Attachment and Loss

Attachment is an instinct for protection2

Attachment behavior aims at closeness to a caregiver; its evolutionary job is protecting the infant from danger, not feeding.

Separation explains fear2

Children fear both cues to danger and the absence of an attachment figure; separation and the threat of it breed anxiety.

Loss explains grief and defence2

Bowlby explains mourning in young children and how painful information gets excluded from awareness.

Behavioral systems instead of drives2

Bowlby replaced Freud's psychic energy with goal-corrected control systems borrowed from ethology and cybernetics.

Secure base and safe haven2

A child explores from the attachment figure and returns to it for comfort; how well that works depends on the carer's sensitivity.

Internal working models2

Children form models of self and attachment figure: valued and reliable when needs were met, unworthy when bids were rejected.

Patterns pass down the generations2

Bowlby held that family micro-culture passes on mental health and ill health at least as much as genes do.

Defensive exclusion2

Information too painful to think about is kept out of awareness, which splits working models and blocks their updating.

Ploughing Freud's field2

In the preface Bowlby wrote that his field "was no less than the one Freud had started tilling sixty years earlier".

The dog between mother and child2

Fleeing danger and fleeing to an attachment figure are separate systems, visible when a fierce dog comes between a mother and her child.

Smooth and troubled pairs2

When interaction between a couple runs smoothly each takes pleasure in the other; persistent conflict brings anxiety and unhappiness (vol. 1, p. 242).

Rejected by psychoanalysts1

Bowlby rejected psychoanalytic accounts of attachment, and psychoanalysts in turn rejected his theory.

Slow uptake for volumes 2 and 32

Separation and Loss made less impact than Attachment at first, partly because supporting studies lagged behind.

Wider objections to the theory4

Critics fault attachment theory on temperament, measurement, neglect of social complexity and mother-blaming.

Patterns of Attachment

Ainsworth's Baltimore study, the main evidence for the trilogy's claims.

A Secure Base

Bowlby's short lectures applying the theory to parenting and psychotherapy.

Attachment Theory in Practice

Sue Johnson turns attachment theory into a therapy for individuals, couples and families.