John Bowlby

John Bowlby’s background
John Bowlby was born in 1907 in London to an upper-middle-class family. He was the fourth of six children and he was raised by a nanny in a traditional English fashion. His father, Sir Anthony Bowlby, second Baronet Bowlby, was a surgeon who had a traumatic history. When Sir Anthony was just five years old, his father, who had been serving as a war correspondent in the Anglo-Chinese Opium War, was brutally killed. Normally, Bowlby saw his mother only one hour a day after teatime. During the summer she was more available. She thought that spoiling her children was dangerous, so that attention and affection was the opposite of what was required. When Bowlby was almost four years old, his beloved nanny, who was his primary caretaker, left the family. Later, he was to describe this as tragic as the loss of a mother.

At the age of seven Bowlby was sent off to boarding school, because his father had to work as surgeon in a war. His ater work, for example Separation, Anxiety and Anger shows that this was a terrible time for him. Because of his experiences as a child he had an unusual sensitivity to children’s suffering during his entire life.

His intellectual career started at the University of Cambridge, were he studied psychology and pre-clinical sciences. He won prizes for outstanding intellectual performance. After Cambridge he took some time to work with maladjusted and delinquent children. At the age of twenty-two, he enrolled at University College Hospital in London, at the age of twenty-six he qualified in medicine. While still in medical school he also found time to enroll himself in the Institute for Psychoanalysis. After graduation of medical school he went off to train in adult psychiatry at the Maudsley Hospital. In 1937, he qualified as an analyst. Because of his former work with maladapted and delinquent children, he became interested in the development of children and started working at the Child Guidance Clinic in London.

Bowlby was interested in finding out the actual patterns of family interaction involved in both healthy and pathological development. He focused on how attachment difficulties were transmitted from one generation to the next. The three most important experiences for Bowlby’s future work and the development of attachment theory were his work with:


 * Maladapted and delinquent children.


 * James Robertson (in 1952) in making the documentary ‘A Two-Year Old Goes to the Hospital’, which was one of the films "young children in brief separation". The film illustrated the impact of loss and suffering experienced by young children separated from their primary caretakers.


 * Melanie Klein during his psychoanalytic training. She was his supervisor, however they had different views about the role of the mother in the treatment of a three-year-old boy.

The most famous and enduring work of John Bowlby was about attachment styles of infants with primary caretakers (see attachment theory). In his view, attachment behavior was an evolutionary survival strategy for protecting the infant from predators. According to Bowlby, initial development of attachment takes place in four phases. Mary Ainsworth, a student of Bowlby’s, extended and tested his ideas. John Bowlby died at the age of 83 in 1990. He had one son, Sir Richard Bowlby, afterwards fourth Baronet Bowlby.

Use of Bowlby's Theory in Practice
Bowlby‘s attachment theory looms large as a well-researched explanation of infant and toddler behavior and in the field of infant mental health. As a consequence, it is hard to imagine any therapeutic work with an infant or toddler that is not about attachment, since dealing with that issue has been shown to be an essential developmental task for that age period. For older children, attachment theory‘s clinical application is more indirect. Many if not most contemporary clinicians treating troubled children and families are informed by attachment theory but deal with attachment as an emergent property in family relationships, one that needs monitoring, counseling and instruction (primarily for parents) rather than therapy. Relatively few clinicians have tried to treat presenting attachment problems or issues as if they are symptomatic of a mental disorder of the child (such as ”reactive attachment disorder,“ which is generally deemed to be very uncommon).

Following Bowlby‘s leads, a few established child-development researchers had suggested developmentally appropriate mental health interventions to sensitively foster emotional relationships between young children and adults. These approaches used tested techniques which were congruent with attachment theory and other established principles of child development. Among such researchers contemporarily are Alicia Lieberman (parent education), Stanley Greenspan (”Floor Time“), Mary Dozier (autonomous states of mind), Robert Marvin (”Circle of Security“), Daniel Schechter (intergenerational communication of trauma), and Joy Osofsky (”Safe Start Initiative“).

A small number of clinicians presented proprietary interventions for sundry mental-health issues of children, often focusing on attachment. These approaches often used unresearched or under-researched techniques and ignored the cognitive element that Bowlby recognized as essential, especially for older children. As a consequence, the interventions generated little enthusiasm among researchers familiar with Bowlby‘s theories. Controversy also dogged these interventions because of their lack of congruence with established child-development principles, difficulties with accurate assessment of attachment, use of unsubstantiated diagnoses, and weak scientific evidence. Some developers of these proprietary interventions made particularly strong statements about their evidentiary bases but did not publish either Level I material or well-designed Level II material to support their claims, providing only weak Level II evidence without replication from any independent source. (see attachment disorder)

External Link

 * Bowlby biography by Juan Carlos Garelli

John Bowlby ג'ון בולבי ジョン・ボウルビィ John Bowlby