Bowlby's Monotropic Theory

10 Key excerpts on "Bowlby's Monotropic Theory"

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  Different Faces of Attachment

  Cultural Variations on a Universal Human Need

  • Hiltrud Otto, Heidi Keller(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  6 Heidi Keller One attachment or many One central issue of attachment research is its definition of attachment as the result of a monotropic, dyadically organized relationship despite the acknowledgment of the existence of different care systems involving different caregivers that hold different responsibilities. And again, amaz- ingly, attachment researchers conclude, after stating these differences, that, “in general, Bowlby and Ainsworth’s original ideas [the primacy of the mother–child relationship] held up well” (Cassidy, 2008, p. 17). This view of monotropy as an evolved tendency of human infants and their mothers is based on the primate model of rhesus macaques, with the particular role of the mother in the upbringing of the offspring, that is used as the evolutionary basis (Suomi, 2008). There are, however, other primate models with different care arrangements such as those of cotton- top tamarins, who rely more on distributed caregiving (Blum, 2002), and capuchin monkeys, whose activities with their mothers are not different from those with siblings or unrelated adults. As Suomi (2008, p. 177) concludes, “One wonders how Bowlby’s attachment theory would have looked if Hinde [the ethologist on whose work Bowlby heavily relied] had been studying capuchin rather than rhesus monkeys.” Parenting in over 300 primate species can vary greatly (Fairbanks, 2003) in terms of social systems and parenting strategies; moreover, it varies contextually (Bard et al., 2005), so that the assumption of one natural model cannot be maintained. The monotropic understanding of relationships and its formation has also been questioned for many decades by sociobiological (e.g., Hrdy, 1999), anthropological (e.g., Lancy, 2008; Weisner and Gallimore, 1977), and psychological (e.g., Tronick, Winn, and Morelli, 1985) accounts.

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  Security of Attachment and the Social Development of Cognition

  • Elizabeth Meins(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  cope with this separation. I shall also consider the possibility that the causes of such individual differences lie in the patterns of early dyadic interaction between infant and mother. In order to put these ideas into context, it is first necessary to consider the ideas of those who placed the child’s tie to the mother at the focal point of their work: Bowlby (1958, 1969) and Freud (e.g. 1931).

  Bowlby’s Theory of Attachment

  Regardless of whether researchers agree with his theoretical claims, John Bowlby’s theory of attachment (1958, 1969) represents the starting point for research into the relationship between infant and caregiver. The theoretical emphasis of his work thus underpins, to varying degrees, virtually all subsequent work on the infant-mother attachment relationship.

  The original spur for Bowlby’s investigation of the tie between a mother and her child came from observations he made in his first job, working as a volunteer at a school for maladjusted children. The problems that he encountered in these children convinced him of the importance of balanced family relationships in the development of a psychologically healthy personality, and led to his decision to train as a child psychiatrist (Senn, 1977). In the 1940s, Bowlby embarked on a number of studies which investigated the adverse effects of maternal deprivation and institutional care on children’s psychological well being. This background made him an obvious choice for the World Health Organisation (WHO) when they sought to commission an investigation into the mental health of children made homeless or orphaned by the Second World War. Bowlby first published his findings in a report to the WHO in 1951, in which he detailed his views on the importance of maternal care for the child’s subsequent mental health. Bowlby’s first exposition of a theory of infant-mother attachment

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  Introduction to Attachment Theory, An

  • (Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • The English Press

    (Publisher)

  Over time, orphanages were abandoned in favour of foster care or family-style homes in most developed countries. Formulation of the theory Following the publication of Maternal Care and Mental Health , Bowlby sought new understanding from the fields of evolutionary biology, ethology, developmental psychology, cognitive science and control systems theory. He formulated the innovative proposition that mechanisms underlying an infant's emotional tie to the caregi-ver(s)emerged as a result of evolutionary pressure. He set out to develop a theory of ________________________ WORLD TECHNOLOGIES ________________________ motivation and behaviour control built on science rather than Freud's psychic energy model. Bowlby argued that with attachment theory he had made good the deficiencies of the data and the lack of theory to link alleged cause and effect of Maternal Care and Mental Health . Infant exploration is greater when the caregiver is present; with the caregiver present, the infant's attachment system is relaxed and he is free to explore. The formal origin of the theory began with the publication of two papers in 1958, the first being Bowlby's The Nature of the Child's Tie to his Mother, in which the precursory concepts of attachment were introduced. The second was Harry Harlow's The Nature of Love. The latter was based on experiments which showed that infant rhesus monkeys appeared to form an affectional bond with soft, cloth surrogate mothers that offered no food but not with wire surrogate mothers that provided a food source but were less pleasant to touch. Bowlby followed up his first paper with two more; Separation Anxiety (1960a), and Grief and Mourning in Infancy and Early Childhood (1960b). At the same time, Bowlby's colleague Mary Ainsworth, with Bowlby's ethological theories in mind, was completing her extensive observational studies on the nature of infant attachments in Uganda.

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  An Introduction to Developmental Psychology

  • Alan Slater, J. Gavin Bremner, Alan Slater, J. Gavin Bremner(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • BPS Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  At this time, infants tend to use the mother as a ‘safe base’ from which to begin their explorations of the world, and it then becomes possible to measure how infants react to their mother’s departure and to her return. For these measures we are indebted to Mary Ainsworth, who trained with Bowlby, and who invented what is commonly called the strange situation. In this situation a baby (usually around a year old) and their mother enter an experimental room in which there are several toys. The mother sits on a chair and after a short while a stranger enters, at which point the mother leaves, only to return a few minutes later. An observer then notes the infant’s response to several events – when the stranger enters, when the mother leaves and when she returns. monotropy the view that the infant has a basic need to form an attachment with one significant person, usually the mother. A central claim in Bowlby’s early theory of attachment formation. strange situation measure, devised by Ainsworth, of the level of attachment a child has with their parent. FIGURE 2.4 Infants will usually form multiple attachments. 66 AN INTRODUCTION TO DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY Using the strange situation Ainsworth discovered that there are several attachment ‘styles’ that differ in degree of security. A detailed account of these attachment styles and of Bowlby’s and Ainsworth’s contribution in developing what is called attachment theory is given in detail in Chapter 6. For the moment we can conclude that their importance has been in demonstrating the importance of early secure attachments and showing that these attachments are as basic and important as any other human drive or motivation. PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORIES Sigmund Freud – The founder of psychoanalysis For generations almost every branch of human knowledge will be enriched and illuminated by the imagination of Freud.

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  Understanding Attachment

  Parenting, Child Care, and Emotional Development

  • Jean Mercer(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  Harlow's showed that although baby monkeys could survive these conditions, their later behavior was much affected by their experiences. 7 The ability to court and mate was impaired, and when the females did become pregnant, their treatment of their infants was inappro- priate and harmful. Harlow's work substantiated Bowlby's belief that early experiences with caregivers could set a direction for good, or poor, social and emotional development. As Bowlby became familiar with the ethological view, mentioned in the previous chapter, another type of animal research provided him with some essential ideas about attachment. The most important ethological concept, from the perspective of Bowlby's work, was the young animal's rapid connection with an adult. Imprinting was an intriguing phenome- non for several reasons. It involved a social bond that might be comparable to the emotional tie between human parents and children. It was not linked to feeding, demonstrating that social relationships could have their The Growth of Attachment Theory 37 own primary motivations. It occurred very readily during a period of de- velopment comparable to the one that most interested Bowlby. Imprinting was also an event with a long-term effect on the individual's social and emotional life, as Bowlby thought might be the case for children. Most theories develop gradually, but there comes a moment when they coalesce and are presented to the world in a nearly complete form. Bowlby's attachment theory reached this stage in the late 1950s, and it was published in several important papers. 8 These papers drew together Bowlby's ideas about the reasons for children's emotional attachments to their mothers and caregivers, about the observable behaviors that indicate attachment, and about the consequences of separation from a familiar attachment figure. Although Bowlby's ideas became further elaborated over the years, these papers are the true foundation of modern attachment theory.

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  Developmental Psychobiology

  • B.J. Casey(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • American Psychiatric Association Publishing

    (Publisher)

  2 DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOBIOLOGY studying early development of the parent–infant interaction, have stimulated increasing interest in early attachment among psychiatrists over the past decade. Historically, the place of the infantile attachment concept has been an uncertain one, not only in psychiatry but also in developmental psychobiology itself. John Bowlby was knighted by the Queen of England but disre- garded by his psychoanalytic colleagues. His ideas did not fare much better among those studying the behavioral and biological processes of early development. I cannot recall using the word at- tachment in my research or hearing it from my colleagues in de- velopmental psychobiology during my first 20 years in the field. The concept was too global and did not readily suggest research questions that would advance our understanding of its nature and how it functioned. Outside of psychoanalysis and develop- mental psychobiology, however, Bowlby’s attachment theory (Bowlby 1969) inspired remarkable changes in the treatment of infants, young children, and their parents and gave rise to an enormous body of research by developmental psychologists based on Mary Ainsworth’s (Bowlby’s colleague and successor) research instrument known as “The Strange Situation.” Bowlby’s great accomplishment was to dispel the misconcep- tion that existed among professionals in the first half of the twen- tieth century—that the only functions of the mother for the infant were to provide nutrition and protection. Too much time spent with the mother in trivial play, it was thought, would only serve to delay the development of independence and reason. But it was Harlow’s experiments (Harlow 1961), carried out under con- trolled conditions in the laboratory, that compelled the skeptics to take Bowlby’s revolutionary ideas seriously. The problem with Bowlby’s conceptual structure was not its limitations but that it explained too much.

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  Great Ideas in Psychology

  A Cultural and Historical Introduction

  • Fathali M. Moghaddam(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Oneworld Publications

    (Publisher)

  The modern idea of attachment was given shape by John Bowlby (1907–90), a British psychiatrist with training in psychoanalysis and also a serious interest in ethology. Bowlby’s views were shaped by his practical experiences of working with children who had serious problems, such as children separated from their parents because of the Second World War, and children who got into trouble with the law and were placed in juvenile homes. During the war years, hundreds of thousands of young children were sent out of London and other major cities to live in rural areas away from the most intense enemy bombing. Also, many children, both in Britain and elsewhere, lost one or both parents in the war. There was an urgent need for a better understanding of the consequences of the separation of children from their parents. Bowlby recognized this need and through his work with children he came to see the context of development, as well as relationship between the child and the primary caregiver, as fundamentally important. In his earliest writings from the 1940s and 1950s, it is clear that he saw children as vulnerable and dependent on a special relationship with the primary caregiver, usually the mother. Thus, Bowlby was working out, in the sense that he was developing theoretical ideas ahead of his time, but he was also to some extent working in, in the sense that he used his practical experiences to formulate theoretical ideas.

  Bowlby gave children a lot more credit than other researchers had done, particularly in terms of their cognitive and emotional experiences. He came to believe that through their early attachment experiences infants develop working models, rather like cognitive templates, of how future attachment figures will act toward them. These working models are used by children to guide future behavior: how much to trust and rely on others, for example. In the emotional arena, he came to see children as capable of experiencing grief as a result of rejection and abandonment by caregivers. Moreover, he saw the attachment that takes place between a mother and infant at a critical period as unique, in that the mother could not simply be replaced by somebody else who could feed the infant. Just as Harlow’s research implied, for Bowlby the mother–infant relationship is founded on emotional ties of comfort and support, rather than physiological needs that could simply be satisfied by food. Bowlby’s main long-term contribution may be that he systematically explored the emotional sense of loss (for example, as associated with low confidence and self worth) experienced by children as a result of rejection or abandonment by caregivers.

  The psychological consequences of a lack of adequate support from caregivers he saw as having evolutionary roots. Infants have evolved to show anxiety and distress when separated from caregivers, because infants who stay in close proximity to caregivers are more likely to be fed, protected, and trained to survive. Thus, the negative reactions of infants to separation from caregivers have the same adaptive roots as the negative reactions of newborn ducklings or other young animals when separated from their mothers.

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  Attachment and Dynamic Practice

  An Integrative Guide for Social Workers and Other Clinicians

  • Jerrold R. Brandell, Shoshana Ringel(Authors)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Columbia University Press

    (Publisher)

  From studies with human babies, Bowlby moved to the natural world and to studies with animals. He was deeply influenced by Konrad Lorenz’s work on the imprinting of offspring on their mothers. In a famous experiment, Lorenz observed that recently hatched ducklings would follow him, the first moving object that they saw, despite the fact that he neither resembled a mother duck nor behaved like one. This experiment had a deep impact on Bowlby, who viewed it as an indication of how powerful the need for attachment is in earliest life, even with a substitute maternal figure that does not provide feeding. If the ducklings, however, did not encounter a moving object within a specific period of time, the instinctual behavior was extinguished, and normal bonding did not take place. From this, Bowlby hypothesized that, like animal species, which are genetically “hardwired” to respond to certain signals and intergenerational rituals, human babies, too, have innate relational behaviors, such as sucking, clinging, crying, and smiling; if attachment needs are not met early on in life, a child’s development will be seriously disrupted. Bowlby’s theory, that a child’s most important need is for emotional bonding with another at the earliest stage of life, contrasted with the Freud/Abraham model of libidinal stages, in which the infant’s earliest need is an oral one, biologically driven though exclusively focused on obtaining mother’s breast milk.

  Bowlby was also influenced by Harry Harlow’s experiments with baby rhesus monkeys (Harlow, 1958). Harlow, a psychologist who worked at the University of Wisconsin, observed that many of his experimental monkeys died of disease. In an effort to find the solution to this problem, he separated his infant monkeys from their mothers after birth and raised them in complete isolation. He observed that the infant monkeys became attached to the gauze diapers that covered the floor of their cages and furiously protested when the staff tried to remove them. Other baby monkeys became attached to a wire mesh cone covered with terry cloth and placed in their cage. To examine this behavior further, Harlow created two wire models that he called “surrogate mothers.” One model was a block of wood covered with terry cloth; it had a face, and a lightbulb placed behind it generated heat. The other model was made only of wire mesh, but also had a face and a lightbulb. For four of the monkeys, the cloth-covered model was fitted with a feeding nipple. For the other four the wire mesh mother had the nipple. Regardless of which model did the actual feeding, the monkeys spent almost all their time, sixteen to eighteen hours a day, clinging to the cloth mother. They then began to use the cloth mother as a secure base for exploration of their environment and as a refuge, running to it when strangers entered the room. Harlow’s experiment was the first methodologically sound, scientific experiment offering proof that affectional ties are not based on nursing. Bowlby concluded from this experiment that the need for attachment and emotional nurturing is even more powerful than the need for food—not only in mammals but in human babies as well.

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  Attachment in Social Networks

  Contributions to the Bowlby-Ainsworth Attachment Theory

  • L.W.C. Tavecchio, M.H. van IJzendoorn(Authors)
  • 1987(Publication Date)
  • North Holland

    (Publisher)

  This is the so-called monotropy-thesis. Applying the four Attachment Theory as a Lakatosian Research Program 23 criteria to test the progressiveness of this problem shift, we get the following results. In adding the monotropy-thesis to the attachment theory, Bowlby appears to break the rule not to make changes in the hard core of the program without its being tested seriously. The monotropy-thesis implies a hier- archy of attachment relationships, in which the bond with the primary caregiver is the strongest, other relationships functioning at a lower level of intensity. Speaking in terms of strength of a bond implies crossing over to another re- search program. In attachment theory one can only speak about quality of attachment - the exemplary operationalization only measures quality, not strength of the relationship. Strength of a bond typically belongs to the terminology of the condi- tioning approach to attachment (Gewirtz, 1972), in which the difference between attachment and dependency seems to be blurred (Ainsworth, 1969; Sroufe, 1985). In a conditioning context, it is perfectly correct to argue about the strength of the dependency of an infant on its parent. But without losing sight of the fundamental difference between attachment and dependency, it is not possible to argue about a hierarchy of attachment figures with stronger or weaker bonds with the child. Furthermore, the monotropy-thesis did not lead to empirical progress. On the contrary, the thesis is not con- firmed by empirical evidence pointing to the existence of equivalent attachment relationships with several different caregivers, e.g. father, mother, and professional caregivers (Lamb, 1978; Main & Weston, 1981; Sagi et al., 1985; Smith, 1980; Smith & Noble, chapter 3 in this volume). The attachment relationships do not have identical qualities and thus appear to be dyadic-specific, but they cannot be discerned in terms of strength, and be placed in a hierarchy.

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  Beyond Sex Differences

  Genes, Brains and Matrilineal Evolution

  • Eric B. Keverne(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Attachment behaviour starts early in life with the Mother–Infant Bonding 129 129 survival benefit of protection from harm (Bowlby, 1982). To quote Bowlby, ‘the biological strategy of attachment behaviour in young infants has evolved in parallel with the complementary parental strategy of responsive care giving. The one presumes the other’. The attachment behaviour of infants with their mother, and the use of this relationship as a ‘secure base’, thereby enables infants to con- fidently explore their own expanding social world. In this way, the pattern of communication that a child adopts towards the mother comes to match the pattern of communication that the mother has been adapting towards the child (Bowlby, 1991). The sensitivity of the mother’s responsiveness to her infant is dependent on her accu- racy in reading the infant’s attention-seeking signals and respond- ing appropriately, thereby providing a ‘security of attachment’. The mother’s sensitivity, although a reliable promoter of secure attach- ment, is not, however, independent of her own emotional state (anxiety or depression) and can also be negatively influenced by her own previous traumatic experiences. However, for the most part, infant–mother security of attachment is mainly associated with positive outcomes. Bowlby, unlike most child psychiatrists, was more concerned with a child’s experience of life events, especially when it came to understanding the trajectory for the child’s psychological develop- ment. He was more focussed on the developmental enrichment of the infant through a close emotional relationship with the mother. However, under normal circumstances the mother integrates her experiences with her child according to those experiences from her own past history of close relationships (Fonagy, 1999). Thus, it is the mother who interprets the behaviour of her child based on her own experiences from when she was growing up with her parents and family.

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