John Bowlby

Psychologist

• Born: February 26, 1907
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: September 2, 1990
• Place of death: Skye, Scotland

Also known as: Edward John Mostyn Bowlby

Education: Trinity College, Cambridge; University College Hospital

Significance: John Bowlby was a psychologist mainly involved in child development and notable for his elaboration of attachment theory.

Background

John Bowlby was born on February 26, 1907, in London, England. He was born to an upper-middle-class family along with five siblings and was raised by a nanny, who took care of the children in a separate wing of the home. His father was a surgeon in the royal household. Bowlby and his siblings had minimal interaction with their mother, though Bowlby was very fond of his nursemaid, Minnie, who assisted his nanny and served as a mother figure to him. When Bowlby was four, Minnie left the family, a loss that affected him deeply and would inspire his later work on attachment. After World War I started, Sir Anthony Bowlby, Bowlby’s father, left to fight in the war and the children had little to no contact with their father. Bowlby was sent to boarding school at the age of ten along with his older brother, another negative experience in his life that motivated his work in psychology.

Life’s Work

Bowlby studied psychology at Cambridge University’s Trinity College, after which he took a job teaching troubled children. The job further inspired Bowlby’s interest in developmental psychology, as he realized many psychological problems begin with early relationship experiences. At the age of twenty-two and continuing to work with children, he underwent medical training at the University College Hospital in London. While still in medical school he enrolled at the Institute for Psychoanalysis, qualifying as a psychoanalyst in 1936 at age thirty.

During World War II, Bowlby served as a psychiatrist in the British army, attaining the rank of lieutenant colonel. He often dealt with cases of war neurosis (now known as combat stress reaction), and also with children who had been evacuated from London to escape the air raids. Bowlby observed the children and their reactions to being separated from their families, which also influenced his research. Part of his work during this time involved studying children with a history of petty theft, whose life histories and family backgrounds he compared with those of children who did not steal. This provided the material for his first published work, Forty-Four Juvenile Thieves, released at the end of the war. He found that in general, the children with a history of theft had experienced early childhood separation from caregivers at a much higher rate than the other children. This study helped lay the groundwork for his research into the importance of secure attachment to caregivers for a child’s emotional development.

After World War II, Bowlby joined the staff of the Tavistock Clinic, a mental health clinic in London where he would spend much of the rest of his career, becoming director of the department of child psychiatry. He was also involved with the related Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, and in 1950 became a consultant to the World Health Organization (WHO). In his work for the WHO he studied children in Europe left homeless or orphaned by the war, work that yielded the 1951 book Maternal Care and Mental Health. This and Bowlby’s ensuing work in the 1950s was highly influential but was also considered controversial, especially in psychoanalytical circles, as he broke from the standard psychoanalytical view that the internal emotional experience of infants and children was mediated by fantasy rather than real-life experiences.

This work would also serve as a basis for Bowlby’s best-known research, surrounding attachment theory. Attachment theory posits that the quality of the bond between child and caregiver, especially in the first two years of life, establishes an emotional template for the way the child will respond to all close interpersonal relationships later in life. A secure attachment early in life allows a child to develop healthy relationships later in life, while an insecure or dysfunctional attachment conditions a child to respond to later relationships in specific dysfunctional ways. Bowlby came to be greatly influenced in his elaboration of this theory by his interest in contemporaneous work in the field of ethology, the study of animal behavior under natural conditions. He thus came to see human attachment behavior as an evolutionary adaptation that allowed humans to survive by being sharply attuned from an early age to the presence or absence of a caregiver who could keep them safe from danger.

Bowlby’s work on attachment theory was most fully articulated in his Attachment and Loss trilogy, published over the course of more than a decade: Attachment (1969), Separation: Anxiety and Anger (1972), and Loss: Sadness and Depression (1980). He was also influenced in this work by his contemporary Donald Winnicott, a British pediatrician and psychoanalyst, and his student and later colleague Mary Ainsworth.

Impact

Bowlby’s work on attachment theory profoundly influenced child psychology and psychotherapy, at a time when the importance of early childhood experiences on later mental health was still not widely understood. His work also helped offset the emphasis of psychoanalysis on fantasy and the unconscious, bringing greater attention to the importance of the quality of real-world relationships. His work continues to be widely read and studied in the twenty-first century.

Personal Life

Bowlby was married to Ursula Longstaff and they had four children. He died in 1990.

Principal Works

• Maternal Care and Mental Health, 1951
• Attachment, 1969
• Separation: Anxiety and Anger, 1972
• Loss: Sadness and Depression, 1980
• A Secure Base: Parent-Child Attachment and Healthy Human Development, 1988

Bibliography

Goleman, Daniel. "John Bowlby, Psychiatric Pioneer on Mother-Child Bond, Dies at 83." New York Times. New York Times, 14 Sept. 1990. Web. 18 July 2016.

"The Great Psychoanalysts: John Bowlby." Philosophers’ Mail. School of Life, n.d. Web. 18 July 2016.

Holmes, Jeremy. John Bowlby and Attachment Theory. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2013. Print.

"John Bowlby (1907–1990)." GoodTherapy.org. GoodTherapy.org, 23 July 2015. Web. 18 July 2016.

Kraemer, Sebastian, Howard Steele, and Jeremy Holmes. "A Tribute to the Legacy of John Bowlby at the Centenary of His Birth." Attachment and Human Development 9.4 (2007): 303–6. Print.

McLeod, Saul. "Bowlby’s Attachment Theory." Simply Psychology. Simply Psychology, 2007. Web. 18 July 2016.

Stevenson-Hinde, Joan. "Attachment Theory and John Bowlby: Some Reflections." Attachment and Human Development 9.4 (2007): 337–42. Print.

Van Der Horst, Frank C. P. "John Bowlby and Ethology: An Annotated Interview with Robert Hinde." Attachment and Human Development 9.4 (2007): 321–35. Print.