Life and Work of John Bowlby

Bowlby was born in London to an upper-middle-class family. He was the quaternaryth 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, premiere Baronet, was surgeon to the Kings Ho utilizehold, with a tragic history at age five, Sir Anthonys own father (Johns grandfather) was killed term serving as a war correspondent in the Opium Wars. Normally, Bowlby apothegm his bewilder only one hour a day ulterior on teatime, though during the summer she was more available.Like many other mothers of her companionable class, she considered that parental attention and affection would lead to dangerous spoiling of the children. Bowlby was friendly in that the nanny in his family was present throughout his childhood. 1 When Bowlby was al approximately four years old, his beloved nanny, who was echtly his basal caretaker in his early years, left wing the family. Later, he was to describe this as tragic as the los s of a mother. At the age of seven, he was sent off to boarding rail, as was common for boys of his amicable status. In his hold Separation fear and Anger, he revealed that he regarded it as a terrible time for him.He afterward said, I wouldnt send a dog away to boarding school at age seven. 2 Because of such experiences as a child, he displayed a sensitivity to childrens damage throughout his life. However, with his characteristic esteem to the personal effects of age differences, Bowlby did consider boarding schools appropriate for children aged viii and older, and wrote, If the child is maladjusted, it may be useful for him to be away for articulation of the year from the tensions which produced his difficulties, and if the root is bad in other ways the said(prenominal) 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 ordinary social pattern of most Weste rn communities today 1951, the child who goes to boarding-school will non feel different from other children. Moreover, by relieving the parents of the children for part of the year, it will be possible for well-nigh of them to develop more favorable 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 third Baronet. Bowlby died at his summer home on the Isle of Skye, Scotland. Career Bowlby studied psychology and pre-clinical scholarships at common chord College, Cambridge, winning prizes for outstanding intellectual performance. After Cambridge, he worked with maladjusted and bedraggled 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 even in medical school he enrolled himself in the Institute for Psychoanal ysis. chase medical school, he trained in adult psychiatry at the Maudsley Hospital. In 1937, aged 30, he qualified as a psychoanalyst. During worldity War II, he was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Royal force Medical Corps. After the war, he was Deputy Director of the Tavistock Clinic, and from 1950, Mental health Consultant to the piece health Organization. Because of his previous work with maladapted and delinquent children, he became interested in the k directlyledge of children and began work at the Child charge Clinic in London.This interest was probably increased by a physical organic structure of wartime events involving interval of childly children from known people these included the rescue of Judaic children by the Kindertransport arrangements, the evacuation of children from London to keep them safe from air raids, and the use of group nurseries to allow mothers of younker children to contribute to the war effort. 4 Bowlby was interested from the root of h is career in the problem of 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 body of observational and theoretical work to indicate the funda psychical importance for human festering of adjunct from birth. 2 Bowlby was interested in finding out the actual patterns of family interaction involved in both healthy and pathological development. He foc utilise on how adhesion difficulties were transmitted from one generation to the next. In his development of auxiliary possibleness he propounded the idea that accessory behaviour was essentially an evolutionary survival strategy for protecting the infant from predators.bloody shame Ainsworth, a student of Bowlbys, further extended and tested his ideas, and in feature played the primary role in suggesting that several attachment styles existed. The one-third most important experiences for Bowlbys future work and the development of attac hment conjecture were his work with Maladapted and delinquent children. James Robertson (in 1952) in making the documental film A Two- family Old Goes to the Hospital, which was one of the films rough 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 submissive in a campaign to alter hospital restrictions on tour 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 aphorism the childs distress as cause by elements of unconscious mind fantasies (in the film because the mother was pregnant).Melanie Klein during his psychoanalytic training. She was his supervisor however they had different views slightly the role of the mother in the treatment of a three-year-old boy. Specifically and importantly, Klein accented the role of the childs fantasies about his mother, but Bowlby emphasized the actual history of the relationship. Bowlbys viewsthat children were responding to actually 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 matriarchalistic de poverty main(prenominal) article motherlike deprivation In 1949, Bowlbys earlier work on delinquent and affectionless children and the effects of hospitalised and institutionalised care lead to his being commissioned to write the World Health Organizations report on the mental health of homeless children in post-war Europe. 5 The result was Maternal Care and Mental Health published in 1951. 6 Bowlby drew together such limited experiential demonstration as existed at the time from acro ss 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 fixed mother substitute) in which both find satisfaction and enjoyment and that not to do so may have significant and irreversible mental health consequences, were both controversial and influential. The 1951 WHO publication was highly influential in causing widespread 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 soil was controversial in many ways. He broke with psychoanalytic theories which saw infants internal life as being determined by fantasy rather than real life events. Some critics profoundly disagreed with the necessity for maternal (or equivalent) love in order to function normally,7 or that the formation of an incumbent relationship with a child was an important part of parenting. 8 Others questioned the extent to which his surmisal was supported by the evidence.There was criticism of the confusion of the effects of privation (no primary attachment embark) 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 resolves 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(a) servicemen. 9 In 1962 WHO published Deprivation of maternal care A revaluation of its Effects to which bloody shame Ainsworth, Bowlbys close colleague, contributed with his approval, to present the recent research and developments and to savoir-f aire 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 books on maternal deprivation lay in his emphasis that childrens experiences of interpersonal relationships were pivotal to their psychological development. 8 Development of attachment theory Bowlby himself explained in his 1988 work A Secure Base that the selective information 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 fresh one. He then went on to describe the subsequent development of attachment theory. 11Because he was dissatisfied with traditional theories, Bowlby sought new mind from such celestial spheres as evolutionary biology, ethology, developmental psychology, cognitive cognition and control sy stems theory and drew upon them to formulate the innovative proposition that the mechanisms underlying an infants tie emerged as a result of evolutionary pressure. 12 Bowlby realised that he had to develop a new theory of motivation and behaviour control, build on up-to-date science rather than the outdated psychic zippo model espoused by Freud. 5Bowlby expressed himself as having made 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 now known as huma n attachment behaviour. In particular, on the stern of ethological evidence he was able to reject the dominant Cupboard drive in theory of attachment prevailing in psychoanalysis and learning theory of the 1940s and 1950s.He also introduced the concepts of environmentally stable or labile human behaviour allowing for the revolutionary combination of the idea of a species- unique(predicate) communicable bias 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 phencyclidine-child relationship influenced ethological research, and godly students of animal behaviour such as Tinbergen, Hinde, and Harry Harlow.Bowlby spurred Hinde to start his prime breaking work on attachment and separation in order 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 suffer of ethology and attachment theory led to a genuine cross-fertilization ( vanguard 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, building on concepts from ethology and developmental psychology, were presented to the British Psychoanalytical Society in London in three now classic papers The reputation of the Childs Tie to His Mother (1958), Separation Anxiety (1959), and mourning 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 subsequent evidence place 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 revise in 1982 to incorporate recent research. According to attachment theory, attachment in infants is primarily a process of proximity assaying 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 reactive in social interactions with the infant, and who remain as 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 inter nal working models which will guide the individuals feelings, thoughts, and expectations in later relationships. 5 In Bowlbys approach, the human infant is considered to have a have for a secure relationship with adult caregivers, without which normal social and stirred up development will not occur. As the bambino grows, it uses its attachment figure or figures as a secure base from which to explore.Mary Ainsworth used this feature plus stranger wariness and reunion behaviours, other features of attachment behaviour, to develop a research tool called the Strange Situation social occasion for developing and classifying different attachment styles. The attachment process is not sex 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 use appears to be more influential than amount of time spent. 16 Darwin biography Bowlbys stretch forth work, published posthumously , is a biography of Charles Darwin, which discusses Darwins mysterious illness and whether it was psychosomatic. 17Bowlbys legacy Main article Attachment theory Although not without its critics, attachment theory has been depict 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 ruttish attachments to old(prenominal) caregivers, especially if the adults are sensitive and responsive to child communications. 2) The wound up attachments of young children are shown behaviourally in their preferences for particular familiar people, their tendency 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 emotional and personality development, and the type 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 negative impacts on the childs emotional and cognitive life.