Bowlby and Harry Harlow on Attachment Behavior
Frank C. P. van der Horst1 , Helen A. LeRoy2 and René van der Veer1
(1) Centre for Child and Family Studies, Leiden University, P.O. Box 9555, NL-2300RB Leiden, The Netherlands
(2) Harlow Primate Laboratory, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, USA
Frank C. P. van der Horst
Email: fhorst@fsw.leidenuniv.nl
Received: 12 February 2008 Accepted: 21 August 2008 Published online: 3 September 2008
Abstract From 1957 through the mid-1970s, John Bowlby, one of the founders of attachment theory, was in close personal and scientific contact with Harry Harlow. In constructing his new theory on the nature of the bond between children and their caregivers, Bowlby profited highly from Harlow’s experimental work with rhesus monkeys. Harlow in his turn was influenced and inspired by Bowlby’s new thinking. On the basis of the correspondence between Harlow and Bowlby, their mutual participation in scientific meetings, archival materials, and an analysis of their scholarly writings, both the personal relationship between John Bowlby and Harry Harlow and the cross-fertilization of their work are described.
Keywords Attachment theory - Animal psychology - Ethology - Animal behavior - Infant–mother relations - History
Frank C.P. van der Horst is a PhD student and Lecturer at the Centre for Child and Family Studies at Leiden University, The Netherlands. The work presented in this special issue is part of his doctoral thesis on the roots of Bowlby’s attachment theory. The defence of this thesis, titled John Bowlby and ethology: a study of cross-fertilization, is scheduled for early 2009.
Helen A. LeRoy recently retired from the Harlow Primate Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison after working there for nearly half a century. During that time, she worked closely with Harry Harlow from her arrival in 1958 until his retirement in 1974. She was Harlow’s executive assistant and was his help and stay in the editing of the Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology.
René van der Veer is Professor of History of Educational Thinking at Leiden University, The Netherlands. His research addresses the work of key educational thinkers such as Gal’perin, Janet, Piaget, Vygotsky, Werner, and Wallon. In a longer study the origin of the idea of the social mind was traced. He is on the Editorial Board of Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Sciences.
Introduction
Today, one can pick up almost any introductory, general, or developmental psychology textbook (e.g., DeHart et al. 2004; Cole and Cole 2005) and find references to British child psychiatrist John Bowlby (1907–1990) and American animal psychologist Harry Harlow (1905–1981). Quite often their work is discussed in tandem. Bowlby was a clinician by training and Harlow an experimentalist. Despite these rather different backgrounds, the two men had several things in common. One of them was that they showed no hesitation in expressing views that went against the prevailing Zeitgeist. In the 1950s and 1960s, both Bowlby and Harlow formulated new ideas on the nature of the bond between child and caregiver. They defied the prevailing psychoanalytic and learning theoretical views that dominated psychological thinking from the 1930s. Although it has been argued (Singer 1975) that Harlow’s experimenting had no influence on Bowlby’s theorizing, here it will become clear that Bowlby used Harlow’s surrogate work with rhesus monkeys as much needed empirical support for his emerging theory of attachment in which he explained the nature and function of the affectional bonds between children and their caregivers (Bowlby 1958, 1969/1982). In his turn, Harlow was influenced by Bowlby’s thinking and tried to model his rhesus work to support Bowlby’s new theoretical framework (e.g., Seay et al. 1962; Seay and Harlow 1965).
The theories of Harlow and Bowlby are well-known but so far little was known about the personal and professional relationships between these two giants in the field. In this contribution, on the basis of the correspondence between Harlow and Bowlby1, their joint participation in scientific meetings, archival materials, and an analysis of their scholarly writings, an attempt is made to delineate the cross-fertilization of their work during the most active years of their acquaintance from 1957 through the mid-1970s. It will be demonstrated that Bowlby and Harlow’s interests converged as Harlow shifted his focus to a developmental approach shortly before the two met. Their introduction at a distance by British ethologist Robert Hinde was the beginning of an exchange of ideas that resulted in groundbreaking experimenting and theorizing that affects the field of developmental psychology to this day.