The son of Sir Anthony and Lady Bowlby, Edward John Mostyn Bowlby was born in London on 26 February 1907, the fourth of six children. It was customary then for an upper-class mother to hand over her children to a nanny and nursemaids. A particular nursemaid took care of John on a daily basis, but she left when he was about 4. The effect of this on Bowlby is unknown, as he never discussed it (van Dijken 1998). The Bowlby children saw their mother for a short time each day and their father, who was a surgeon, on Sundays. He was absent even more during the First World War. However, there were long family holidays in the country — to the New Forest in July and to Scotland in late summer. This remained a family tradition — with Bowlby, his wife Ursula, their four children, and later their grandchildren retreating to the Isle of Skye each summer. Bowlby did much of his writing there, as well as walking and enjoying the 'season', including the Skye Ball with its Scottish reels. Skye is where Bowlby died on 2 September 1990, and where he is buried, on a remote hillside overlooking the cliffs and sea.
When Bowlby was 11, he and his elder brother were sent off to boarding school. From there he went to the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth. But at 17, Bowlby decided that the navy was not for him, writing to his mother that he wanted a job which would 'improve the community as a whole' (van Dijken 1998). At Trinity College, Cambridge, he followed his father by studying medicine, with a departure into psychology in his final year, graduating in 1928. Rather than going straight into clinical school, he spent a year teaching in two boarding schools, including one for disturbed children. Their early disrupted childhoods impressed Bowlby, and he decided to combine his medical training with psychoanalytic training. After becoming medically qualified at University College Hospital in 1933, he went to the Maudsley to train in adult psychiatry, and then to the London Child Guidance Clinic in 1936. He became an army psychiatrist in 1940, and after the war he went to the Tavistock Clinic, where he remained as director of the Department for Children and Parents (Holmes 1993).
At the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, Bowlby was assigned to Joan Riviere and then Melanie , who supervised him after his analytical qualification in 1937. Differences grew between Bowlby and Klein concerning the importance of real-life experiences vs. unconscious fantasies. For example, when treating a hyperactive and anxious 3-year-old boy, Bowlby noted that the boy's mother had been admitted to a mental hospital and was having another breakdown. Klein, however, did not allow Bowlby to treat the mother, devaluing what was actually happening in real life.
Bowlby was particularly interested in what happened around separation. This interest may have sprung from his own childhood experiences, as well as later when working with maladjusted children. He was struck by the high incidence of severely disrupted relationships with mother figures in the early histories of children and adolescents who had been referred to the clinic on account of repeated and apparently incorrigible stealing. This led to the publication in 1944 of Forty-Four Juvenile Thieves: Their Characters and Home Life. His seminal WHO monograph, Maternal Care and Mental Health, appeared in 1951, followed by Child Care and the Growth of Love in 1953. Around this time Bowlby and his colleagues the Robertsons observed young children in hospital, noting their intense and prolonged distress when not visited by parents. Moreover, home visits afterwards showed that the child's relationship with the mother was seriously disturbed for weeks or longer. Also in 1950, a Canadian woman called Mary Ainsworth (1913–99) joined Bowlby at the Tavistock, and she was to remain a close and influential colleague throughout his life. After her longitudinal study of mother–infant behaviour in Uganda, Ainsworth joined the faculty at the Johns Hopkins University in 1955, where she devised a strange situation procedure for assessing an infant's quality of attachment (Ainsworth et al. 1978). This identification of different 'patterns of attachment' enriched the theory and enabled research into the antecedents and consequences of security vs. insecurity.
During the 1950s, Bowlby's eclecticism was evidenced by his 'weekly workshop in a dingy room in the old Tavi, in Beaumont Street. The group was entirely heterogeneous — a Freudian and a Kleinian analyst, a Hullian and a Skinnerian learning theorist, a Piagetian, an ethologist, sometimes an anti-psychiatrist, psychiatric social workers — having in common only an interest in parent–child relations. ... John Bowlby's intellectual dynamism and judicious enthusiasm held the group together. ... During that period Bowlby formulated his ideas on "the child's tie to his mother" and "separation anxiety" ... with inputs from ethology and systems theory' (Hinde 1991: 216). He came to the view that a child's attachment behaviour to the mother does not depend upon prior association with other behaviour such as feeding, but rather it evolved in its own right through natural selection, with a presumed function of protection from harm. The essence of his theory was set out in 'The nature of a child's tie to his mother' (1958) followed by his trilogy Attachment and Loss (1969/82, 1973, 1980). The thesis is that attachment behaviour is shown from birth onwards, leading to the formation over the first year of life of an enduring attachment bond. The quality of this bond, as secure or insecure, plays a key role in our view of ourselves and others, and in what Bowlby called our 'psychological well-being' (further described in the entry attachment).
One reason for the power of attachment theory is that it lies at the heart of our emotional life. In one of his final papers Bowlby wrote, 'Many of the most intense emotions arise during the formation, the maintenance, the disruption and the renewal of attachment relationships. The formation of a bond is described as falling in love, maintaining a bond as loving someone, and losing a partner as grieving over someone. Similarly, threat of loss arouses anxiety and actual loss gives rise to sorrow; while each of these situations is likely to arouse anger. The unchallenged maintenance of a bond is experienced as a source of security and the renewal of a bond as a source of joy' (1991: 306).
(Published 2004)
— Joan Stevenson-Hinde
- Bibliography
- Ainsworth, M. D. A., Blehar, M. C., Waters, E., and Wall, S. (1978). Patterns of Attachment.
- Bowlby, J. (1951). Maternal Care and Mental Health.
- — — (1953). Child Care and the Growth of Love.
- — — (1958). 'The nature of a child's tie to his mother'. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 39.
- — — (1969/1982). Attachment and Loss, i: Attachment.
- — — (1973). Attachment and Loss, ii: Separation, Anxiety and Anger.
- — — (1980). Attachment and Loss, iii: Loss, Sadness and Depression.
- — — (1990). Charles Darwin: A New Biography.
- — — (1991). 'Ethological light on psychoanalytical problems'. In Bateson, P. (ed.), Development and Integration of Behaviour.
- Hinde, R. A. (1991). 'Obituary: John Bowlby'. Journal of Child Psychology & Psychiatry, 32.
- Holmes, J. (1993). John Bowlby and Attachment Theory.
- van Dijken, S. (1998). John Bowlby: His Early Life.
The Oxford Companion to the Mind. Second Edition. Copyright © Oxford University Press, 2004. All rights reserved.
