Fifty Years of Attachment Theory

The Donald Winnicott Memorial Lecture

Sir Richard Bowlby

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429913730
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book is the second volume in the series based on the annual Donald Winnicott Memorial Lecture. It provides the personal and professional lives of Donald Winnicott and Dr John Bowlby, to give a fascinating insight into the worlds of these influential analysts.

Fifty Years of Attachment Theory

Sir Richard Bowlby

I am not a psychologist, I like to design racing cars. I lived close to my father all my life: I lived with him, in the flat above him, in the house next door to him, shared a boat on the south coast and a holiday home on the Isle of Skye. I find that I remember more about my father than I once realized. It was a psychiatrist who told me that.

It is astonishing to me, as a layman, that Attachment Theory was not greeted with a great chorus of “Hallelujah!, at last we have seen the light.” It was not like that. It was a real struggle to get this concept—one of the fundamentals of what makes us human—more widely understood so that society could benefit. It is solidly based on research and, after all, what is the point of doing research if nobody knows about it? That makes it a waste of time. Even when it is obscure, as much of it can be, research data is valuable. I have spent much of my life trying to clarify research findings in medical science and assist in their wider circulation. Eventually I quit my job to communicate Attachment Theory in what I hope is a more accessible way so that it could be more broadly understood.

What I want to do tonight is to recount some of the struggles that Attachment Theory has had in gaining a wider acceptance.

It is fifty years since my father wrote Child Care and the Growth of Love, and although Attachment Theory is now established as a valuable working model in child development and mental health circles, the general public’s knowledge of the concept of attachment is notably lacking. From my position inside the family and outside the professions, I am taking a critical look at what prevents the dissemination of the valuable insights that Attachment Theory could bring to the general public. For some years I have been presenting recollections of my father’s professional struggle to develop Attachment Theory, and some of the public’s misunderstandings of what he wrote. Sometimes this has been because of the emotional difficulties that they have with his work, and there are also wider social issues which still prevent many people from accepting Attachment Theory.

Probably the largest group consists of people fortunate enough to have had a secure attachment, who have the confident expectation of repeating the cycle with their own children; for this group the whole subject is so self-explanatory and obvious that it hardly merits comment—unless things go wrong.

In a way I do not even like to call it Attachment Theory any more; I prefer to call it research into bonding. For many people “theory” means a vague, “anything goes”, sort of idea; it does not have only the strict scientific definition which is to be found in the dictionary.

The origin of my father’s motivation for working on this conundrum of the parent–child attachment relationship probably stems from a traumatic event when he was about four years old. In 1911 his father was a successful surgeon who lived in a large London town-house with his wife and six children. The normal arrangement for child-care at that time was to have a senior nanny—she was called Nana—and one or two nursemaids who helped out as more children were born. My father was the fourth child; he had a nursemaid called Minnie who had day-to-day responsibility for him. The children rarely saw their father, except on Sundays and holidays; and they only saw their mother for an hour a day between 5.00 and 6.00 in the evening. Effectively, these children had twenty-three-hour a day good quality and non-parental care. My father grew to love Minnie, who once told his sister that John was her favourite, and my guess is that Minnie was his surrogate, principal attachment figure in preference to his own mother. Then, when he was four, Minnie left the family to get a better job. When my father spoke of this event, he said he was sufficiently hurt to feel the pain of childhood separation—but was not so traumatized that he could not face working with it on a daily basis. All this is in print; it is not a family secret.

At the age of twenty-one, my father, a disenchanted medical student, was working at Priory Gate, a school for maladjusted children (that’s what they were called—people were not very “PC” in those days). Here he met John Alford, a remarkable man for whom my father had great respect and who became a professor (in Canada, I believe). Alford had noticed that many of the disturbed children in the school came from very disrupted family backgrounds. It was he who convinced my father to complete his medical degree and study psychoanalysis; he also inspired his interest in maternal deprivation, the forerunner of his later work on attachment. I imagine my father identified the loss of his Minnie with the maternal deprivation experienced by the delinquent children in the school. He undertook his study of forty-four juvenile thieves before the Second World War and it was published in 1944. He found that seventeen of the group had suffered an early prolonged, or permanent, separation from their mother, or permanent mother substitute, during the first five years of their life—as compared with only two in the control group. In order that he could be absolutely sure of the disrupted childhood these children had experienced, he recorded only death, desertion, or divorce in the families; these were the only data that he could be absolutely sure were reliable.

My father was not afraid to confront intimidating figures, which was to lead him into a series of conflicts throughout his career. It began with his protracted psychoanalytic training, when he would insist on arguing with his analyst, Joan Riviere, and his supervisor, Melanie Klein. He found it hard to accept their rigidly-held theories because he believed these failed to satisfy the scientific rigour he had learned at Cambridge when studying medicine. (I may say that Donald Winnicott was at Cambridge, too, and neither did he go much on the training; it was very rigid; there was no emotion involved; everything was very clinical.)

In 1949 the World Health Organization (WHO) invited my father to report on the psychiatric needs of the many homeless children who had been orphaned because of the Second World War. The wide-ranging material that he gathered for the WHO report, called Maternal Care and Mental Health, was published in 1951. The main text of the report was used for his popular and controversial paperback Child Care and the Growth of Love, written in 1952 and published a year later. It used to be said about him: “Stick a pin in Bowlby and out comes maternal deprivation!” At this point he was still working with the material on orphans; he had not worked out Attachment Theory. On the first page of both books he outlined the conditions needed for the healthy development of children:

For the moment it is sufficient to say that what is believed to be essential for mental health is that the infant and young child should experience a warm, intimate and continuous relationship with his mother, or permanent mother substitute, in which both find satisfaction and enjoyment.

However, only in the paperback does he clarify his use of the words “permanent mother substitute” by adding: “one person who steadily mothers him”. Nowhere did he clarify his use of the word “continuous”, and this was to get him into a great deal of trouble later on. It is worth noting here that if you look up the word “attachment” in the index of Child Care and the Growth of Love, you will not find it. He had not worked it out in 1952, and did not use it in a publication until 1957.

Video clip of John Bowlby

What I noticed was that there were children who had been referred for persistent thieving, truancy, and what I spotted was that they had had very, very disrupted childhoods. A continuous relationship between a mother and child in which both find happiness and satisfaction, promotes mental health.

Notice again his use of the word “continuous”; he frequently used it but did not distinguish between what he meant by “the enduring relationship” from that of “unbroken contact”.

Child Care and the Growth of Love was primarily addressing children’s experience of complete maternal deprivation, or prolonged separation, when abandoned in orphanages; he saw this as being “foremost among the causes of delinquent character development”. He clarified the term “prolonged separation” as being “complete and prolonged separation, six months or more, from their mothers or established foster-mothers.” However, the phrase “prolonged separation” has been misrepresented and frequently used to suggest th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• CONTRIBUTORS
• FOREWORD
• INTRODUCTION OF SIR RICHARD BOWLBY JOHN BOWLBY AND DONALD WINNICOTT: COLLEGIAL COMRADES IN CHILD MENTAL HEALTH
• FIFTY YEARS OF ATTACHMENT THEORY
• INTRODUCTION OF PEARL KING
• RECOLLECTIONS OF DONALD WINNICOTT AND JOHN BOWLBY
• QUESTIONS TO SIR RICHARD BOWLBY
• ENVOI