The following sections, on attachment theory, draw upon a review by Bretherton (1992). As noted in Chapter 3, readers are also referred to Susan Goldberg's (2000) book Attachment and Development. John Bowlby (1907-91), one of the originators of attachment theory, studied medicine and psychiatry, and also trained at the London Child Guidance Clinic and the British Psychoanalytic Institute. He disagreed with Klein's approach to child psychopathology, which emphasized internal conflict rather than external influences as the source of children's emotional problems. The later object relations theorists, such as Winnicott, were more in accord with Bowlby's views of the importance of early family relationships, although Bowlby preferred the term 'affectional bonds' to 'object relations' (Bowlby,
1975: 15) (Box 5.1).
Box 5.1 Did Bowlby's ideas anticipate Vygotskian theory?
As we discuss in Chapter 7, the Soviet psychologist Vygotsky and later workers such as Bruner maintained that children develop through interaction with more capable individuals, who gradually withdraw support for activities as the child becomes independently capable of them. Vygotsky's work had not been translated into English at the time Bowlby wrote the following passage. While the language is Freudian, the notion is distinctly Vygotskian (Bretherton,
1992).
It is not surprising that during infancy and early childhood these functions are either not operating at all or are doing so most imperfectly. During this phase of life, the child is therefore dependent on his mother performing them for him. She orients him in space and time, provides his environment, permits the satisfaction of some impulses, restricts others. She is his ego and his super-ego. Gradually he learns these arts himself, and as he does, the skilled parent transfers the roles to him. This is a slow, subtle and continuous process, beginning when he first learns to walk and feed himself, and not ending completely until maturity is reached. ... Ego and super-ego development are thus inextricably bound up with the child's primary human relationships.
(Bowlby, 1951, cited in Bretherton, 1992: 761)
Bowlby's interest in the importance of early attachment and loss devel- oped originally from a couple of specific cases of children with emotional problems who had experienced early maternal loss (one of these used to follow him around the clinic and was known as his shadow). Later, he analysed over 40 case studies, concluding that the children's problems (including thieving) resulted from maternal deprivation. During the 1940s he began to put this area of research on a more scientific footing when he developed some expertise in statistical analyses, which enabled him to add some numerical support to his case study approach. After the Second World War he became director of London's Tavistock Clinic's Children's Department. Significantly, he renamed it as the Department for Children and Parents and, in 1949, wrote a paper on a form of family therapy he had devised.
Bowlby was commissioned by the World Health Organization (WHO) to write a report on children displaced by the war, which appeared in 1951, and a later version of this report appeared as the well-known book Child Care and the Growth of Love in 1953. It is interesting to observe that in Bowlby's WHO report, a Freudian influence is obvious in the language used, but certainly not in the concepts expounded (Bretherton, 1992). His basic tenet was that healthy mental development of the young child was dependent upon an ongoing warm, intimate relationship with the mother (or permanent mother substitute). The mother acts as the child's ego and superego, the child gradually taking over such functions as s/he becomes capable - a very different scenario from the internal and interpersonal con- flicts that characterize the Oedipal processes described by Freud.
Bowlby's thinking was influenced by biological considerations and ethol- ogy, fruitful exchanges of ideas occurring between himself and Robert Hinde. He saw the organism's behaviour as controlled by a hierarchy of action plans which, in more complex organisms, are determined by a com- bination of innate factors and those that are flexible in the light of environ- mental circumstances. This theorizing reflected a movement towards cybernetic, rather than drive-reduction, models of behavioural control (Bretherton, 1992). He likened the psychological development of the infant to that of an embryo: just as early interference in embryonic devel- opment will have widespread ill effects, so the failure to establish an attachment relationship to a single individual in the first year of life will be very difficult to make good, as 'the character of the psychic tissue has become fixed' (Bowlby: 1953: 59). Thus the notions of imprinting and crit- ical periods in mother-infant relationships began to supplant the Freudian idea that the child is attached to the mother because she gratifies its oral needs. These ideas were later supported through animal research, such as Harlow's well-known research with infant rhesus monkeys, who preferred to cling to a terry-cloth 'mother' than to a wire one that provided milk (Harlow and Harlow, 1966); however, as pointed out by Robinson (1999),
it is possible that the terry-cloth mother assisted temperature regulation and was thus still meeting the infant's physical needs. Bowlby cited Harlow's research in his later discussions of attachment (Bowlby, 1969).
Like Winnicott, Bowlby discussed infants' attachment to inanimate objects, but took issue with Winnicott's explanation in terms of a symbolic shift from subjective to objective existence. He maintained that a more parsimonious explanation is simply that certain components of attachment behaviour become directed towards such objects because the 'natural' object, such as the breast, is unavailable. Thus he suggested the term 'sub- stitute object' rather than 'transitional object'. Bowlby's interpretation has been supported by more recent research, which has shown that in Mayan society in Guatemala, where infants sleep with their mothers and feed at will during the night, such objects are almost unknown (Morelli el a/.,
1992).
Bowlby later expanded upon the notions of separation from and loss of attachment figures (Bowlby, 1975), drawing upon the work of Ainsworth, discussed below. An important theoretical advance in this connection was the introduction of the notion of 'working models' of the self and attach- ment figures. In other words, the child develops internal representations of the self and others, which guide his/her expectations about how others are likely to respond should he/she seek support from them. Bowlby suggested that this theory, taken together with Piagetian theory, provides a frame- work for understanding the psychoanalytic phenomenon of transference:
the analyst is assimilated to the patient's pre-existing model, which has not yet accommodated to incorporate the way the therapist has actually behaved towards the patient.
In contrast with Freud, Bowlby's theorizing was supported through empirical observations of mothers and children. However, his ideas were very critically received by influential members of the psychoanalytic move- ment at the time. Nevertheless, Bowlby's work has supplanted that of psy- choanalysis in its influence on modern child development theory, and his ideas about attachment have deeply influenced broader theorizing about grief and loss (Archer, 1999). Bowlby was concerned about the public policy implications of attachment and loss for children's welfare, and addressed issues such as adoption and the importance of mothers main- taining contact with their hospitalized children.
Someone else who proved to be an important figure in the development of attachment theory was James Robertson. He learned child observation skills working as a boilerman at a residential London nursery for children displaced by the Second World War, run by Freud's daughter Anna. In fact, Bretherton (1992) sees the training of Robertson as being Anna Freud's enduring contribution to attachment theory. The skills Robertson devel- oped were later used to good effect when he worked for Bowlby collecting data about the hospitalization of young children. Observing the plight of
these children separated from their mothers, Robertson (1953, and later with his wife) made films that had the desired impact of bringing to public attention the hitherto unrecognized distress caused to young children through being separated from their parents - for example, through hospi- talization or absence of the mother to give birth to another child.
Another person who joined Bowlby's unit a little later was Mary Ainsworth (born in 1913), whose name has become almost synonymous with attachment theory. As Mary S alter, she had completed a dissertation on secure dependence of the young child on parents, and moved from Canada to London in 1950, where she became familiar with Bowlby's work.
She first studied mother-infant attachment in Uganda in the early 1950s, but did not publish the data for several more years, after moving to the United States and also renewing her intellectual collaboration with Bowlby.
Mary Ainsworth made a very important contribution to attachment the- ory in two respects. She introduced the notion that the mother, or other attachment figure, provides a secure base from which the young child can explore the world. Second, she introduced the notion of parental sensitivity to child signals, paving the way for a later body of research on parent-infant communication. Ainsworth (e.g. Ainsworth et a/., 1978) is famed for developing an experimental protocol for examining infants' attachment to their mothers, known as the Strange Situation. The child is examined around the age of a year. She or he is first observed playing with her/his caregiver, usually the mother. The child's behaviour is then observed in several different situations: when a stranger enters the room;
when the mother leaves the room; when the mother returns and the stranger leaves; when the mother leaves; when the stranger returns; and when the mother returns. On the basis of studies using this procedure, Ainsworth proposed that infants vary in the degree of security of their attachment relationship. 'Securely attached' infants explore the room freely in their mother's presence, protest at her absence and reunite joyfully with her; this is regarded as the optimum type of attachment relationship, resulting from sensitive parenting. 'Insecure-avoidant' infants are less dis- tressed at separation and avoid the mother on her return, while 'insecure- resistant' babies are distressed throughout the procedure and respond to the mother with a mixture of relief and anger on her return.
The sharing of ideas between those interested in infant development and attachment issues was not limited to Bowlby and Ainsworth: Bowlby was also influential in bringing together in regular meetings other researchers from various backgrounds, including those interested in comparative psy- chology, such as Harlow and Hinde. The proceedings of these meetings appeared in Determinants of Infant Behaviour - a series of volumes edited throughout the 1960s by Brian Foss, whose own research interests lay in imitation and ethology. The second author of the present book (RS) was, as an undergraduate, lectured in ethology by Foss; on social occasions he
would accompany himself on the piano and sing his own ditties on etho- logical themes, such as 'I'm a little fish' celebrating Tinbergen's famous stickleback research.
Work by the psychiatrist Michael Rutter was later very influential in examining more closely the mechanisms involved in 'maternal depriv- ation'. In a close examination of the evidence, in his 1972 book, he con- cluded that there were two separate aspects to the reported ill effects of separation: disruption of bonding with an attachment figure (not necessar- ily the mother) and privation of social, perceptual and linguistic stimula- tion. The former might occur in short-term situations, such as hospitalization, while the latter was a crucial factor in the case of the insti- tutionalized infants studied by Spitz and Goldfarb. A particularly impor- tant aspect of Rutter's work was to point out that not all children are similarly affected by separations from attachment figures. Variables modify- ing the long-term reponse include the child's age, the length of separation, whether there are other attachment figures available, whether the separa- tion is a result of family discord, and the temperament of the child. Thus, it was becoming apparent that the developmental implications of attachment were much more complicated than previously supposed.