John Bowlby
John Bowlby, 1907 to 1990, was a British psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who argued that a baby's drive to keep a responsive adult close is built in rather than learned. The reasoning was evolutionary: an infant cannot feed, warm or defend itself, so one that keeps an adult nearby survives better. That claim has held up. The reading built on top of it, that the bond formed in the first year sets how a person loves for life, is where the evidence thins.
Who they are
Bowlby trained analytically and broke with the prevailing account of why children bond to their mothers, which held that the bond was learned because the mother supplies food. He looked instead to ethology, the study of animal behaviour, and to the wartime and post-war evidence on children separated from their parents.
His argument reached its full statement in the trilogy Attachment and Loss: Attachment in 1969, revised in 1982, Separation in 1973 and Loss in 1980.
Two things about his position are worth getting right, because both are routinely misreported.
The first is monotropy. Bowlby held that a baby is biased toward one principal attachment figure, with others arranged beneath in a hierarchy, and that the principal bond is different in kind. He did not claim other bonds are absent, so describing him as believing attachment is all-or-nothing is a caricature. The ranking itself, though, was already awkward in 1964, when Schaffer and Emerson found most Glasgow babies attached to several people by eighteen months and only about one in eight to a single person.
The second is a fabricated quotation. The definition of attachment most often attributed to him in articles and study guides, given as page six of the first volume, is not on page six. That page concerns whether it is legitimate to borrow concepts from animal behaviour. The sentence does not appear in the book. It traces to a study-notes paraphrase that acquired a page number somewhere and has circulated as Bowlby ever since. It is a small thing and it is a useful reminder: a theory worth citing is worth opening.
Key papers
Key papers
His own output here is books rather than papers, and the trilogy is the statement of the theory: Attachment and Loss, Volume 1: Attachment (1969, second edition 1982), Volume 2: Separation (1973) and Volume 3: Loss (1980). Page six of the second edition of the first volume was checked directly, because the definition of attachment most widely attributed to that page is not on it and does not appear in the book.
The papers that matter here are the ones that tested him.
Schaffer, H. R., & Emerson, P. E. (1964). Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 29(3). The Glasgow study, and the earliest serious difficulty for monotropy. Most infants were attached to several people by eighteen months, and only about one in eight to a single person.
Ainsworth, M. D. S., Blehar, M. C., Waters, E., & Wall, S. (1978). Patterns of Attachment. Lawrence Erlbaum. The work that turned his theory into something measurable, and which everything later in this literature is built on or argues with.
Key ideas
The bond is built in, not bought with food. The contribution that survived everything else.
Monotropy, a hierarchy of attachment figures with one at the top. Not all-or-nothing, and not well supported by the early data either.
The internal working model, a representation of whether others will be available, carried forward. Plausible, influential, and the part the measurement evidence has since made hardest to test.
Concepts on this site
Sources
- Bowlby, J. (1969/1982). Attachment and Loss, Vol. 1: Attachment, 2nd edition. Basic Books. Page 6 checked directly against the second edition.
- Schaffer, H. R., & Emerson, P. E. (1964). Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 29(3).
- Ainsworth, M. D. S., Blehar, M. C., Waters, E., & Wall, S. (1978). Patterns of Attachment. Lawrence Erlbaum.