www.psychspace.com心理学空间网THE FORMULATION OF ATTACHMENT THEORY AND THE
FIRST ATTACHMENT STUDY
Theoretical Formulations
Bowlby’s first formal statement of attachment theory, building on concepts from ethology
and developmental psychology, was presented to the British Psychoanalytic Society in London in
three now classic papers: “The Nature of the Child’s Tie to His Mother” (1958), “Separation
Anxiety” (1959), and “Grief and Mourning in Infancy and Early Childhood” (1960). By 1962
Bowlby had completed two further papers (never published; 1962 a and b) on defensive processes
related to mourning. These five papers represent the first basic blueprint of attachment theory.
The Nature of the Child’s Tie to His Mother
This paper reviews and then rejects those contemporary psychoanalytic explanations for the
child’s libidinal tie to the mother in which need satisfaction is seen as primary and attachment as
secondary or derived. Borrowing from Freud’s (1905/1953) notion that mature human sexuality
is built up of component instincts, Bowlby proposed that I 2-month-olds’ unmistakable attach
ment behavior is made up of a number of component instinctual responses that have the function
of binding the infant to the mother and the mother to the infant. These component responses
(among them sucking, clinging, and following, as well as the signaling behaviors of smiling and
crying) mature relatively independently during the first year of life and become increasingly
integrated and focused on a mother figure during the second 6 months. Bowlby saw clinging and
following as possibly more important for attachment than sucking and crying.
To buttress his arguments, Bowlby reviewed data from existing empirical studies of infants’
cognitive and social development, including those of Piaget (1951, 1954), with whose ideas he
had become acquainted during a series of meetings by the ‘Psychobiology of the Child” study
group, organized by the same Ronald I Hargreaves at the World Health Organization who had
commissioned Bowlby’s 1951 report. These informative meetings, also attended by Erik Erikson,
Julian Huxley, Baerbel Inhelder, Konrad Lorenz, Margaret Mead, and Ludwig von Bertalanffy,
took place between 1953 and 1956. (Proceedings were published by Tavistock Publications.) For
additional evidence, Bowlby drew on many years of experience as weekly facilitator of a support
group for young mothers in London.
After his careful discussion of infant development, Bowlby introduced ethological concepts,
such as sign stimuli or social releasers that “cause” specific responses to he activated and shut off
or terminated (see Tinbergen, 1951). These stimuli could he external or intrapsychic, an important
point in view of the fact that some psychoanalysts accused Bowlby of behaviorism because he
supposedly ignored mental phenomena. Bowlby also took great pains to draw a clear distinction
between the old social learning theory concept of dependency and the new concept of attachment,
noting that attachment is not indicative of regression, hut rather performs a natural, healthy
function even in adult life.
Bowlby’s new instinct theory raised quite a storm at the British Psychoanalytic Society.
Even Bowlby’s own analyst, Joan Riviere, protested. Anna Freud, who missed the meeting but
read the paper, politely wrote:
“Dr. Bowlby is too valuable a person to get lost to psychoanalysis” (Grosskurth, 1987).
Separation Anxiety
The second seminal paper (Bowlby, 1959) builds on observations by Robertson (1953b) and
Heinicke (1956; later elaborated as Heinicke & Westheimer, 1966), as well as on Harlow and
Zimmermann’s (1958) groundbreaking work on the effects of maternal deprivation in rhesus
monkeys. Traditional theory, Bowlby claims, can explain neither the intense attachment of infants
and young children to a mother figure nor their dramatic responses to separation.
Robertson (Robertson & Bowlby, 1952) had identified three phases of separation response:
protest (related to separation anxiety), despair (related to grief and mourning), and denial or
detachment (related to defence mechanisms, especially repression). Again drawing on ethological
concepts regarding the control of behavior, Bowlby maintained that infants and children experience
separation anxiety when a situation activates both escape and attachment behavior hut an
attachment figure is not available.
The following quote explains, in part, why some psychoanalytic colleagues called Bowlby a
behaviorist: “for to have a deep attachment for a person (or a place or thing) is to have taken
them as the terminating object of our instinctual responses” (Bowlby, 1959, p. 13). The oddity of
this statement derives from mixing, in the same sentence, experiential language (to have a deep
attachment) with explanatory language representing an external observer’s point of view (the
attachment figure as the terminating object).
In this paper, Bowlby also took issue with Freud’s claim that maternal overgratification is a
danger in infancy. Freud failed to realize, says Bowlby, that maternal pseudo-affection and
overprotection may derive from a mother’s overcompensation for unconscious hostility. In
Bowlby’s view, excessive separation anxiety is due to adverse family experiences-such as
repeated threats of abandonment or rejection by parents-or to a parent’s or sibling’s illness or
death for which the child feels responsible.
Bowlby also pointed out that, in some cases, separation anxiety can be excessively low or be
altogether absent, giving an erroneous impression of maturity. He attributes pseudo-
independence under these conditions to defensive processes. A well-loved child, he claims, is
quite likely to protest separation from parents but will later develop more self-reliance, These
ideas reemerged later in Ainsworth’s classifications of ambivalent, avoidant, and secure patterns
of infant-mother attachment (Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, & Wall, 1978).
Grief and Mourning in Infancy and Early Childhood
In the third, most controversial paper, Bowlby (1960) questioned Anna Freud’s contention
that bereaved infants cannot mourn because of insufficient ego development and therefore
experience nothing more than brief bouts of separation anxiety if an adequate substitute caregiver
is available. In contrast, Bowlby (citing Marris, 1958) claimed that grief and mourning processes
in children and adults appear whenever attachment behaviors are activated but the attachment
figure continues to he unavailable. He also suggested that an inability to form deep relationships
with others may result when the succession of substitutes is too frequent.
As with the first paper, this paper also drew strong objections from many members of the
British Psychoanalytic Society. One analyst is said to have exclaimed: “Bowlby? Give me
Barrabas” (Grosskurth, 1987). Controversy also accompanied the published version of this paper
in The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child. Unbeknownst to Bowlby, rejoinders had been invited
from Anna Freud (1960), Max Schur (1960), and René Spitz (1960), all of whom protested
various aspects of Bowlby’s revision of Freudian theory. Spitz ended his rejoinder by saying:
When submitting new theories we should not violate the principle of parsimony in science by
offering hypotheses which in contrast to existing theory becloud the observational facts, are
oversimplified, and make no contribution to the better understanding of observed phenomena.
(p. 93)
Despite this concerted attack, Bowlby remained a member of the British Psychoanalytic Society
for the rest of his life, although he never again used it as a forum for discussing his ideas. At a
meeting of the society in memory of John Bowlby, Eric Rayner (1991) expressed his regret at this
turn of events:
What seems wrong is when a theorist extols his own view by rubbishing others; Bowlby
received this treatment. . . . Our therapeutic frame of mind is altered by theory. John Bowlby
was a great alterer of frames of mind.
Bowlby’s controversial paper on mourning attracted the attention of Colin Parkes, now well
known for his research on adult bereavement. Parkes saw the relevance of Bowlby’s and Robertson’s
work on mourning in infancy and childhood for gaining insight into the process of adult
grief. On joining Bowlby’s research unit at the Tavistock Institute in 1962, Parkes set out to
study a nonclinical group of widows in their homes to chart the course of nominal adult grief,
about which little was known at the time, The findings led to a joint paper with Bowlby (Bowlby
& Parkes, 1970) in which the phases of separation response delineated by Robertson for young
children were elaborated into four phases of grief during adult life: (a) numbness, (h) yearning
and protest, (c) disorganization and despair, and (d) reorganization (see also Parkes, 1972).
Before the publication of the 1970 paper, Parkes had visited Elizabeth Kubler-Ross in
Chicago, who was then gathering data for her influential book On Death and Dying (1978). The
phases of dying described in her book (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance) owe
much to Bowlby’s and Robertson’s thinking. Bowlby also introduced Parkes to the founder of the
modern hospice movement, Cicely Saunders. Saunders and Parkes used attachment theory and
research in developing programs for the emotional care of the dying and bereaved, What they
found particularly helpful in countering negative attitudes to the dying and bereaved was the
concept of grief as a process toward attaining a new identity, rather than as a state (Parkes,
personal communication, November 1989).
The First Empirical Study of Attachment: Infancy in Uganda
Let us now return to Mary Ainsworth’s work. In late 1953, she had left the Tavistock
Clinic, obviously quite familiar with Bowlby’s thinking about ethology hut not convinced of its
value for understanding infant- mother attachment. The Ainsworths were headed for Uganda,
where Leonard Ainsworth had obtained a position at the East African Institute of Social Research
at Kampala. With help from the same institute, Mary Ainsworth was able to scrape together funds
for an observational study, but not before writing Bowlby a letter in which she called for empirical
validation of his ethological notions (Ainsworth, January 1992, personal communication),
Inspired by her analyses of Robertson’s data, Ainsworth had initially planned an investigation
of toddlers’ separation responses during weaning, but it soon became obvious that the old
tradition of sending the child away “to forget the breast” had broken down. She therefore decided
to switch gears and observe the development of infant-mother attachment.
As soon as she began her data collection, Ainsworth was struck by the pertinence of
Bowlby’s ideas, Hence, the first study of infant-mother attachment from an ethological perspective
was undertaken several years before the publication of the three seminal papers in which
Bowlby (1958, 1959, 1960) laid out attachment theory.
Ainsworth recruited 26 families with unweaned babies (ages 1 - 24 months) whom she
observed every 2 weeks for 2 hours per visit over a period of up to 9 months. Visits (with an
interpreter) took place in the family living room, where Ganda women generally entertain in the
afternoon. Ainsworth was particularly interested in determining the onset of proximity-promoting
signals and behaviors, noting carefully when these signals and behaviors became preferentially
directed toward the mother.
On leaving Uganda in 1955, the Ainsworths moved to Baltimore, where Mary Ainsworth
began work as a diagnostician and part-time clinician at the Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital,
further consolidating her already considerable assessment skills. At the same time, she taught
clinical and developmental courses at the Johns Hopkins University, where she was initially hired
as a lecturer. Because of her involvement in diagnostic work and teaching, the data from the
Ganda project lay fallow for several years.
FIRST ATTACHMENT STUDY
Theoretical Formulations
Bowlby’s first formal statement of attachment theory, building on concepts from ethology
and developmental psychology, was presented to the British Psychoanalytic Society in London in
three now classic papers: “The Nature of the Child’s Tie to His Mother” (1958), “Separation
Anxiety” (1959), and “Grief and Mourning in Infancy and Early Childhood” (1960). By 1962
Bowlby had completed two further papers (never published; 1962 a and b) on defensive processes
related to mourning. These five papers represent the first basic blueprint of attachment theory.
The Nature of the Child’s Tie to His Mother
This paper reviews and then rejects those contemporary psychoanalytic explanations for the
child’s libidinal tie to the mother in which need satisfaction is seen as primary and attachment as
secondary or derived. Borrowing from Freud’s (1905/1953) notion that mature human sexuality
is built up of component instincts, Bowlby proposed that I 2-month-olds’ unmistakable attach
ment behavior is made up of a number of component instinctual responses that have the function
of binding the infant to the mother and the mother to the infant. These component responses
(among them sucking, clinging, and following, as well as the signaling behaviors of smiling and
crying) mature relatively independently during the first year of life and become increasingly
integrated and focused on a mother figure during the second 6 months. Bowlby saw clinging and
following as possibly more important for attachment than sucking and crying.
To buttress his arguments, Bowlby reviewed data from existing empirical studies of infants’
cognitive and social development, including those of Piaget (1951, 1954), with whose ideas he
had become acquainted during a series of meetings by the ‘Psychobiology of the Child” study
group, organized by the same Ronald I Hargreaves at the World Health Organization who had
commissioned Bowlby’s 1951 report. These informative meetings, also attended by Erik Erikson,
Julian Huxley, Baerbel Inhelder, Konrad Lorenz, Margaret Mead, and Ludwig von Bertalanffy,
took place between 1953 and 1956. (Proceedings were published by Tavistock Publications.) For
additional evidence, Bowlby drew on many years of experience as weekly facilitator of a support
group for young mothers in London.
After his careful discussion of infant development, Bowlby introduced ethological concepts,
such as sign stimuli or social releasers that “cause” specific responses to he activated and shut off
or terminated (see Tinbergen, 1951). These stimuli could he external or intrapsychic, an important
point in view of the fact that some psychoanalysts accused Bowlby of behaviorism because he
supposedly ignored mental phenomena. Bowlby also took great pains to draw a clear distinction
between the old social learning theory concept of dependency and the new concept of attachment,
noting that attachment is not indicative of regression, hut rather performs a natural, healthy
function even in adult life.
Bowlby’s new instinct theory raised quite a storm at the British Psychoanalytic Society.
Even Bowlby’s own analyst, Joan Riviere, protested. Anna Freud, who missed the meeting but
read the paper, politely wrote:
“Dr. Bowlby is too valuable a person to get lost to psychoanalysis” (Grosskurth, 1987).
Separation Anxiety
The second seminal paper (Bowlby, 1959) builds on observations by Robertson (1953b) and
Heinicke (1956; later elaborated as Heinicke & Westheimer, 1966), as well as on Harlow and
Zimmermann’s (1958) groundbreaking work on the effects of maternal deprivation in rhesus
monkeys. Traditional theory, Bowlby claims, can explain neither the intense attachment of infants
and young children to a mother figure nor their dramatic responses to separation.
Robertson (Robertson & Bowlby, 1952) had identified three phases of separation response:
protest (related to separation anxiety), despair (related to grief and mourning), and denial or
detachment (related to defence mechanisms, especially repression). Again drawing on ethological
concepts regarding the control of behavior, Bowlby maintained that infants and children experience
separation anxiety when a situation activates both escape and attachment behavior hut an
attachment figure is not available.
The following quote explains, in part, why some psychoanalytic colleagues called Bowlby a
behaviorist: “for to have a deep attachment for a person (or a place or thing) is to have taken
them as the terminating object of our instinctual responses” (Bowlby, 1959, p. 13). The oddity of
this statement derives from mixing, in the same sentence, experiential language (to have a deep
attachment) with explanatory language representing an external observer’s point of view (the
attachment figure as the terminating object).
In this paper, Bowlby also took issue with Freud’s claim that maternal overgratification is a
danger in infancy. Freud failed to realize, says Bowlby, that maternal pseudo-affection and
overprotection may derive from a mother’s overcompensation for unconscious hostility. In
Bowlby’s view, excessive separation anxiety is due to adverse family experiences-such as
repeated threats of abandonment or rejection by parents-or to a parent’s or sibling’s illness or
death for which the child feels responsible.
Bowlby also pointed out that, in some cases, separation anxiety can be excessively low or be
altogether absent, giving an erroneous impression of maturity. He attributes pseudo-
independence under these conditions to defensive processes. A well-loved child, he claims, is
quite likely to protest separation from parents but will later develop more self-reliance, These
ideas reemerged later in Ainsworth’s classifications of ambivalent, avoidant, and secure patterns
of infant-mother attachment (Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, & Wall, 1978).
Grief and Mourning in Infancy and Early Childhood
In the third, most controversial paper, Bowlby (1960) questioned Anna Freud’s contention
that bereaved infants cannot mourn because of insufficient ego development and therefore
experience nothing more than brief bouts of separation anxiety if an adequate substitute caregiver
is available. In contrast, Bowlby (citing Marris, 1958) claimed that grief and mourning processes
in children and adults appear whenever attachment behaviors are activated but the attachment
figure continues to he unavailable. He also suggested that an inability to form deep relationships
with others may result when the succession of substitutes is too frequent.
As with the first paper, this paper also drew strong objections from many members of the
British Psychoanalytic Society. One analyst is said to have exclaimed: “Bowlby? Give me
Barrabas” (Grosskurth, 1987). Controversy also accompanied the published version of this paper
in The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child. Unbeknownst to Bowlby, rejoinders had been invited
from Anna Freud (1960), Max Schur (1960), and René Spitz (1960), all of whom protested
various aspects of Bowlby’s revision of Freudian theory. Spitz ended his rejoinder by saying:
When submitting new theories we should not violate the principle of parsimony in science by
offering hypotheses which in contrast to existing theory becloud the observational facts, are
oversimplified, and make no contribution to the better understanding of observed phenomena.
(p. 93)
Despite this concerted attack, Bowlby remained a member of the British Psychoanalytic Society
for the rest of his life, although he never again used it as a forum for discussing his ideas. At a
meeting of the society in memory of John Bowlby, Eric Rayner (1991) expressed his regret at this
turn of events:
What seems wrong is when a theorist extols his own view by rubbishing others; Bowlby
received this treatment. . . . Our therapeutic frame of mind is altered by theory. John Bowlby
was a great alterer of frames of mind.
Bowlby’s controversial paper on mourning attracted the attention of Colin Parkes, now well
known for his research on adult bereavement. Parkes saw the relevance of Bowlby’s and Robertson’s
work on mourning in infancy and childhood for gaining insight into the process of adult
grief. On joining Bowlby’s research unit at the Tavistock Institute in 1962, Parkes set out to
study a nonclinical group of widows in their homes to chart the course of nominal adult grief,
about which little was known at the time, The findings led to a joint paper with Bowlby (Bowlby
& Parkes, 1970) in which the phases of separation response delineated by Robertson for young
children were elaborated into four phases of grief during adult life: (a) numbness, (h) yearning
and protest, (c) disorganization and despair, and (d) reorganization (see also Parkes, 1972).
Before the publication of the 1970 paper, Parkes had visited Elizabeth Kubler-Ross in
Chicago, who was then gathering data for her influential book On Death and Dying (1978). The
phases of dying described in her book (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance) owe
much to Bowlby’s and Robertson’s thinking. Bowlby also introduced Parkes to the founder of the
modern hospice movement, Cicely Saunders. Saunders and Parkes used attachment theory and
research in developing programs for the emotional care of the dying and bereaved, What they
found particularly helpful in countering negative attitudes to the dying and bereaved was the
concept of grief as a process toward attaining a new identity, rather than as a state (Parkes,
personal communication, November 1989).
The First Empirical Study of Attachment: Infancy in Uganda
Let us now return to Mary Ainsworth’s work. In late 1953, she had left the Tavistock
Clinic, obviously quite familiar with Bowlby’s thinking about ethology hut not convinced of its
value for understanding infant- mother attachment. The Ainsworths were headed for Uganda,
where Leonard Ainsworth had obtained a position at the East African Institute of Social Research
at Kampala. With help from the same institute, Mary Ainsworth was able to scrape together funds
for an observational study, but not before writing Bowlby a letter in which she called for empirical
validation of his ethological notions (Ainsworth, January 1992, personal communication),
Inspired by her analyses of Robertson’s data, Ainsworth had initially planned an investigation
of toddlers’ separation responses during weaning, but it soon became obvious that the old
tradition of sending the child away “to forget the breast” had broken down. She therefore decided
to switch gears and observe the development of infant-mother attachment.
As soon as she began her data collection, Ainsworth was struck by the pertinence of
Bowlby’s ideas, Hence, the first study of infant-mother attachment from an ethological perspective
was undertaken several years before the publication of the three seminal papers in which
Bowlby (1958, 1959, 1960) laid out attachment theory.
Ainsworth recruited 26 families with unweaned babies (ages 1 - 24 months) whom she
observed every 2 weeks for 2 hours per visit over a period of up to 9 months. Visits (with an
interpreter) took place in the family living room, where Ganda women generally entertain in the
afternoon. Ainsworth was particularly interested in determining the onset of proximity-promoting
signals and behaviors, noting carefully when these signals and behaviors became preferentially
directed toward the mother.
On leaving Uganda in 1955, the Ainsworths moved to Baltimore, where Mary Ainsworth
began work as a diagnostician and part-time clinician at the Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital,
further consolidating her already considerable assessment skills. At the same time, she taught
clinical and developmental courses at the Johns Hopkins University, where she was initially hired
as a lecturer. Because of her involvement in diagnostic work and teaching, the data from the
Ganda project lay fallow for several years.
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