The Affectionless Character

What it is

The clinical picture is set out at page 31 of the report, drawn from a case of David Levy's: superficial relationships, no capacity to care for people or to make true friends, an inaccessibility that exasperates anyone trying to help, no emotional response where it is normal, deceit and evasion often to no purpose, stealing, and lack of concentration at school.

It rests on one study, Bowlby's own, and it is worth knowing how small that study is. Forty-Four Juvenile Thieves was published in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis in 1944 and reprinted as a pamphlet in 1946. Forty-four children seen at one London child guidance clinic who had been reported as stealing were compared with forty-four emotionally disturbed controls from the same clinic who had not. At Table IV, reproduced at page 33 of the report, fourteen of the forty-four thieves were classed by Bowlby as affectionless characters and none of the controls. Seventeen of the thieves had suffered complete and prolonged separation, of six months or more, from mother or established foster mother during the first five years, against two of the controls. The overlap between the affectionless group and the separated group is high, and that overlap is the finding the whole construct rests on. Table V at page 34 sets adverse heredity against the same groups and shows it does not do the work, which is the part of the study that has held up best. His conclusion, at page 34, was that prolonged separation of a child from mother or mother substitute during the first five years stands foremost among the causes of delinquent character development.

In effect

Three things are worth keeping even though the construct itself should be dropped.

First, it is what Bowlby was actually measuring. The 1951 report is not about attachment. Attachment as a construct arrives about twenty years later, and running the two together misdescribes both.

Second, the convergence is real even if the inference is not. At pages 30 to 32 the same clinical picture is described independently by David Levy in 1937, by Florence Powdermaker and colleagues in 1937, by Lawson Lowrey in 1940, by Lauretta Bender and Helen Yarnell in 1941 and by William Goldfarb through the 1940s, in wording so close that Bowlby remarks each might have written the others' papers. Something was being seen. What was causing it is the open question.

Third, the therapeutic pessimism attached to it, recorded as a claim of its time. At page 50 Bowlby quotes Bender to the effect that once the defect is created it cannot be corrected, and Goldfarb saying he had never seen even one example of significantly favourable response to treatment. Bowlby himself is more hopeful and says the Swedish regression experiments will take years to judge. Both halves belong together.

What it does not say

It does not carry a clean causal finding. It is a clinician's category, assigned by the same clinician who knew the separation histories, on forty-four children from one clinic, with no blinding of any kind. The circularity is not hidden and Bowlby does not claim otherwise: he calls his own work retrospective at page 32 and names the objection himself, that such studies see only the children who developed badly.

It does not survive the later revision intact. Michael Rutter separated what this construct ran together. Delinquency tracked family discord rather than separation as such, institutional harm came from several deprivations arriving at once, and separation, loss and never having had an attachment figure are three different circumstances with different outcomes. Maternal deprivation is now treated as a vulnerability factor among others rather than as a specific cause of a character type.

It does not support any judgement about a family. The construct was a mid-century clinical category applied retrospectively to children already in trouble, it has been superseded, and nothing here is a diagnosis, a prediction or a comment on how any household raises children.

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