The Origins of Attachment Theory: John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth

Inge Bretherton's article in Developmental Psychology (1992) is a historical account of how attachment theory came about, written as the joint achievement of John Bowlby and Mary Salter Ainsworth. Bretherton traces two separate roots in the 1930s: Bowlby's growing conviction, formed in child guidance work and psychoanalytic training, that real experiences of maternal loss and deprivation shape later personality, and Ainsworth's grounding in William Blatz's security theory at the University of Toronto. Their partnership began in 1950, when Ainsworth joined Bowlby's research team at the Tavistock Clinic, where James Robertson was already documenting young children's responses to separation. Its most productive phase came later, after Bowlby had drawn ethology, control systems theory and psychoanalytic thinking into a first blueprint of the theory, and after Ainsworth had carried out in Uganda the first empirical study of infant–mother attachment. The article then follows the period of theory building and consolidation: Bowlby's trilogy Attachment and Loss, with its account of the attachment behavioural system and of internal working models of self and attachment figures, and Ainsworth's Baltimore study, which introduced the Strange Situation, the idea of the attachment figure as a secure base for exploration, and maternal sensitivity to the infant's signals as the source of differences in attachment patterns. Bretherton argues that Bowlby's theory owes its influence to Ainsworth's methods and to the research they made possible. A final part reviews new directions, above all the turn to the representational level of attachment opened by Mary Main's Adult Attachment Interview and the study of how attachment patterns pass between generations, and speculates on the theory's future.