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Developmental Psychology
1992,
\fol. 28, No.
5,759-775
Copyright 1992 by the American Psychological Association, Inc.
The Origins of Attachment Theory:
John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth
Inge Bretherton
Department of Child and Family Studies
University of Wisconsin—Madison
Attachment theory
is
based on the joint work of John Bowlby (1907-1991) and Mary Salter Ains-
worth
(1913-
). Its developmental history begins in the
1930s,
with Bowlby's growing interest
in the link between maternal loss or deprivation and later personality development and with
Ainsworth's interest in security
theory.
Although Bowlby's and Ainsworth's collaboration began in
1950,
it entered
its
most creative phase much
later,
after Bowlby had formulated an initial blueprint
of attachment theory, drawing on ethology, control systems theory, and psychoanalytic thinking,
and after Ainsworth had visited Uganda, where she conducted the first empirical study of infant-
mother attachment
patterns.
This article summarizes Bowlby's and Ainsworth's separate and joint
contributions to attachment theory but also touches on other theorists and researchers
whose
work
influenced them or was influenced by them. The article then highlights some of the major new
fronts along which attachment theory
is
currently advancing. The article ends with some specula-
tions on the future potential of the theory.
Attachment theory is the joint work of John Bowlby and
Mary Ainsworth (Ainsworth
&
Bowlby,
1991).
Drawing on con-
cepts from
ethology,
cybernetics,
information
processing,
devel-
opmental psychology, and psychoanalysis, John Bowlby formu-
lated the basic tenets of
the
theory. He thereby revolutionized
our thinking about
a child's
tie to the mother and
its
disruption
through separation, deprivation, and bereavement. Mary Ains-
worth's innovative methodology not only made it possible to
test some of Bowlby's ideas empirically but
also
helped expand
the theory itself and is responsible for some of the new direc-
tions it
is now
taking.
Ainsworth contributed the concept of the
attachment figure as a secure base from which an infant can
explore the world. In addition, she formulated the concept of
maternal sensitivity to infant signals and
its
role in the develop-
ment of infant-mother attachment patterns.
The ideas now guiding attachment theory have a long devel-
opmental
history.
Although Bowlby and Ainsworth worked in-
dependently of each other during their early
careers,
both were
influenced by Freud and other psychoanalytic thinkers—di-
rectly in
Bowlby's
case,
indirectly in
Ainsworth's.
In this article,
I document the origins of ideas that later became central to
attachment theory. I then discuss the subsequent period of
theory building and
consolidation.
Finally,
I review some
of the
new directions in which the theory
is
currently developing and
speculate on its future potential. In taking this retrospective
developmental approach to the origins of attachment theory, I
am reminded of Freud's (1920/1955) remark:
I would like to thank Mary Ainsworth and Ursula Bowlby for helpful
input to a draft of this article. I am also grateful for insightful com-
ments by three very knowledgeable anonymous reviewers.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Inge
Bretherton, Department of Child and Family Studies, University of
Wisconsin—Madison, Madison, Wisconsin 53706.
So long
as we
trace the development from its
final
outcome back-
wards,
the chain of events appears
continuous,
and
we
feel
we
have
gained an insight which
is
completely satisfactory or even exhaus-
tive.
But if we proceed in the reverse way, if
we
start from the
premises inferred from the analysis and try to follow these up to
the
final
results, then we no longer get the impression of an inevita-
ble sequence of
events
which could not have otherwise been deter-
mined, (p. 167)
In elucidating how each idea and methodological advance
became
a
stepping stone for the next, my retrospective account
of the
origins
of attachment theory makes the
process
of theory
building seem planful and
orderly.
No
doubt this
was
the case to
some
extent,
but
it may
often not have seemed
so to
the protago-
nists at the time.
Origins
John Bowlby
After graduating from the University of Cambridge in 1928,
where he received rigorous scientific training and
some
instruc-
tion in what is now called developmental psychology, Bowlby
performed volunteer work at a school for maladjusted children
while reconsidering his career
goals.
His experiences with two
children at the school set his professional life on course. One
was a very isolated, remote, affectionless teenager who had
been expelled from
his
previous school for theft and had had no
stable mother
figure.
The second child was an anxious boy of 7
or 8 who trailed Bowlby around and who was known as his
shadow (Ainsworth,
1974).
Persuaded by this experience of the
effects of early family relationships on personality develop-
ment, Bowlby decided to embark on
a
career
as a
child psychia-
trist (Senn, 1977b).
Concurrently with his studies in medicine and psychiatry,
Bowlby undertook training at the British Psychoanalytic Insti-
759
760INGE BRETHERTON
tute.
During this period Melanie Klein was a major influence
there (the
institute had three
groups:
Group
A
sided with Freud,
Group B sided with Klein, and the Middle Group sided with
neither). Bowlby was exposed to Kleinian (Klein, 1932) ideas
through his training analyst, Joan Riviere, a close associate of
Klein, and eventually through supervision by Melanie Klein
herself.
Although he acknowledges Riviere and Klein for
grounding him
in
the object-relations approach
to
psychoanaly-
sis,
with
its
emphasis on early relationships and the pathogenic
potential of loss (Bowlby, 1969, p. xvii), he had grave reserva-
tions about aspects of the Kleinian approach to child psycho-
analysis. Klein held that children's emotional problems are al-
most entirely due to fantasies generated from internal conflict
between aggressive and libidinal drives rather than to events in
the external world. She hence forbade Bowlby to talk to the
mother of a
3-year-old
whom he analyzed under her supervi-
sion (Bowlby, 1987). This was anathema to Bowlby
who,
in the
course of his postgraduate training with two psychoanalytically
trained social workers at the London Child Guidance Clinic,
had
come
to believe that actual family experiences
were
a much
more important, if not the basic cause of emotional distur-
bance.
Bowlby's plan to counter Klein's ideas through research is
manifest in an early theoretical paper (1940) in which he pro-
posed that, like nurserymen, psychoanalysts should study the
nature of the organism, the properties of the soil, and their
interaction
(p.
23).
He
goes
on to suggest that, for mothers with
parenting difficulties,
a weekly interview
in
which their problems are approached analyt-
ically and traced back to childhood
has
sometimes been remark-
ably effective. Having once been helped to recognize and recap-
ture the feelings which she herself had as a child and to find that
they are accepted tolerantly and understandingly, a mother will
become increasingly sympathetic and tolerant toward the same
things in her child. (Bowlby, 1940, p. 23)
These quotations reveal Bowlby's early theoretical and clinical
interest in the intergenerational transmission of attachment re-
lations and in the possibility of helping children by helping
parents. Psychoanalytic object-relations theories later proposed
by Fairbairn (1952) and Winnicott (1965) were congenial to
Bowlby, but
his
thinking had developed independently of them.
Bowlby's first empirical study, based on case notes from the
London Child Guidance Clinic, dates from this period. Like
the boy at the school for maladjusted children, many of the
clinic patients were affectionless and prone to stealing.
Through detailed examination of 44 cases, Bowlby was able to
link their symptoms to histories of maternal deprivation and
separation.
Although World War II led to an interruption in Bowlby's
budding career
as
a practicing child psychiatrist, it laid further
groundwork for his career as a researcher. His assignment was
to collaborate on officer selection procedures with a group of
distinguished colleagues from the Tavistock Clinic in London,
an experience that gave Bowlby a level of methodological and
statistical expertise then unusual for a psychiatrist and psy-
choanalyst.
This
training
is
obvious in the revision of his
paper,
"Forty-Four Juvenile Thieves: Their Characters and Home
Lives"
(Bowlb^ 1944), which includes statistical tests
as
well as
detailed case histories.
At the end of World War II, Bowlby was invited to become
head of the Children's Department at the Tavistock Clinic. In
line with his earlier ideas on the importance of family relation-
ships in child therapy, he promptly renamed it the Department
for Children and Parents. Indeed, in what
is
credited
as
the first
published paper in family therapy, Bowlby (1949) describes
how he was often able to achieve clinical breakthroughs by
interviewing parents about their childhood experiences in the
presence of their troubled children.
To Bowlby's chagrin, however, much of
the
clinical work in
the department
was
done
by
people
with a
Kleinian orientation
who,
he
says,
regarded
his
emphasis
on
actual family interaction
patterns as not particularly relevant. He therefore decided to
found his own research unit whose efforts were focused on
mother-child separation. Because separation is a clearcut and
undeniable event, its effects on the child and the parent-child
relationship were easier to document than more subtle influ-
ences of parental and familial interaction.
Mary
Ainsworth
Mary Ainsworth (nee Salter), 6 years younger than Bowlby,
finished graduate study at the University of Toronto just before
World War
II.
Courses with William Blatz had introduced her
to security theory (Blatz, 1940), which both reformulated and
challenged Freudian
ideas,
though
Blatz chose
not to recognize
his debt to Freud because of the anti-Freudian climate that
pervaded the University of Toronto at that time (Ainsworth,
1983;
Blatz 1966).
One of the major tenets of security theory
is
that infants and
young
children need
to
develop
a secure
dependence on parents
before launching out into unfamiliar
situations.
In her disserta-
tion entitled "An Evaluation of Adjustment Based on the Con-
cept of Security," Mary Salter (1940) states it this way:
Familial security in the early stages is of a dependent type and
forms a basis from which the individual can work out gradually,
forming new skills and interests in other fields. Where familial
security is lacking, the individual is handicapped by the lack of
what might be called a
secure base
[italics added] from which to
work. (p. 45)
Interestingly, Mary Salter's dissertation research included an
analysis of
students'
autobiographical narratives in support of
the validity of her paper-and-pencil self-report scales of famil-
ial and extrafamilial security, foreshadowing her later penchant
for narrative methods of data collection. Indeed, few re-
searchers realize the enormous experience in instrument devel-
opment and diagnostics she brought to attachment research.
Like Bowlby's, Mary Salter's professional career was shaped
by her duties as a military officer during World War II (in the
Canadian Women's Army Corps). After the war, as a faculty
member at the University of Toronto, she set out to deepen her
clinical skills in response to the request to teach courses in
personality assessment. To prepare herself for this task, she
signed up for workshops by Bruno Klopfer, a noted expert in
the interpretation of the Rorschach test. This experience led to
a coauthored book on the Rorschach technique (Klopfer, Ains-
worth, Klopfer, & Holt, 1954), which is still in print.
In
1950
Mary Salter married Leonard Ainsworth and accom-
APA CENTENNIAL: ORIGINS OF ATTACHMENT THEORY761
panied him to London, where he completed his doctoral stud-
ies.
Someone there drew her attention to a job advertisement in
the London Times that happened to
involve
research, under the
direction of John
Bowlby,
into the effect
on
personality
develop-
ment of separation from the mother in early childhood. As
Mary Ainsworth acknowledges, joining Bowlby's research unit
reset the
whole
direction of her professional
career,
though nei-
ther Bowlby nor Ainsworth realized this at the time.
The Emergence of Attachment Theory
In 1948,2
years
before Ainsworth's arrival, Bowlby had hired
James Robertson to help him observe hospitalized and institu-
tionalized children who were separated from their
parents.
Rob-
ertson had had impeccable training in naturalistic observation,
obtained
as a
conscientious objector during
World War
II,
when
he was employed as a boilerman in Anna Freud's Hampstead
residential nursery for homeless
children.
Anna Freud required
that all members of the
staff,
no matter what their training or
background, write notes on cards about the children's behavior
(Senn,
1977a),
which were then used
as
a
basis
for weekly group
discussions. The thorough training in child observation that
Robertson thus obtained at the Hampstead residential nursery
are Anna Freud's lasting personal contribution to the develop-
ment of attachment theory.
After 2 years of collecting data on hospitalized children for
Bowlby's research projects, Robertson protested that he could
not continue as an uninvolved research worker, but felt com-
pelled to do something for the children he had been observing.
On a shoestring budget, with minimal training, a hand-held
cinecamera, and no artificial
lighting,
he made the deeply mov-
ing film, A
Two-Year-Old Goes
to
Hospital
(Robertson, 1953a,
1953b; Robertson & Bowlby, 1952). Foreseeing the potential
impact of this
film,
Bowlby insisted that it be carefully planned
to
ensure that
no one
would later
be able to accuse
Robertson of
biased recording. The target child was randomly selected, and
the hospital clock on the wall served as proof that time sam-
pling took place at regular periods of the day. Together with
Spitz's (1947) film,
Grief:
A
Peril
in
Infancy,
Robertson's first
film helped improve the fate of hospitalized children all over
the Western world, even though it was initially highly contro-
versial among the medical establishment.
When Mary Ainsworth arrived at
Bowlby's
research unit late
in 1950, others working there (besides James Robertson) were
Mary Boston and Dina Rosenbluth. Rudolph Schaffer, whose
subsequent attachment research is well known (SchafFer &
Emerson,
1964),
joined the group somewhat
later,
as
did
Chris-
toph Heinicke (1956; Heinicke & Westheimer, 1966), who un-
dertook additional separation and reunion studies, and Tony
Ambrose (1961), who was interested in early social behavior.
Mary Ainsworth, who was charged with analyzing James Rob-
ertson's data, was tremendously impressed with his records of
children's behavior and decided that she would emulate his
methods of naturalistic observation
were she
ever to undertake
a study of her own (Ainsworth, 1983).
At this
time,
Bowlby's earlier writings about the familial
expe-
riences of affectionless children had led Ronald Hargreaves of
the World Health Organization (WHO) to commission him to
write a report on the mental health of homeless children in
postwar Europe. Preparation of the WHO report gave Bowlby
an opportunity to pick the brains of many practitioners and
researchers across Europe and the United
States who
were con-
cerned with the effects of maternal separation and deprivation
on young children, including Spitz (1946) and Goldfarb
(1943,
1945).
The report was written in 6 months and translated into
14
languages, with
sales
of 400,000 copies in the English paper-
back edition; it was published in 1951 as
Maternal Care
and
Mental
Health
by the WHO. A second edition, entitled Child
Care
and the
Growth
of Love, with review chapters by Mary
Ainsworth, was published by Penguin Books in 1965.
It is interesting to examine the
1951
report from today's per-
spective. At that time Bowlby still used the terminology of tra-
ditional psychoanalysis (love object, libidinal ties, ego, and su-
perego), but his ideas were little short of heretical. Perhaps fol-
lowing
Spitz,
he used embryology
as
a metaphor to portray the
maternal role in child development:
If growth
is
to proceed
smoothly,
the tissues must
be
exposed to
the influence of
the
appropriate organizer at certain critical pe-
riods. In the same way, if mental development is to proceed
smoothly,
it would appear
to be necessary
for the undifferentiated
psyche to
be
exposed during certain critical periods to the influ-
ence of the
psychic
organizer—the mother.
(Bowlby,
1951,
p.
53)
Then, seemingly doing
away
with the idea that
the
superego has
its origin in the resolution of the Oedipus complex, Bowlby
claims that during the early years, while the child acquires the
capacity for self-regulation, the mother is a child's ego and su-
perego:
It
is
not surprising that during infancy and
early
childhood these
functions are either not operating at all
or are doing so
most im-
perfectly. During this phase of
life,
the child
is
therefore depen-
dent
on
his mother performing them for
him.
She orients
him in
space and time, provides his environment, permits the satisfac-
tion 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 inextric-
ably bound up with the child's primary human relationships.
(Bowlby,
1951,
p.
53)
This sounds more Vygotskian than Freudian. Moreover, de-
spite his disagreements with Kleinian therapy, I detect rem-
nants of Kleinian ideas in Bowlby's discussions of children's
violent fantasies on returning
to
parents after a prolonged sepa-
ration and "the intense depression that humans experience
as
a
result of hating the person they most dearly love and need"
(Bowlby,
1951,
p. 57).
Bowlby's
major conclusion, grounded in the available empiri-
cal evidence, was that to grow up mentally healthy "the infant
and young child should experience a warm, intimate, and con-
tinuous relationship with his mother (or permanent mother
substitute) in which both find satisfaction and enjoyment"
(Bowlby,
1951,
p.
13).
Later summaries often overlook the refer-
ence to the substitute mother and
to
the partners' mutual enjoy-
ment. They also neglect
Bowlby's
emphasis on the
role
of social
networks and on economic
as well as
health factors in the devel-
opment of well-functioning mother-child relationships. His
762INGE BRETHERTON
call to society to provide support for parents
is
still not heeded
today:
Just as children are absolutely dependent
on
their parents for suste-
nance,
so in
all but
the
most primitive
communities,
are
parents,
especially their
mothers,
dependent on a greater society for eco-
nomic
provision.
If
a
community
values its
children it must cher-
ish their
parents.
(Bowlby,
1951,
p.
84)
True to the era in which the WHO report was written, Bowlby
emphasized
the
female
parent.
In infancy,
he
comments,
fathers
have their uses, but normally play second fiddle to mother.
Their prime role
is
to provide emotional support to their
wives'
mothering.
The proposition that, to thrive emotionally, children need a
close and continuous caregiving relationship called for a theo-
retical explanation. Bowlby was not satisfied with the then
current psychoanalytic view that love of mother derives from
sensuous oral gratification, nor did he agree with social learn-
ing theory's claim that dependency
is
based on secondary rein-
forcement (a concept that was itself derived from psychoana-
lytic ideas). Like Spitz (1946) and Erikson (1950), Bowlby had
latched on to the concept of critical periods in embryological
development and was casting about for similar phenomena at
the behavioral level when, through a friend, he happened upon
an English translation of Konrad Lorenz's (1935) paper on im-
printing.
From then on Bowlby began to mine ethology for useful new
concepts. Lorenz's (1935) account of imprinting in geese and
other precocial birds especially intrigued him, because it sug-
gested that social bond formation need not be tied to feeding.
In addition, he favored ethological methods of observing ani-
mals in their natural environment, because this approach was
so compatible with the methods Robertson had already devel-
oped at the Tavistock research unit.
One notable talent that stood Bowlby in great stead through-
out his professional life was his ability to draw to himself out-
standing individuals who were willing and able to help him
acquire expertise in new fields of inquiry that he needed to
master in the service of theory building. To learn more about
ethology, Bowlby contacted Robert
Hinde,
under
whose
"gener-
ous
and stern guidance"
(see
Bowlby,
1980b,
p.
650) he
mastered
ethological principles to help him find new ways of thinking
about infant-mother attachment. Conversely, Hinde's fascinat-
ing studies of individual differences in separation and reunion
behaviors of group-living rhesus mother-infant
dyads
(Hinde
&
Spencer-Booth,
1967) were
inspired by the contact with Bowlby
and his co-workers (Hinde, 1991).
Bowlby's
first
ethological paper appeared in
1953.
Somewhat
surprisingly, however, various empirical papers on the effects
of
separation, published with his own research team at the very
same period, show little trace of Bowlby's new thinking, be-
cause his colleagues were unconvinced that ethology was rele-
vant to the mother-child relationship (Bowlby, personal com-
munication, October 1986). Even Mary Ainsworth, though
much enamored of
ethology,
was somewhat wary of the direc-
tion Bowlby's theorizing had begun to take. It was obvious to
her, she said, that a baby loves his mother because she satisfies
his needs
(Ainsworth,
personal communication, January
1992).
A collaborative paper dating from this period (Bowlby, Ains-
worth, Boston,
&
Rosenbluth, 1956) is nevertheless important,
because it prefigures later work on patterns of attachment by
Ainsworth. Her contribution to the paper was a system for
classifying three basic relationship patterns in school-age chil-
dren who had been reunited with parents after prolonged sana-
torium stays: those with strong positive feelings toward their
mothers; those with markedly ambivalent relationships; and a
third group with nonexpressive, indifferent, or hostile relation-
ships with mother.
The Formulation of Attachment Theory
and the First Attachment Study
Theoretical Formulations
Bowlby's first formal statement of attachment theory, build-
ing on concepts from ethology and developmental psychology,
was presented to the British Psychoanalytic Society in London
in three now classic papers: "The Nature of the Child's Tie to
His Mother" (1958), "Separation Anxiety" (1959), and "Grief
and Mourning in Infancy and Early Childhood" (1960). By
1962 Bowlby had completed two further papers (never pub-
lished; 1962a and b) on defensive processes related to mourn-
ing. These five papers represent the first basic blueprint of at-
tachment theory.
The
Nature
of the
Child's
Tie
to
His
Mother.
This paper re-
views and then rejects those contemporary psychoanalytic ex-
planations for the child's libidinal tie to the mother in which
need satisfaction is seen as primary and attachment as second-
ary or derived. Borrowing from Freud's (1905/1953) notion that
mature human sexuality is built up of component instincts,
Bowlby proposed that 12-month-olds' unmistakable attach-
ment behavior is made up of a number of component instinc-
tual 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 exist-
ing empirical studies of infants' cognitive and social develop-
ment, 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 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
Bertalanfly, took place between 1953 and 1956 (proceedings
were published by Tavistock Publications). For additional evi-
dence, 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 be activated and
shut off or terminated (see Tinbergen, 1951). These stimuli
APA CENTENNIAL: ORIGINS
OF
ATTACHMENT THEORY763
could
be
external
or
intrapsychic, an important point in
view of
the fact that some psychoanalysts accused Bowlby of behavior-
ism because
he
supposedly ignored mental phenomena.
Bowlby also took great pains
to
draw
a
clear distinction
be-
tween
the old
social learning theory concept
of
dependency
and
the
new concept
of
attachment, noting that attachment
is
not indicative
of
regression,
but
rather performs
a
natural,
healthy function even
in
adult life.
Bowlby's new instinct theory raised quite a storm
at
the Brit-
ish 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.
The
second seminal paper (Bowlby,
1959) builds
on
observations
by
Robertson (1953b)
and
Hein-
icke
(1956;
later elaborated
as
Heinicke
&
Westheimer,
1966),
as
well as
on
Harlow
and
Zimmermann's (1958) groundbreaking
work on the effects of maternal deprivation
in
rhesus monkeys.
Traditional theory, Bowlby claims,
can
explain neither
the in-
tense attachment
of
infants
and
young children
to a
mother
figure nor their dramatic responses
to
separation.
Robertson (Robertson & Bowlby, 1952)
had
identified three
phases
of
separation response: protest (related
to
separation
anxiety), despair (related
to
grief and mourning), and denial
or
detachment (related
to
defence mechanisms, especially repres-
sion).
Again drawing on ethological concepts regarding the con-
trol
of
behavior, Bowlby maintained that infants
and
children
experience separation anxiety when
a
situation activates both
escape and attachment behavior but an attachment
figure
is
not
available.
The following quote explains,
in
part, why some psychoana-
lytic colleagues called Bowlby
a
behaviorist:
"for
to have a deep
attachment
for a
person
(or a
place
or
thing)
is to
have taken
them
as the
terminating object
of our
instinctual responses"
(Bowlby,
1959,
p.
13).
The oddity of
this
statement derives from
mixing,
in the
same sentence, experiential language (to have
a
deep attachment) with explanatory language representing
an
external observer's point
of
view (the attachment figure
as the
terminating object).
In this paper Bowlby also took issue with Freud's claim that
maternal overgratification
is a
danger
in
infancy. Freud failed
to
realize,
says
Bowlby,
that maternal pseudoaffection and over-
protection
may
derive from
a
mother's overcompensation
for
unconscious hostility.
In
Bowlby's view, excessive separation
anxiety
is
due
to
adverse family experiences—such as repeated
threats
of
abandonment
or
rejection
by
parents—or
to a par-
ent's
or
sibling's
illness or death for
which
the child feels respon-
sible.
Bowlby also pointed out that, in some
cases,
separation anxi-
ety
can be
excessively
low or be
altogether absent, giving
an
erroneous impression
of
maturity.
He
attributes pseudoinde-
pendence under these conditions
to
defensive processes.
A
well-loved child, he claims, is quite likely
to
protest separation
from parents
but
will later develop more self-reliance. These
ideas later reemerged
in
Ainsworth's classifications of ambiva-
lent, avoidant,
and
secure patterns
of
infant-mother attach-
ment (Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, & Wall, 1978).
Grief and
Mourning in Infancy
and
Early
Childhood.
In the
third, most controversial paper, Bowlby (1960) questioned
Anna Freud's contention that bereaved infants cannot mourn
because
of
insufficient
ego
development
and
therefore experi-
ence nothing more than brief bouts of separation anxiety if an
adequate substitute caregiver
is
available.
In
contrast, Bowlby
(citing
Marris,
1958)
claimed that grief and mourning processes
in children
and
adults appear whenever attachment behaviors
are activated
but
the attachment
figure
continues to be unavail-
able.
He also suggested that
an
inability
to
form deep relation-
ships with others may result when
the
succession of substitutes
is too frequent.
As
with the
first
paper, this paper
also
drew strong objections
from many members of the British Psychoanalytic
Society.
One
analyst
is
said
to
have exclaimed: "Bowlby? Give me Barrabas"
(Grosskurth, 1987). Controversy also accompanied
the pub-
lished version
of
this
paper
in the
Psychoanalytic
Study of the
Child.
Unbeknownst
to
Bowlby, rejoinders
had
been invited
from Anna Freud (1960),
Max
Schur (1960),
and
Rene Spitz
(1960),
all
of whom protested various aspects of Bowlby's revi-
sion
of
Freudian theory. Spitz (1960) ended
his
rejoinder
by
saying:
When submitting new theories we should not violate the
principle
of parsimony
in science by
offering
hypotheses which
in contrast
to existing theory
becloud
the
observational
facts,
are
oversimpli-
fied, and make
no
contribution
to the
better understanding
of
observed phenomena,
(p.
93)
Despite this concerted attack, Bowlby remained
a
member
of
the British Psychoanalytic Society
for the
rest
of his
life,
al-
though
he
never again used
it as a
forum
for
discussing
his
ideas.
At a
meeting
of
the society
in
memory
of
John Bowlby,
Eric Rayner (1991) expressed
his
regret
at
this turn of events:
What seems wrong is when a
theorist
extols his own view by
rub-
bishing others; Bowlby
received
this treatment..
.
.Ourtherapeu-
tic frame
of
mind is altered by theory. John Bowlby was
a
great
alterer of frames of mind.
Bowlby's controversial paper
on
mourning attracted
the at-
tention
of
Colin Parkes,
now
well known
for his
research
on
adult bereavement. Parkes
saw the
relevance
of
Bowlby's
and
Robertson's work
on
mourning
in
infancy
and
childhood
for
gaining insight into
the
process
of
adult
grief. On
joining
Bowlby's
research unit
at
the Tavistock Institute in
1962,
Parkes
set
out to
study
a
nonclinic group of widows
in
their homes
to
chart
the
course
of
normal adult
grief,
about which little
was
known
at the
time.
The
findings
led to a
joint paper with
Bowlby (Bowlby
&
Parkes,
1970)
in
which the phases of separa-
tion response delineated by Robertson
for
young
children were
elaborated into four phases of grief during adult life:
(a)
numb-
ness,
(b) yearning
and
protest, (c) disorganization
and
despair,
and (d) reorganization (see also Parkes, 1972).
Before
the
publication of the 1970 paper, Parkes
had
visited
Elizabeth Kubler-Ross
in
Chicago,
who was
then gathering
data
for her
influential book On Death
and
Dying
(1970).
The
phases of dying described
in her
book (denial, anger, bargain-
ing, depression,
and
acceptance)
owe
much
to
Bowlby's
and
Robertson's thinking. Bowlby also introduced Parkes
to the
founder
of the
modern hospice movement, Cicely Saunders.
Saunders
and
Parkes used attachment theory
and
research
in
developing programs
for the
emotional care
of
the
dying
and
764INGE BRETHERTON
bereaved. What they found particularly helpful in countering
negative attitudes to the dying and bereaved was the concept of
grief as a process toward attaining a new identity rather than as
a state (Parkes, personal communication, November 1989).
The First Empirical Study of Attachment:
Infancy in Uganda
Let us now return to Mary Ainsworth's work. In late 1953,
she had left the Tavistock Clinic, obviously quite familiar with
Bowlby's
thinking about ethology but not convinced of
its
value
for understanding infant-mother attachment. The Ainsworths
were headed for Uganda, where Leonard Ainsworth had ob-
tained a position at the East African Institute of Social Re-
search at Kampala. With help from the same institute, Mary
Ainsworth was able to scrape together funds for an observa-
tional
study,
but not before writing Bowlby a letter in which she
called for empirical validation of his ethological notions
(Ains-
worth, January
1992,
personal communication).
Inspired by her analyses of Robertson's data, Ainsworth had
initially planned an investigation of toddlers' separation re-
sponses during weaning, but it soon became obvious that the
old tradition of sending the child away "to forget the breast"
had broken down. She therefore decided to switch gears and
observe the development of infant-mother attachment.
As soon as she began her data collection, Ainsworth was
struck by the pertinence of Bowlby's ideas. Hence, the first
study of infant-mother attachment from an ethological per-
spective
was
undertaken several years before the publication of
the three seminal papers in which Bowlby (1958,1959,1960)
laid out attachment theory.
Ainsworth recruited 26 families with unweaned babies (ages
1
-24 months) whom she observed every
2
weeks for
2
hours per
visit over a period of up to
9
months.
Visits
(with an interpreter)
took place in the family living-room,
where
Ganda women
gen-
erally entertain in the afternoon. Ainsworth was particularly
interested in determining the onset of proximity-promoting
sig-
nals and behaviors, noting carefully when these signals and be-
haviors became preferentially directed toward the mother.
On leaving Uganda in
1955,
the Ainsworths moved to Balti-
more, where Mary Ainsworth began work as a diagnostician
and part-time clinician at
the
Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospi-
tal,
further consolidating her already considerable assessment
skills.
At the same time, she taught clinical and developmental
courses at the Johns Hopkins
University,
where
she was
initially
hired as a lecturer. Because of her involvement in diagnostic
work and teaching, the data from the Ganda project lay fallow
for several years.
Refining Attachment Theory and Research:
Bowlby and Ainsworth
Before the publication of "The Nature of the Child's Tie to
His Mother" in 1958, Mary Ainsworth received a preprint of
the paper from John Bowlby. This event led Bowlby and Ains-
worth to renew their close intellectual collaboration. Ains-
worth's subsequent analysis of data from her Ganda project
(Ainsworth 1963, 1967) influenced and was influenced by
Bowlby's reformulation of attachment theory (published in
1969).
In this sharing of
ideas,
Ainsworth's theoretical contribu-
tion to Bowlby's presentation of the ontogeny of human attach-
ment cannot be overestimated.
Findings From Ainsworth's Ganda Project
The Ganda data (Ainsworth, 1963,1967) were a rich source
for the study of individual differences in the quality of mother-
infant interaction, the topic that Bowlby had earlier left
aside as
too difficult to study. Of special note, in light of Ainsworth's
future work, was an evaluation of maternal sensitivity to infant
signals, derived from interview data. Mothers who were excel-
lent informants and who provided much spontaneous detail
were rated as highly
sensitive,
in contrast to other mothers who
seemed imperceptive of the nuances of infant behavior. Three
infant attachment patterns were observed: Securely attached
infants cried little and seemed content to explore in the pres-
ence of mother; insecurely attached infants cried frequently,
even when held by their mothers, and explored little; and not-
yet attached infants manifested no differential behavior to the
mother.
It turned out that secure attachment was significantly corre-
lated with maternal sensitivity. Babies of sensitive mothers
tended to be securely attached, whereas babies of less sensitive
mothers were more likely to be classified as insecure. Mothers'
enjoyment of breast-feeding
also
correlated with infant security.
These findings foreshadow some of Ainsworth's later work, al-
though the measures are not yet
as
sophisticated
as
those devel-
oped for subsequent studies.
Ainsworth presented her initial findings from the Ganda
project at meetings of the Tavistock Study Group organized by
Bowlby during the 1960s (Ainsworth, 1963). Participants in-
vited to these influential gatherings included many now-emi-
nent infant researchers of diverse theoretical backgrounds (in
addition to Mary Ainsworth, there were Genevieve Appell,
Miriam David, Jacob Gewirtz, Hanus Papousek, Heinz
Prechtl, Harriet Rheingold, Henry Ricciuti, Louis Sander, and
Peter Wolff), as well as renowned animal researchers such as
Harry Harlow, Robert Hinde, Charles Kaufmann, Jay Rosen-
blatt, and Thelma
Rowell.
Their lively discussions and ensuing
studies contributed much to the developing field of infant so-
cial development in general. Importantly for
Bowlby,
they also
enriched his ongoing elaboration of attachment
theory.
Bowlby
had always believed that he had much to gain from bringing
together researchers with different theoretical backgrounds
(e.g.,
learning
theory,
psychoanalysis, and
ethology),
whether or
not they agreed with his theoretical position. Proceedings of
these fruitful meetings were published in four volumes entitled
Determinants
of Infant
Behaviour
(1961,1963,1965, and 1969,
edited by Brian Foss).
The Baltimore Project
In
1963,
while
still pondering the data from the Ganda study,
Mary Ainsworth embarked on a second observational project
whose thoroughness no researcher has since equalled. Again,
she opted for naturalistic observations, but with interviews
playing a somewhat lesser
role.
The 26 participating Baltimore
families were recruited prenatally, with 18 home visits begin-
APA CENTENNIAL: ORIGINS OF ATTACHMENT THEORY765
ning in the
first
month and ending
at 54
weeks.
Each visit lasted
4 hours to make sure that mothers would feel comfortable
enough to follow their normal routine, resulting in approxi-
mately 72 hours of data collection per family.
Raw data took the form of narrative reports, jotted down in
personal shorthand, marked in 5-minute intervals, and later
dictated into
a
tape recorder for transcription. Typed narratives
from all visits for each quarter of the first year of life were
grouped together for purposes of analysis.
A unique (at the time) aspect of Ainsworttis methodology
was the emphasis on meaningful behavioral patterns in con-
text, rather than on frequency
counts
of specific
behaviors.
This
approach had roots in her dissertation work, in which she clas-
sified patterns of familial and extrafamilial dependent and
inde-
pendent security, in her expertise with the Rorschach test, and
in her work at the Tavistock Institute with Bowlby and Rob-
ertson.
Close examination of
the
narratives revealed the emergence
of characteristic mother-infant interaction patterns during the
first 3 months (see Ainsworth et al., 1978; see also Ainsworth,
1982,1983).
Separate analyses
were
conducted on feeding situa-
tions (Ainsworth & Bell, 1969), mother-infant face-to-face in-
teraction (Blehar, Liebermann, & Ainsworth, 1977), crying
(Bell & Ainsworth, 1972), infant greeting and following (Stay-
ton & Ainsworth, 1973), the attachment exploration balance
(Ainsworth, Bell, & Stayton,
1971),
obedience
(Stayton,
Hogan,
& Ainsworth,
1973),
close bodily contact
(Ainsworth,
Bell, Ble-
har, & Main, 1971), approach behavior (Tracy, Lamb, & Ains-
worth, 1976), and affectionate contact (Tracy & Ainsworth,
1981).
Striking individual differences were observed in how sensi-
tively, appropriately, and promptly mothers responded to their
infants' signals. For some mother-infant pairs, feeding was an
occasion for smooth cooperation. Other mothers had difficul-
ties in adjusting their pacing and behavior
to
the
baby's
cues.
In
response their babies tended to struggle, choke, and spit up,
hardly the sensuous oral experience Freud had had in mind.
Similar distinctive patterns
were
observed in face-to-face inter-
actions between mother and infant during the period from
6
to
15 weeks (Blehar, Lieberman, & Ainsworth, 1977). When
mothers meshed their own playful behavior with that of their
babies, infants responded with joyful bouncing, smiling, and
vocalizing. However, when mothers initiated fact-to-face inter-
actions silently and with an unsmiling expression, ensuing in-
teractions were muted and
brief.
Findings on close bodily con-
tact resembled those on feeding and fact-to-face interaction, as
did those on crying. There were enormous variations in how
many crying episodes a mother ignored and how long she let
the baby cry. In countering those who argued that maternal
responsiveness might lead to "spoiling," Bell and Ainsworth
(1972) conclude that "an infant whose mother's responsiveness
helps him to achieve his ends develops confidence in his own
ability to control what happens to him"
(p.
1188).
Maternal sensitivity in the first quarter was associated with
more harmonious mother-infant relationships in the fourth
quarter. Babies whose mothers had been highly responsive to
crying during the early months now tended to cry less, relying
for communication on facial expressions, gestures, and vocali-
zations (Bell & Ainsworth, 1972). Similarly, infants whose
mother had provided much tender holding during the first
quarter sought contact less often during the fourth quarter, but
when contact occurred
it was
rated
as
more satisfying and affec-
tionate (Ainsworth, Bell, Blehar, & Main, 1971). Ainsworth
(Ainsworth et al., 1978) explains these findings by recourse to
infants'
expectations,
based on prior satisfying or rejecting
expe-
riences with mother.
All first-quarter interactive patterns were also related to in-
fant behavior in a laboratory procedure known as the Strange
Situation (Ainsworth
&
Wittig,
1969).
This
initially
very
contro-
versial laboratory procedure for
1-year-olds
was originally de-
signed to examine the balance of attachment and exploratory
behaviors under conditions of
low
and high stress, a topic in
which Harlow (1961) had aroused Ainsworth's interest during
meetings of the Tavistock
group,
but which also reminded her
of an earlier study by Arsenian (1943) on young children in an
insecure situation and of her dissertation work on security
theory.
The Strange Situation is a 20-minute miniature drama with
eight episodes. Mother and infant are introduced to a labora-
tory play room where they are later joined by an unfamiliar
woman. While the stranger plays with the baby, the mother
leaves briefly and then returns. A second separation ensues
during which the baby
is
completely
alone.
Finally, the stranger
and then the mother return.
As expected, Ainsworth found that infants explored the
playroom and toys more vigorously in the presence of their
mothers than after a stranger entered or while the mother was
absent (Ainsworth & Bell, 1970). Although these results were
theoretically interesting, Ainsworth became much more in-
trigued with unexpected patterns of infant reunion behaviors,
which reminded her of responses Robertson had documented
in children exposed to prolonged separations, and about which
Bowlby (1959) had theorized in his paper on separation.
A few of the
1-year-olds
from the Baltimore study were sur-
prisingly angry when the mother returned after a 3-minute (or
shorter) separation. They cried and wanted contact but would
not simply cuddle or "sink
in"
when picked up
by
the returning
mother. Instead, they showed their ambivalence by kicking or
swiping at her. Another group of children seemed to snub or
avoid the mother on reunion, even though they had often
searched for her while she was gone. Analyses of home data
revealed that those infants who had been ambivalent toward or
avoidant of the mother on reunion in the Strange Situation had
a less harmonious relationship with her at home than those (a
majority) who sought proximity, interaction, or contact on re-
union (Ainsworth, Bell, & Stayton, 1974). Thus originated the
well-known Strange Situation classification system (Ainsworth
et
al.,
1978) which, to Ainsworth's chagrin, has stolen the lime-
light from her observational
findings
of naturalistic mother-in-
fant interaction patterns at home.
The
First Volume in
the Attachment
Trilogy:
Attachment and
Ethology
While Ainsworth wrote up the findings from her Ganda
study for
Infancy in Uganda
(1967) and was engaged in collect-
ing data for the Baltimore project, Bowlby worked on the first
volume of the attachment trilogy,
Attachment
(1969).
When he
766INGE BRETHERTON
began this enterprise in 1962, the plan had been for a single
book. However, as he explains in the preface: "As my study of
theory progressed it was gradually borne in upon me that the
field I had set out to plough so light-heartedly was no less than
the one Freud had started tilling sixty years earlier." In short,
Bowlby realized that he had to develop
a
new theory of motiva-
tion and behavior control, built on up-to-date science rather
than the outdated psychic energy model espoused by Freud.
In the first half of
Attachment,
Bowlby lays the groundwork
for such a theory, taking pains to document each important
statement with available research
findings.
He begins
by
noting
that organisms at different
levels
of the phylogenetic scale regu-
late instinctive behavior in distinct ways, ranging from primi-
tive reflexlike "fixed action patterns" to complex plan hierar-
chies
with subgoals. In the most complex organisms, instinctive
behaviors may be "goal-corrected" with continual on-course
adjustments (such as a bird of prey adjusting its flight to the
movements of the prey). The concept of cybernetically con-
trolled behavioral systems organized as plan hierarchies
(Miller, Galanter, & Pribram, 1960) thus came to replace
Freud's concept of drive and instinct. Behaviors regulated by
such systems need not be
rigidly
innate, but—depending on the
organism—can adapt in greater or lesser degrees to changes in
environmental circumstances, provided these do not deviate
too much from the organism's environment of evolutionary
adaptedness. Such
flexible
organisms pay a price, however, be-
cause adaptable behavioral systems can more easily be sub-
verted from their optimal path of development. For humans,
Bowlby speculates, the environment of evolutionary adapted-
ness probably resembles that of present-day hunter-gatherer
societies.
The ultimate functions of behavioral systems controlling at-
tachment, parenting, mating, feeding, and exploration are sur-
vival and procreation. In some cases, the predictable outcome
of system activation is a time-limited behavior (such as food
intake), in others it is the time-extended maintenance of an
organism in a particular relation to
its
environment
(e.g.,
within
its own territory or in proximity to particular companions).
Complex behavioral
systems
of the kind proposed
by
Bowlby
can work with foresight in organisms that have evolved an abil-
ity to construct internal working models of the environment
and of their own actions in it
(a
concept taken over from Craik,
1943,
through the writings of the biologist J. Z. Young, 1964).
The more adequate an organism's internal working model, the
more accurately the<