Mental health articles

The origins of attachment theory The key historical figure in the field of attachment theory is John Bowlby. Dr John Bowlby (1907–90) was a British child psychiatrist who trained as a psychoanalyst. The work that was to become attachment theory had its origins in Bowlby’s interest in ethology (the study of the behaviour of animals in relation to their natural environments), his experience with deprived and affectionless children and a report he prepared for the World Health Organization on the mental health of homeless children in post-war Europe (Bowlby, 1951). He was profoundly influenced by work with deprived children, and out of this developed his conviction that maladjustment follows early maternal deprivation and loss. Bowlby was considerably aided by his working relationship with two other researchers. In the late 1940s he hired James Robertson, a social worker, to assist in observation of hospitalised children, and Mary Ainsworth, who conducted the first empirical study of attachment on a group of mothers and babies in Uganda in the mid-1950s. It is likely that Bowlby reacted strongly against what he perceived to be too strong a psychoanalytic emphasis on the inner world of the infant and a neglect of the realities of the external world. Regrettably, this was in turn reacted to by psychoanalysts of that time, with an equal and opposite criticism of Bowlby’s alleged neglect of the infant’s inner world. The result was an unfortunate schism between a talented researcher and theorist and the psychoanalytic orthodoxy of the time. This is being repaired by the significant work of Peter Fonagy (2001), Mary Target (Fonagy & Target, 2000), Jeremy Holmes (2001) and others.