Life and Work of John Bowlby

Bowlby was born in London to an upper-middle-class family. He was the fourth of six children and was brought up by a nanny in the British fashion of his class at that time. His father, Sir Anthony Bowlby, first Baronet, was surgeon to the Kings Household, with a tragic history at eld five, Sir Anthonys own father (Johns grandfather) was killed while serving as a war correspondent in the Opium Wars. Normally, Bowlby saw his mother only one hour a twenty-four hours after teatime, though during the summertime she was more available.Like m whatever other mothers of her accessible class, she considered that p arental charge and affection would lead to dangerous spoiling of the children. Bowlby was lucky in that the nanny in his family was pre displace throughout his childhood. 1 When Bowlby was almost four years old, his beloved nanny, who was actually his primary caretaker in his early years, left the family. Later, he was to describe this as tragic as the loss of a mother. At the ag e of seven, he was sent off to embarkment school, as was common for boys of his social status. In his work Separation Anxiety and Anger, he revealed that he regarded it as a terrible time for him.He later said, I wouldnt send a dog away to boarding school at age seven. 2 Because of such experiences as a child, he dis compete a sensitivity to childrens suffering throughout his life. However, with his characteristic attentiveness to the effects of age differences, Bowlby did consider boarding schools appropriate for children aged eight and older, and wrote, If the child is maladjusted, it may be useful for him to be away for part of the year from the tensions which produced his difficulties, and if the home is bad in other ways the same is true.The boarding school has the advantage of preserving the childs all-important home ties, even if in slightly attenuated form, and, since it forms part of the unexceptional social pattern of most Western communities today 1951, the child who goe s to boarding-school go forth not feel dissimilar from other children. Moreover, by relieving the parents of the children for part of the year, it will be possible for some of them to develop more brotherly attitudes toward their children during the remainder. 3He married Ursula Longstaff, herself the daughter of a surgeon, on April 16, 1938, and they had four children, including (Sir) Richard Bowlby, who succeeded his uncle as trio Baronet. Bowlby died at his summer home on the Isle of Skye, Scotland. Career Bowlby studied psychology and pre-clinical sciences at Trinity College, Cambridge, winning prizes for owing(p) intellectual performance. After Cambridge, he worked with maladjusted and flea-bitten children, then at the age of twenty-two enrolled at University College Hospital in London. At the age of twenty-six, he qualified in medicine.While still in medical school he enrolled himself in the Institute for Psychoanalysis. Following medical school, he trained in adult psyc hiatry at the Maudsley Hospital. In 1937, aged 30, he qualified as a psychoanalyst. During creation War II, he was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Royal Army Medical Corps. After the war, he was Deputy Director of the Tavistock Clinic, and from 1950, Mental Health Consultant to the World Health administration. Because of his previous work with maladapted and delinquent children, he became chaseed in the development of children and began work at the Child Guidance Clinic in London.This matter to was probably increased by a variety of wartime events involving detachment of childly children from familiar people these include the rescue of Jewish children by the Kindertransport arrangements, the evacuation of children from London to keep them safe from air raids, and the use of conference nurseries to allow mothers of young children to contri hardlye to the war effort. 4 Bowlby was elicit from the beginning of his career in the problem of judicial separation and the wartime work of Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham on evacuees and Rene Spitz on orphans.By the late 1950s he had accumulated a automobile trunk of observational and theoretical work to indicate the fundamental importance for human development of extension from birth. 2 Bowlby was interested in finding out the actual patterns of family interaction involved in twain healthy and pathological development. He focused on how shackle difficulties were transmitted from one generation to the next. In his development of attachment guess he propounded the idea that attachment behaviour was essentially an evolutionary survival strategy for defend the sister from predators.Mary Ainsworth, a student of Bowlbys, further extended and tested his ideas, and in fact played the primary role in suggesting that several attachment styles existed. The three most important experiences for Bowlbys early work and the development of attachment supposition were his work with Maladapted and delinquent children. James Robertson (in 1952) in making the documentary carry film A Two-Year Old Goes to the Hospital, which was one of the films about young children in brief separation.The documentary illustrated the impact of loss and suffering experienced by young children separated from their primary caretakers. This film was instrumental in a campaign to alter hospital restrictions on visiting by parents. In 1952 when he and Robertson presented their film A Two Year Old Goes to Hospital to the British Psychoanalytical Society, psychoanalysts did not accept that a child would mourn or experience grief on separation but instead saw the childs distress as caused by elements of unconscious mind fantasies (in the film because the mother was pregnant).Melanie Klein during his psychoanalytic training. She was his supervisory program however they had different views about the role of the mother in the treatment of a three-year-old boy. Specifically and importantly, Klein tonic the role of the childs fant asies about his mother, but Bowlby emphasized the actual history of the relationship. Bowlbys viewsthat children were responding to real life events and not unconscious fantasieswere rejected by psychoanalysts, and Bowlby was effectively ostracized by the psychoanalytic community.He later expressed the view that his interest in real-life experiences and situations was alien to the Kleinian outlook. 2 matriarchal deprivation chief(prenominal) article Maternal deprivation In 1949, Bowlbys earlier work on delinquent and affectionless children and the effects of hospitalised and institutionalised care lead to his being fit out to write the World Health Organizations report on the mental health of homeless children in post-war Europe. 5 The outlet was Maternal Care and Mental Health published in 1951. 6 Bowlby force together such expressage empirical evidence as existed at the time from across Europe and the USA.His main conclusions, that 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 and that not to do so may hire momentous and permanent mental health consequences, were both controversial and influential. The 1951 WHO publication was highly influential in causing far-flung changes in the practices and prevalence of institutional care for infants and children, and in changing practices relating to the visiting of infants and small children n hospitals by parents.The theoretical basis was controversial in many ways. He broke with psychoanalytic theories which saw infants interior life as being determined by fantasy rather than real life events. near critics profoundly disagreed with the necessity for paternal (or equivalent) love in order to function dominionly,7 or that the formation of an on-going relationship with a child was an important part of parenting. 8 Others questioned the extent to which his hypothesis w as supported by the evidence. on that point was criticism of the confusion of the effects of privation (no primary attachment work) and deprivation (loss of the primary attachment figure) and in particular, a failure to distinguish between the effects of the lack of a primary attachment figure and the other forms of deprivation and understimulation that may affect children in institutions. 9 The monograph was also used for political places to claim any separation from the mother was deleterious in order to discourage women from working and leaving their children in daycare by governments concerned about maximising employment for returned and returning servicemen. 9 In 1962 WHO published Deprivation of maternal care A Reassessment of its Effects to which Mary Ainsworth, Bowlbys close colleague, contributed with his approval, to present the recent research and developments and to citation misapprehensions. 10This publication also attempted to address the previous lack of evidence on the effects of paternal deprivation. According to Rutter the importance of Bowlbys initial writings on maternal deprivation lay in his emphasis that childrens experiences of social relationships were crucial to their psychological development. 8 Development of attachment possibility Bowlby himself explained in his 1988 work A Secure place that the data were not, at the time of the publication of Maternal Care and Mental Health, accommodated by any theory then current and in the brief time of my employment by the World Health Organization there was no possibility of developing a new one. He then went on to describe the subsequent development of attachment theory. 11Because he was dissatisfied with traditional theories, Bowlby sought new catch from such subject fields as evolutionary biology, ethology, developmental psychology, cognitive science and control systems theory and drew upon them to formulate the innovative proposition that the mechanisms underlying an infants tie em erged as a result of evolutionary pressure. 12 Bowlby take in that he had to develop a new theory of motivation and behaviour control, built on up-to-date science rather than the outdated psychic energy model espoused by Freud. 5Bowlby expressed himself as having do good the deficiencies of the data and the lack of theory to link alleged cause and effect in Maternal Care and Mental Health in his later work Attachment and Loss published in 1969. 13 Ethology and evolutionary concepts From the 1950s Bowlby was in personal and scientific contact with leading European scientists in the field of ethology, namely Niko Tinbergen, Konrad Lorenz, and especially the rising star of ethology Robert Hinde.Using the viewpoints of this emerging science and reading extensively in the ethology literature, Bowlby developed new explanatory hypotheses for what is in a flash known as human attachment behaviour. In particular, on the basis of ethological evidence he was able to reject the dominant Cup board Love theory of attachment prevailing in psychoanalysis and learning theory of the 1940s and 1950s.He also introduced the concepts of environmentally inactive or labile human behaviour allowing for the revolutionary combination of the idea of a species-specific genetic mold to become attached and the concept of individual differences in attachment security as environmentally labile strategies for adaptation to a specific childrearing niche. Alternately, Bowlbys thinking about the nature and function of the caregiver-child relationship influenced ethological research, and stimulate students of animal behaviour such as Tinbergen, Hinde, and Harry Harlow.Bowlby spurred Hinde to start his ground breaking work on attachment and separation in primates (monkeys and humans), and in general emphasized the importance of evolutionary thinking about human development that foreshadowed the new interdisciplinary approach of evolutionary psychology. Obviously, the encounter of ethology an d attachment theory led to a genuine cross-fertilization (Van der Horst, Van der Veer & Van IJzendoorn, 2007, p. 321). 1415 The Attachment and Loss trilogy Main articles Attachment theory and Attachment in childrenBefore the publication of the trilogy in 1969, 1972 and 1980, the main tenets of attachment theory, construction on concepts from ethology and developmental psychology, were presented to the British Psychoanalytical Society in London in three now classic papers The Nature of the Childs Tie to His Mother (1958), Separation Anxiety (1959), and heartache and Mourning in Infancy and Early Childhood (1960). Bowlby rejected psychoanalyst explanations for attachment, and in return, psychoanalysts rejected his theory.At about the same time, Bowlbys former colleague, Mary Ainsworth was completing extensive observational studies on the nature of infant attachments in Uganda with Bowlbys ethological theories in mind. Her results in this and other studies contributed greatly to the s ubsequent evidence base of attachment theory as presented in 1969 in Attachment the first volume of the Attachment and Loss trilogy. 16 The second and third volumes, Separation Anxiety and Anger and Loss Sadness and Depression followed in 1972 and 1980 respectively.Attachment was revised in 1982 to incorporate recent research. According to attachment theory, attachment in infants is primarily a process of law of proximity seeking to an identified attachment figure in situations of perceived distress or alarm for the purpose of survival. Infants become attached to adults who are sensitive and responsive in social interactions with the infant, and who remain as self-consistent caregivers for some months during the period from about 6 months to two years of age.Parental responses lead to the development of patterns of attachment which in turn lead to internal working models which will guide the individuals feelings, thoughts, and expectations in later relationships. 5 In Bowlbys appr oach, the human infant is considered to have a need for a secure relationship with adult caregivers, without which normal social and emotional development will not occur. As the toddler grows, it uses its attachment figure or figures as a secure base from which to explore.Mary Ainsworth used this feature plus stranger direction and reunion behaviours, other features of attachment behaviour, to develop a research tool called the Strange Situation surgical process for developing and classifying different attachment styles. The attachment process is not gender specific as infants will form attachments to any consistent caregiver who is sensitive and responsive in social interactions with the infant. The quality of the social engagement appears to be more influential than amount of time spent. 16 Darwin biography Bowlbys last work, published posthumously, is a biography of Charles Darwin, which discusses Darwins mysterious illness and whether it was psychosomatic. 17Bowlbys legacy Mai n article Attachment theory Although not without its critics, attachment theory has been described as the dominant approach to understanding early social development and to have given rise to a great surge of empirical research into the formation of childrens close relationships. 18 As it is presently formulated and used for research purposes, Bowlbys attachment theory stresses the following important tenets19 1) Children between 6 and about 30 months are very likely to form emotional attachments to familiar caregivers, especially if the adults are sensitive and responsive to child communications. 2) The emotional attachments of young children are shown behaviourally in their preferences for particular familiar people, their disposal to seek proximity to those people, especially in times of distress, and their ability to use the familiar adults as a secure base from which to explore the environment. )The formation of emotional attachments contributes to the foundation of later emot ional and personality development, and the flake of behaviour toward familiar adults shown by toddlers has some continuity with the social behaviours they will show later in life. 4) Events that interfere with attachment, such as abrupt separation of the toddler from familiar people or the significant inability of carers to be sensitive, responsive or consistent in their interactions, have short-term and possible long-run negative impacts on the childs emotional and cognitive life.