Article
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.
Main ideas
- Attachment theory is presented as the joint work of two people with complementary gifts: Bowlby supplied the theoretical framework, Ainsworth the methods that tested it and the findings that extended it.
- The theory has two roots in the 1930s: Bowlby's clinical conviction that actual separation from and loss of the mother affect later personality, and Ainsworth's training in William Blatz's security theory, which both reformulated and challenged Freudian ideas.
- The collaboration began in 1950 at the Tavistock Clinic, where Ainsworth joined Bowlby's research on the effects of early separation and met James Robertson's observations of young children separated from their parents.
- Bowlby's first blueprint of the theory joined psychoanalytic thinking to ethology and control systems theory, recasting the child's tie to the mother as the product of an evolved behavioural system rather than a by-product of feeding.
- Ainsworth's observational study in Uganda was the first empirical study of infant–mother attachment patterns, and her later Baltimore home study, with the Strange Situation procedure, gave the theory a validated way of assessing individual differences in attachment.
- Ainsworth contributed two of the theory's central concepts: the attachment figure as a secure base from which the infant explores, and maternal sensitivity to the infant's signals as what shapes the security of the attachment.
- In the period of consolidation Bowlby's Attachment and Loss set out the attachment behavioural system and internal working models of self and attachment figures, including how defensive exclusion of painful information can split those models.
- New directions turn attachment research to the representational level: Mary Main's Berkeley work and the Adult Attachment Interview opened the study of parents' states of mind about their own childhood attachments and of the transmission of attachment patterns across generations.
- Bretherton concludes that without Ainsworth's patterns of attachment and the Adult Attachment Interview built on them, Bowlby's ideas would not have reached their influence on developmental and clinical psychology, and she speculates on the theory's future reach.
What it shows
Joan Riviere analysed John Bowlby
Riviere was Bowlby's training analyst at the British Psycho-Analytical Institute in the 1930s.