The Nature of the Child's Tie to His Mother

Main ideas

• Bowlby classifies the existing explanations of the infant's tie to its mother into four theories, secondary drive ('cupboard love'), primary object sucking, primary object clinging and primary return-to-womb craving, using 'primary' for what is inborn and 'secondary' for what is learned.
• His review finds that most analysts, among them Freud for much of his work, Anna Freud, Spitz, Ribble and Benedek, theorise the tie as secondary to feeding even when their own observations of infants suggest a primary social bond; Klein is held to give orality excessive weight, while the Hungarian school (Hermann, Michael and Alice Balint) and Suttie come closest to his own view.
• He proposes instead the theory of component instinctual responses: sucking, clinging, following, crying and smiling are inborn, species-specific behaviour patterns, at first independent of one another and maturing at different times in the first year, which become integrated and focused on a mother-figure as 'attachment behaviour'.
• The five fall into two classes: through sucking, clinging and following the infant gains food or closeness by its own activity, whereas crying and smiling are signals that act as social releasers of the mother's care.
• Following the ethologists, an instinctual response is an observable behaviour pattern set off by particular stimuli and ended by consummatory stimuli, not by the discharge of accumulated psychic energy; Bowlby treats instincts of sex and self-preservation as redundant causes and leaves the question of energy open.
• Comparative evidence shows that the tie need not derive from feeding: infant primates cling before they first suck, and the young of ground-nesting birds follow and call to parents that never feed them, which undermines secondary-drive theory's claim to special scientific status.
• The human newborn is immature, so apart from sucking its only effective mother-related response is at first crying, soon joined by smiling; crying is quieted by touch, rocking and voice as well as food, making the mother a 'social suppressor', while clinging and following grow later, intensify under fear, fatigue or separation, and peak around 18 to 30 months.
• On the cognitive side, early smiling answers a simple visual gestalt rather than a person; only from about six months does the infant clearly distinguish the mother from strangers, and, following Piaget, perhaps not before nine months does it conceive of her as a lasting object.
• The mother becomes central because she usually supplies the stimuli that end each response; the responses then centre on one particular figure, a tendency Bowlby names 'monotropy', and interference with this integrating function accounts in large part for the harm done by maternal deprivation and separation.
• Sucking is probably not the most important component, since it passes easily to a bottle; Bowlby's clinical impression is that whether a mother accepts or rejects clinging and following matters more to a child's development than whether it was breast-fed.
• Each response exists for its survival value and was shaped by natural selection; the craving to return to the womb has no such value and is rejected. The responses wane with age but never vanish, and their return in danger or illness is a healthy function, not a regression.
• Attachment is distinct from dependence: an infant may depend on its mother physiologically whatever binds it to her, and be attached to her when, as in hospital, it is not dependent on her. Breast should therefore not be equated with mother, nor good feeding with good mothering, nor the first relationship called oral and anaclitic; the theory is offered as a tentative working hypothesis to stimulate research.

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