www.psychspace.com心理学空间网THE EMERGENCE OF ATTACHMENT THEORY
In 1948, 2 years before Ainsworth’s arrival, Bowlby had hired James Robertson to help him
observe hospitalized and institutionalized children who were separated from their parents.
Robertson had had impeccable training in naturalistic observation, obtained as a conscientious
objector during World War II, when he was employed as a boilerman in Anna Freud’s Hampstead
residential nursery for homeless children. Anna Freud required that all members of the staff, no
matter what their training or background, write notes on cards about the children’s behavior
(Senn, l977a), which were then used as a basis for weekly group discussions. The thorough
training in child observation that Robertson thus obtained at the Hampstead residential nursery is
Anna Freud’s lasting personal contribution to the development of attachment theory.
After 2 years of collecting data on hospitalized children for Bowlby’s research projects,
Robertson protested that he could not continue as an uninvolved research worker, but felt compelled
to do something for the children he had been observing. On a shoestring budget, with minimal
training, a hand-held cinecamera, and no artificial lighting, he made the deeply moving film,
A Two-Year-Old Goes to Hospital (Robertson, 1 953a, 1953b; Robertson & Bowlby, 1952).
Foreseeing the potential impact of this film, Bowlby insisted that it be carefully planned to ensure
that no one would later he able to accuse Robertson of biased recording. The target child was
randomly selected, and the hospital clock on the wall served as proof that time sampling took
place at regular periods of the day. Together with Spitz’s (1947) film, Grief: A Peril in Infancy,
Robertson’s first film helped improve the fate of hospitalized children all over the Western
world, even though it was initially highly controversial among the medical establishment.
When Mary Ainsworth arrived at Bowlby’s research unit late in 1950, others working there
(besides James Robertson) were Mary Boston and Dina Rosenbluth. Rudolph Schaffer, whose
subsequent attachment research is well known (Schaffer & Emerson, 1964), joined the group
somewhat later, as did Christoph Heinicke (1956; Heinicke & Westheimer, 1966), who undertook
additional separation and reunion studies, and Tony Ambrose (1961), who was interested in
early social behavior. Mary Ainsworth, who was charged with analyzing James Robertson’s data,
was tremendously impressed with his records of children’s behavior and decided that she would
emulate his methods of naturalistic observation were she ever to undertake a study of her own
(Ainsworth, 1983).
At this time, Bowlby’s earlier writings about the familial experiences of affectionless
children had led Ronald Hargreaves of the World Health Organization (WHO) to commission him
to write a report on the mental health of homeless children in postwar Europe. Preparation of the
WHO report gave Bowlby an opportunity to pick the brains of many practitioners and researchers
across Europe and the United States who were concerned with the effects of maternal separation
and deprivation on young children, including Spitz (1946) and Goldfarb (1943, 1945). The report
was written in 6 months and translated into 14 languages, with sales of 400,000 copies in the
English paperback edition; it was published in 1951 as Maternal Care and Mental Health by the
WHO. A second edition, entitled Child Care and the Growth of Love, with review chapters by
Mary Ainsworth, was published by Penguin Books in 1965.
It is interesting to examine the 1951 report from today’s perspective. At that time Bowlby
still used the terminology of traditional psychoanalysis (love object, libidinal ties, ego, and
superego), hut his ideas were little short of heretical, Perhaps following Spitz, he used embryol
ogy as a metaphor to portray the maternal role in child development:
If growth is to proceed smoothly, the tissues must he exposed to the influence of the
appropriate organizer at certain critical periods. In the same way, ~f mental development is
to proceed smoothly, it would appear to he necessary for the undifferentiated psyche to be
exposed during certain critical periods to the influence of the psychic organizer- the mother.
(Bowlby, 1951, p. 53)
Then, seemingly doing away with the idea that the superego has its origin in the resolution of the
Oedipus complex, Bowlby claims that during the early years, while the child acquires the capacity
for self-regulation, the mother is a child’s ego and superego:
It is not surprising that during infancy and early childhood these functions are either not
operating at all or are doing so most imperfectly. During this phase of life, the child is
therefore dependent on his mother performing them for him. She orients him in space and
time, provides his environment, permits the satisfaction of some impulses, restricts others.
She is his ego and his super-ego. Gradually he learns these arts himself, and as he does, the
skilled parent transfers the roles to him. This is a slow, subtle and continuous process,
beginning when he first learns to walk and feed himself, and not ending completely until
maturity is reached. . . . Ego and super-ego development are thus inextricably hound up with
the child’s primary human relationships. (Bowlby, 1951, p. 53)
This sounds more Vygotskian than Freudian. Moreover, despite his disagreements with Kleinian
therapy, I detect remnants of Kleinian ideas in Bowlby’s discussions of children’s violent fantasies
on returning to parents after a prolonged separation and “the intense depression that humans
experience as a result of hating the person they most dearly love and need” (Bowlby, 1951, p.
57).
Bowlby’s major conclusion, grounded in the available empirical evidence, was that to grow
up mentally healthy, “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” (Bowlby, 1951, p. 13). Later summaries often overlook the reference
to the substitute mother and to the partners’ mutual enjoyment. They also neglect Bowlby’s
emphasis on the role of social networks and on economic as well as health factors in the
development of well-functioning mother-child relationships. His call to society to provide support
for parents is still not heeded today:
Just as children are absolutely dependent on their parents for sustenance, so in all hut the
most primitive communities, are parents, especially their mothers, dependent on a greater
society for economic provision. If a community values its children it must cherish their
parents. (Bowlby, 1951, p. 84)
True to the era in which the WHO report was written, Bowlby emphasized the female parent. In
infancy, he comments, fathers have their uses, but normally play second fiddle to mother. Their
prime role is to provide emotional support to their wives’ mothering.
The proposition that, to thrive emotionally, children need a close and continuous caregiving relationship
called for a theoretical explanation. Bowlby was not satisfied with the then current psychoanalytic
view that love of mother derives from sensuous oral gratification, nor did he agree
with social learning theory’s claim that dependency is based on secondary reinforcement (a concept
that was itself derived from psychoanalytic ideas). Like Spitz (1946) and Erikson (1950),
Bowlby had latched onto the concept of critical periods in embryological development and was
casting about for similar phenomena at the behavioral level when, through a friend, he happened
upon an English translation of Konrad Lorenz’s (1935) paper on imprinting.
From then on, Bowlby began to mine ethology for useful new concepts. Lorenz’s (1935)
account of imprinting in geese and other precocial birds especially intrigued him, because it
suggested that social bond formation need not be tied to feeding. In addition, he favored
ethological methods of observing animals in their natural environment, because this approach was
so compatible with the methods Robertson had already developed at the Tavistock research unit.
One notable talent that stood Bowlby in great stead throughout his professional life was his
ability to draw to himself outstanding individuals who were willing and able to help him acquire
expertise in new fields of inquiry that he needed to master in the service of theory building To
learn more about ethology, Bowlby contacted Robert Hinde, under whose “generous and stern
guidance” (see Bowlby, 1980b, p. 650) he mastered ethological principles to help him find new
ways of thinking about infant mother attachment. Conversely, Hinde’s fascinating studies of
individual differences in separation and reunion behaviors of group-living rhesus mother infant
dyads (Hinde & Spencer-Booth, 1967) were inspired by the contact with Bowlby and his
co-workers (Hinde, 1991).
Bowlby’s first ethological paper appeared in 1953. Somewhat surprisingly, however,
various empirical papers on the effects of separation, published with his own research team during
the very same period, show little trace of Bowlby’s new thinking, because his colleagues were
unconvinced that ethology was relevant to the mother-child relationship (Bowlby, personal
communication, October 1986). Even Mary Ainsworth, though much enamored of ethology, was
somewhat wary of the direction Bowlby’s theorizing had begun to take. It was obvious to her,
she said, that a baby loves his mother because she satisfies his needs (Ainsworth, personal
communication, January 1992), A collaborative paper dating from this period (Bowlby,
Ainsworth, Boston, & Rosenbluth, 1956) is nevertheless important, because it prefigures later
work on patterns of attachment by Ainsworth. Her contribution to the paper was a system for
classifying three basic relationship patterns in school-age children who had been reunited with
parents after prolonged sanatorium stays: those with strong positive feelings toward their
mothers; those with markedly ambivalent relationships; and a third group with nonexpressive,
indifferent, or hostile relationships with mother.
In 1948, 2 years before Ainsworth’s arrival, Bowlby had hired James Robertson to help him
observe hospitalized and institutionalized children who were separated from their parents.
Robertson had had impeccable training in naturalistic observation, obtained as a conscientious
objector during World War II, when he was employed as a boilerman in Anna Freud’s Hampstead
residential nursery for homeless children. Anna Freud required that all members of the staff, no
matter what their training or background, write notes on cards about the children’s behavior
(Senn, l977a), which were then used as a basis for weekly group discussions. The thorough
training in child observation that Robertson thus obtained at the Hampstead residential nursery is
Anna Freud’s lasting personal contribution to the development of attachment theory.
After 2 years of collecting data on hospitalized children for Bowlby’s research projects,
Robertson protested that he could not continue as an uninvolved research worker, but felt compelled
to do something for the children he had been observing. On a shoestring budget, with minimal
training, a hand-held cinecamera, and no artificial lighting, he made the deeply moving film,
A Two-Year-Old Goes to Hospital (Robertson, 1 953a, 1953b; Robertson & Bowlby, 1952).
Foreseeing the potential impact of this film, Bowlby insisted that it be carefully planned to ensure
that no one would later he able to accuse Robertson of biased recording. The target child was
randomly selected, and the hospital clock on the wall served as proof that time sampling took
place at regular periods of the day. Together with Spitz’s (1947) film, Grief: A Peril in Infancy,
Robertson’s first film helped improve the fate of hospitalized children all over the Western
world, even though it was initially highly controversial among the medical establishment.
When Mary Ainsworth arrived at Bowlby’s research unit late in 1950, others working there
(besides James Robertson) were Mary Boston and Dina Rosenbluth. Rudolph Schaffer, whose
subsequent attachment research is well known (Schaffer & Emerson, 1964), joined the group
somewhat later, as did Christoph Heinicke (1956; Heinicke & Westheimer, 1966), who undertook
additional separation and reunion studies, and Tony Ambrose (1961), who was interested in
early social behavior. Mary Ainsworth, who was charged with analyzing James Robertson’s data,
was tremendously impressed with his records of children’s behavior and decided that she would
emulate his methods of naturalistic observation were she ever to undertake a study of her own
(Ainsworth, 1983).
At this time, Bowlby’s earlier writings about the familial experiences of affectionless
children had led Ronald Hargreaves of the World Health Organization (WHO) to commission him
to write a report on the mental health of homeless children in postwar Europe. Preparation of the
WHO report gave Bowlby an opportunity to pick the brains of many practitioners and researchers
across Europe and the United States who were concerned with the effects of maternal separation
and deprivation on young children, including Spitz (1946) and Goldfarb (1943, 1945). The report
was written in 6 months and translated into 14 languages, with sales of 400,000 copies in the
English paperback edition; it was published in 1951 as Maternal Care and Mental Health by the
WHO. A second edition, entitled Child Care and the Growth of Love, with review chapters by
Mary Ainsworth, was published by Penguin Books in 1965.
It is interesting to examine the 1951 report from today’s perspective. At that time Bowlby
still used the terminology of traditional psychoanalysis (love object, libidinal ties, ego, and
superego), hut his ideas were little short of heretical, Perhaps following Spitz, he used embryol
ogy as a metaphor to portray the maternal role in child development:
If growth is to proceed smoothly, the tissues must he exposed to the influence of the
appropriate organizer at certain critical periods. In the same way, ~f mental development is
to proceed smoothly, it would appear to he necessary for the undifferentiated psyche to be
exposed during certain critical periods to the influence of the psychic organizer- the mother.
(Bowlby, 1951, p. 53)
Then, seemingly doing away with the idea that the superego has its origin in the resolution of the
Oedipus complex, Bowlby claims that during the early years, while the child acquires the capacity
for self-regulation, the mother is a child’s ego and superego:
It is not surprising that during infancy and early childhood these functions are either not
operating at all or are doing so most imperfectly. During this phase of life, the child is
therefore dependent on his mother performing them for him. She orients him in space and
time, provides his environment, permits the satisfaction of some impulses, restricts others.
She is his ego and his super-ego. Gradually he learns these arts himself, and as he does, the
skilled parent transfers the roles to him. This is a slow, subtle and continuous process,
beginning when he first learns to walk and feed himself, and not ending completely until
maturity is reached. . . . Ego and super-ego development are thus inextricably hound up with
the child’s primary human relationships. (Bowlby, 1951, p. 53)
This sounds more Vygotskian than Freudian. Moreover, despite his disagreements with Kleinian
therapy, I detect remnants of Kleinian ideas in Bowlby’s discussions of children’s violent fantasies
on returning to parents after a prolonged separation and “the intense depression that humans
experience as a result of hating the person they most dearly love and need” (Bowlby, 1951, p.
57).
Bowlby’s major conclusion, grounded in the available empirical evidence, was that to grow
up mentally healthy, “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” (Bowlby, 1951, p. 13). Later summaries often overlook the reference
to the substitute mother and to the partners’ mutual enjoyment. They also neglect Bowlby’s
emphasis on the role of social networks and on economic as well as health factors in the
development of well-functioning mother-child relationships. His call to society to provide support
for parents is still not heeded today:
Just as children are absolutely dependent on their parents for sustenance, so in all hut the
most primitive communities, are parents, especially their mothers, dependent on a greater
society for economic provision. If a community values its children it must cherish their
parents. (Bowlby, 1951, p. 84)
True to the era in which the WHO report was written, Bowlby emphasized the female parent. In
infancy, he comments, fathers have their uses, but normally play second fiddle to mother. Their
prime role is to provide emotional support to their wives’ mothering.
The proposition that, to thrive emotionally, children need a close and continuous caregiving relationship
called for a theoretical explanation. Bowlby was not satisfied with the then current psychoanalytic
view that love of mother derives from sensuous oral gratification, nor did he agree
with social learning theory’s claim that dependency is based on secondary reinforcement (a concept
that was itself derived from psychoanalytic ideas). Like Spitz (1946) and Erikson (1950),
Bowlby had latched onto the concept of critical periods in embryological development and was
casting about for similar phenomena at the behavioral level when, through a friend, he happened
upon an English translation of Konrad Lorenz’s (1935) paper on imprinting.
From then on, Bowlby began to mine ethology for useful new concepts. Lorenz’s (1935)
account of imprinting in geese and other precocial birds especially intrigued him, because it
suggested that social bond formation need not be tied to feeding. In addition, he favored
ethological methods of observing animals in their natural environment, because this approach was
so compatible with the methods Robertson had already developed at the Tavistock research unit.
One notable talent that stood Bowlby in great stead throughout his professional life was his
ability to draw to himself outstanding individuals who were willing and able to help him acquire
expertise in new fields of inquiry that he needed to master in the service of theory building To
learn more about ethology, Bowlby contacted Robert Hinde, under whose “generous and stern
guidance” (see Bowlby, 1980b, p. 650) he mastered ethological principles to help him find new
ways of thinking about infant mother attachment. Conversely, Hinde’s fascinating studies of
individual differences in separation and reunion behaviors of group-living rhesus mother infant
dyads (Hinde & Spencer-Booth, 1967) were inspired by the contact with Bowlby and his
co-workers (Hinde, 1991).
Bowlby’s first ethological paper appeared in 1953. Somewhat surprisingly, however,
various empirical papers on the effects of separation, published with his own research team during
the very same period, show little trace of Bowlby’s new thinking, because his colleagues were
unconvinced that ethology was relevant to the mother-child relationship (Bowlby, personal
communication, October 1986). Even Mary Ainsworth, though much enamored of ethology, was
somewhat wary of the direction Bowlby’s theorizing had begun to take. It was obvious to her,
she said, that a baby loves his mother because she satisfies his needs (Ainsworth, personal
communication, January 1992), A collaborative paper dating from this period (Bowlby,
Ainsworth, Boston, & Rosenbluth, 1956) is nevertheless important, because it prefigures later
work on patterns of attachment by Ainsworth. Her contribution to the paper was a system for
classifying three basic relationship patterns in school-age children who had been reunited with
parents after prolonged sanatorium stays: those with strong positive feelings toward their
mothers; those with markedly ambivalent relationships; and a third group with nonexpressive,
indifferent, or hostile relationships with mother.
www.psychspace.com心理学空间网
