Edward John Mostyn Bowlby (; 26 February 1907 – 2 September 1990) was a British psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, notable for his interest in child development and for his pioneering work in attachment theory. Bowlby was inspired by Melanie Klein during his psychoanalytic training. Melanie Klein was his supervisor; however, they had different views about the role of the mother in the treatment of a three-year-old boy. Specifically and importantly, Klein stressed the role of the child's fantasies about his mother, but Bowlby emphasised the actual history of the relationship. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Bowlby as the 49th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
Family background Bowlby was born in London to an upper-middle-income family. He was the fourth of six children and was brought up by a nanny in the British fashion of his class at that time: the family hired a nanny who was in charge of raising the children, in a separate nursery in the house.Van Dijken, S. (1998). John Bowlby: His Early Life: A Biographical Journey into the Roots of Attachment Theory. London: Free Association Books Nanny Friend took care of the infants and generally had two other nursemaids to help her. Bowlby was raised primarily by nursemaid Minnie who acted as a mother figure to him and his siblings.
His father, Sir Anthony Alfred Bowlby, was surgeon to the King's Household, with a history of early loss: at age five, Anthony's father, Thomas William Bowlby, was killed while serving as a war correspondent in the Second Opium War.
Bowlby's parents met at a party in 1897 through a mutual friend. About one year after meeting, Mary (age 31) and Anthony (age 43) decided to get married in 1898. The start of their marriage was said to be difficult due to conflict with Anthony's sister and physical separation between Mary and Anthony. To resolve this prolonged separation, Mary decided to visit her husband for six months while leaving her firstborn daughter Winnie in the care of her nanny. This separation between Mary and her children was a theme found in all six of her children's lives as they were primarily raised by the nanny and nursemaids.
Normally, Bowlby saw his mother only one hour a day after teatime, though during the summer she was more available. Like many other mothers of her social class, she considered that parental attention and affection would lead to dangerous spoiling of the children. Bowlby was fortunate in that the family nanny was present throughout his childhood. When Bowlby was almost four years old, the nursemaid Minnie, his primary caregiver in his early years, left the family. Later, he was to describe this as tragic as the loss of a mother. After Minnie left, Bowlby and his siblings were cared for by Nanny Friend, of a colder and sarcastic nature.
During World War I, Bowlby's father Anthony was on military service. He came home once or twice a year and had little contact with him and his siblings. His mother received letters from Anthony but she did not share them with her children.
At the age of seven, Bowlby was sent to boarding school, as was common for boys of his social status. Bowlby's parents decided to send both him and his older brother Tony to a prep school, to protect them from the bombing attacks due to the ongoing war. In his 1973 work Separation: Anxiety and Anger, Bowlby wrote that he regarded it as a terrible time for him. He later said, "I wouldn't send a dog away to boarding school at age seven". However, earlier Bowlby had considered boarding schools appropriate for children aged eight and older. In 1951, he wrote: If the child is maladjusted, it may be useful for him to be away for part of the year from the tensions which produced his difficulties, and if the home is bad in other ways the same is true. The boarding school has the advantage of preserving the child's all-important home ties, even if in slightly attenuated form, and, since it forms part of the ordinary social pattern of most Western communities today , the child who goes to boarding school will not feel different from other children. Moreover, by relieving the parents of the children for part of the year, it will be possible for some of them to develop more favorable attitudes toward their children during the remainder.Bowlby, J. (1951). Maternal Care and Mental Health. New York: Schocken.P.89.
Bowlby married Ursula Longstaff, the daughter of a surgeon, on 16 April 1938, and they had four children, including Sir Richard Bowlby, who succeeded his uncle as third Baronet.Burke's Peerage (2003) volume 1, page 460.
Bowlby died at his summer home on the Isle of Skye, Scotland.
Career In an interview with Dr. Milton Stenn in 1977,Kanter, J. (2007). John Bowlby, Interview with Dr. Milton Senn. Beyond the Couch: The Online Journal of the American Association for Psychoanalysis in Clinical Social Work, Issue 2. Retrieved from: http://www.beyondthecouch.org/1207/bowlby_int.htm Bowlby explained that his career started off in the medical direction as he was following in his surgeon father's footsteps. His father was a well-known surgeon in London and Bowlby explained that he was encouraged by his father to study medicine at Cambridge. Therefore, he followed his father's suggestion, but was not fully interested in the lessons in anatomy and natural sciences that he was reading about. However, during his time at Trinity College, he became particularly interested in developmental psychology, which led him to give up medicine by his third year. When Bowlby gave up medicine, he took a teaching opportunity at a school called Priory Gates for six months where he worked with maladjusted children. Bowlby explained that one of the reasons why he went to work at Priory Gates was because of an intelligent staff member, John Alford. Bowlby explained that the experience at Priory Gates was extremely influential on him "It suited me very well because I found it interesting. And when I was there, I learned everything that I have known; it was the most valuable six months of my life, really. It was analytically oriented".Kanter, J. (2007). John Bowlby, Interview with Dr. Milton Senn. Beyond the Couch: The Online Journal of the American Association for Psychoanalysis in Clinical Social Work, Issue 2. Retrieved from: http://www.beyondthecouch.org/1207/bowlby_int.htm, page 02 He further explained that the experience at Priory Gates was extremely influential to his career in research as he learned that the problems of today should be understood and dealt with at a developmental level.
Bowlby studied psychology and pre-clinical sciences at Trinity College, Cambridge, winning prizes for outstanding intellectual performance. After Cambridge, he worked with maladjusted and delinquent children until, at the age of twenty-two, he enrolled at University College Hospital in London. At twenty-six, he qualified in medicine. While still in medical school, he enrolled himself in the Institute for Psychoanalysis. Following medical school, he trained in adult psychiatry at the Maudsley Hospital. In 1936, aged 30, he qualified as a psychoanalyst.
During the first six months of World War II, Bowlby worked at the London Child Guidance clinic in Canonbury as a physician. Later on in the war, Bowlby became a lieutenant colonel in the Royal Army Medical Corps, where he conducted research on psychological methods of officer selection (which contributed to the creation of War Office Selection Boards) and where he came into contact with members of the Tavistock Clinic. Alongside his job in the Royal Army Medical Corps, Bowlby explained that he also worked for the Emergency Medical Services (EMS) during the months of May and June in 1940 where he dealt with tragic war neurosis cases. Additionally, the children that were being treated at the Canonbury clinic were evacuated to the child guidance clinic in Cambridge, due to the air raids from the War. Bowlby explained in an interview that he spent time going back and forth from Cambridge to London, where he would see patients in private. From this experience, Bowlby was able to work with several children at Cambridge that were evacuated from London and separated from their families and nannies. This actually extended his research on separation that he was focused on pre-war.
During the first winter of World War II, Bowlby began working on his first published work Forty-four Juvenile Thieves. Although he began working on this book at the beginning of the Second World War, it was not published until 1944. Bowlby studied several children during his time at the Canonbury clinic, and developed a research project based on case studies of the children's behaviors and family histories. Bowlby examined 44 delinquent children from Canonbury who had a history of stealing and compared them to "controls" from Canonbury that were being treated for various reasons but did not have a history of stealing.Bowlby, J. (1946). Forty-Four Juvenile Thieves: Their Character and Home-Life (2nd ed.). London: Bailliere, Tindall & Cox. Bowlby categorized the delinquent children into six different character types which included: normal, depressed, circular, hyperthymic, affectionless, and schizoid.
One of Bowlby's main findings through his research with these children was that 17 out of the 44 thieves experienced early and prolonged separation (six months or more) from their primary caregiver before the age of five. In comparison, only two out of the 44 children who did not steal had experienced prolonged separation from their primary caregiver before the age of five. More specifically, Bowlby found that 12 out of the 14 children who were categorized as affectionless were found to have experienced complete and prolonged separation before the age of five. These findings were important and brought more attention to the impact of early environmental experiences on healthy child development.
After the war, he was deputy director of the Tavistock Clinic, and from 1950, Mental Health Consultant to the World Health Organization. Because of his previous work with maladapted and delinquent children, he became interested in the development of children and returned to work at the London Child Guidance Clinic in Islington.Davies, Hillary A.; The Use of Psychoanalytic Concepts in Therapy with Families; London (2010); Karnac Books His interest was probably increased by a variety of wartime events involving separation of young children from familiar people. These included the rescue of Jewish 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 young children to contribute to the war effort.Mercer, J. (2006). 'Understanding attachment.' Westport, CT:Praeger. Bowlby was interested from the beginning of his career in the problem of separation, the wartime work of Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham on evacuees, and the work of René Spitz with orphans.
By the late 1950s, he had accumulated a body of observational and theoretical work to indicate the fundamental importance for human development of attachment from birth. He contributed evidence to the Platt Report 1959 about how separation from mother whilst in hospital could be harmful to children.
Bowlby was interested in finding out the patterns of family interaction involved in both healthy and pathological development. He focused on how attachment difficulties were transmitted from one generation to the next. In his development of attachment theory, he proposed the idea that attachment behaviour was an evolutionary survival strategy for protecting the infant from predators. Mary Ainsworth joined Bowlby's research unit at Tavistock and further extended and tested his ideas. She played the primary role in suggesting that several attachment styles existed.