the origins of attachment theory: john bowlby and mary ainsworth ...

ment behavior is made up of a number of component instinctual responses that have the function
of binding the infant to the mother and the mother to the infant. These component responses
(among them sucking, clinging, and following, as well as the signaling behaviors of smiling and
crying) mature relatively independently during the first year of life and become increasingly
integrated and focused on a mother figure during the second 6 months. Bowlby saw clinging and
following as possibly more important for attachment than sucking and crying.
To buttress his arguments, Bowlby reviewed data from existing empirical studies of infants’
cognitive and social development, including those of Piaget (1951, 1954), with whose ideas he
had become acquainted during a series of meetings by the ‘Psychobiology of the Child” study
group, organized by the same Ronald I Hargreaves at the World Health Organization who had
commissioned Bowlby’s 1951 report. These informative meetings, also attended by Erik Erikson,
Julian Huxley, Baerbel Inhelder, Konrad Lorenz, Margaret Mead, and Ludwig von Bertalanffy,
took place between 1953 and 1956. (Proceedings were published by Tavistock Publications.) For
additional evidence, Bowlby drew on many years of experience as weekly facilitator of a support
group for young mothers in London.
After his careful discussion of infant development, Bowlby introduced ethological concepts,
such as sign stimuli or social releasers that “cause” specific responses to he activated and shut off
or terminated (see Tinbergen, 1951). These stimuli could he external or intrapsychic, an important
point in view of the fact that some psychoanalysts accused Bowlby of behaviorism because he
supposedly ignored mental phenomena. Bowlby also took great pains to draw a clear distinction
between the old social learning theory concept of dependency and the new concept of attachment,
noting that attachment is not indicative of regression, hut rather performs a natural, healthy
function even in adult life.
Bowlby’s new instinct theory raised quite a storm at the British Psychoanalytic Society.
Even Bowlby’s own analyst, Joan Riviere, protested. Anna Freud, who missed the meeting but
read the paper, politely wrote:
“Dr. Bowlby is too valuable a person to get lost to psychoanalysis” (Grosskurth, 1987).
Separation Anxiety