The Making and Breaking of Affectional Bonds

225 Pages·2005·2.34 MB·English

by  John Bowlby

The Making and Breaking of
Affectional Bonds
‘These essays, spanning 20 years of Bowlby’s speaking
about the forming and breaking of relationships of
affection, are clear and systematic ... They make an
excellent introduction to his thought.’
British Journal of Psychiatry
‘John Bowlby was a towering figure in general psych-
iatry, child psychiatry and psychoanalysis. More than
anyone else he demonstrated the importance of real-
life childhood events for the development of later
psychopathology.’
The Independent

John
Bowlby
The Making and Breaking
of Affectional Bonds
with a new Introduction by Richard Bowlby
London and New York
Originally published 1979 by Tavistock Publications Limited
First published 1989 by Routledge
First published in Routledge Classics 2005
By Routledge
2 Park square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 1979, 2005 R.P.L. Bowlby and others
Introduction © 2005 R.P.L. Bowlby
Typeset in Joanna by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN 10: 0–415–35481–1
ISBN 13: 978–0–415–35481–3
CONTENTS
Introduction by Richard Bowlby vii
Preface 3
1 Psychoanalysis and child care (1956–8) 7
2 An ethological approach to research in
child development (1957) 34
3 Childhood mourning and its implications
for psychiatry (1961) 56
4 Effects on behaviour of disruption of an
affectional bond (1967–8) 83
5 Separation and loss within the family (1968–70) 99
6 Self-reliance and some conditions that
promote it (1970–3) 124
7 The making and breaking of affectional
bonds (1976–7) 150
References 189
Index 203

INTRODUCTION
When my father published this collection of lectures in 1979 I
had no idea it would become a classic. At the time I was a
medical photographer and was about half way through his
three volume ‘magnum opus’ Attachment, Separation and Loss, read-
ing them more out of duty as a son than in a genuine thirst for
knowledge. My wife and I lived next door to my parents and to
get out of my child care duties I would often go round to discuss
the day’s events with my father and the conversation usually
focused on the ideas he was writing about (and on our children)
and this continued on and off for the rest of his life. The first
time the full significance of his work struck me was during a
family walk in the Chiltern Hills in about 1958 just after his
paper on ‘The nature of the child’s tie to his mother’ was first
published. He said to me, ‘You know how distressed small
children get if they’re lost and can’t find their mother and how
they keep on searching? Well, I suspect it’s the same feeling that
adults have when a loved one dies, they keep on searching too.
I think it’s the same instinct that starts in infancy and evolves
viii the making and breaking of affectional bonds
throughout life as people grow up, and becomes part of adult
love’. I remember thinking, well, if you’re right, you’re on to
something really big!
My father was eager that as many people as possible should
benefit from his explanations of what he had learned about mak-
ing affectional bonds and the associated mental health outcomes
of breaking them. However, in later life he became frustrated and
rather disappointed by how reluctant people were to embrace
his ideas for clinical applications. He would give some factual
reasons for this, but I think he did not take account of how
personally his ideas would be taken by clinicians, nor how upset-
ting the inferences could be. There have been many criticisms of
attachment theory over the years and I believe most of these
stem from the way it can press our most sensitive buttons, some-
times bringing back painful memories we would rather forget.
Our sense of self is closely dependant on the few intimate
attachment relationships we have or have had in our lives, espe-
cially our relationship with the person who raised us. These
potent relationships, whether secure or insecure, loving or neg-
lectful, have a profound significance for us and we need to
protect our idealised perception of them vigorously; they may
not be much, but they’re all we’ve got!
Humans seem to have evolved an innate capacity to detect
anything that could destabilise these vital attachment relation-
ships, and unconscious defences seem to be activated by infor-
mation about attachment theory. It’s as if insight into these
relationships could somehow threaten them and the clearer the
information is, the more rapid and vigorous the defences that are
employed; so it’s hardly surprising that in the 45 years since
the ‘Child’s tie’ paper was published, attachment theory has
remained unwelcomed by so many people.
By 1979 when my father had collected these seven lectures he
was beginning to be more confident about the validity of his
ideas and attachment theory in particular. The Strange Situation
introduction ix
Procedure developed by Mary Ainsworth was well established
by then and producing statistically significant support for his
ideas. Shortly before his death in 1990 the Adult Attachment
Interview developed by Mary Main was beginning to establish
itself and there were several longitudinal studies that looked very
promising – which gave him great satisfaction – and these have
subsequently produced unequivocal data which support his
explanations and extend attachment theory into new fields.
Although my father barely mentions the role of fathers in this
collection of lectures, it may not surprise readers to learn that
I have a certain curiosity about his view on being a father. In his
early book ‘Child Care and the Growth of Love’ published in
1953 by Penguin Books he writes about the role of fathers on
page 15, ‘In the young child’s eyes father plays second fiddle and
his value increases only as the child becomes more able to stand
alone. ... In what follows, therefore, while continual reference
will be made to the mother-child relationship, little will be said
of the father-child relationship; his value as the economic and
emotional support of the mother will be assumed’1. This was his
experience of his own father, an eminent surgeon born in 1856;
a man with deeply Victorian ethics who rarely saw his six chil-
dren and did not see them at all during the First World War (my
father was born in 1907). However by the age of 80 my father
had revised his view on the role of fathers to include accompany-
ing children in their exploration of the world, but I’m not
sure that he realised just how significant fathers would turn out
to be as attachment figures for encouraging exploration and
excitement.
In 2002 Karin Grossmann et al. (Social Development Vol.11,
No.3, 2002) published findings from a longitudinal study in
Germany called ‘The Uniqueness of the Child-Father Attachment
Relationship: Fathers’ Sensitive and Challenging Play as a Pivotal
Variable in a 16 year Longitudinal Study’. Among a wide range
of other measurements, the sensitivity of fathers as exciting