuli and ended by others, not by the discharge of psychic energy; because the mother usually supplies the terminating stimuli, the responses come to centre on her, and then on one particular person, a tendency Bowlby names monotropy, and are integrated into 'attachment behaviour'. Primates that cling before they suck, and birds whose young follow and call to parents that never feed them, show that the tie need not derive from feeding. He judges clinging and following, which peak in the second and third years, more important than sucking, and rejects the return-to-womb craving as having no survival value. He concludes that attachment must be distinguished from dependence and that breast and mother, or good feeding and good mothering, should no longer be equated, and offers the theory as a working hypothesis for systematic research. The paper is commonly regarded as the first statement of attachment theory.