History of attachment theory
The human infant is considered by attachment theorists to have a need for a secure relationship with adult caregivers, without which normal social and emotional development will not occur.
In addition to care-seeking by children, peer relationships of all ages, romantic and sexual attraction, and responses to the care needs of infants or sick or elderly adults may be construed as including some components of attachment behavior.
In the 1930s, the British developmentalist Ian Suttie put forward the suggestion that the child's need for affection was a primary one, not based on hunger or other physical gratifications.
They and Bowlby collaborated in making the 1952 documentary film A Two-Year Old Goes to the Hospital illustrating the impact of loss and suffering experienced by young children separated from their primary caretakers.
[13] He realised that he had to develop a new theory of motivation and behaviour control, built on up-to-date science rather than the outdated psychic energy model espoused by Freud.
[8] Bowlby expressed himself as having made good the "deficiencies of the data and the lack of theory to link alleged cause and effect" in "Maternal Care and Mental Health" in his later work "Attachment and Loss" published between 1969 and 1980.
[22] The formal origin of attachment theory can be traced to the publication of two 1958 papers, one being Bowlby's The Nature of the Child's Tie to his Mother, in which the precursory concepts of "attachment" were introduced, and Harry Harlow's The Nature of Love, based on the results of experiments which showed, approximately, that infant rhesus monkeys spent more time with soft mother-like dummies that offered no food than they did with dummies that provided a food source but were less pleasant to the touch.
Mary Ainsworth's innovative methodology and comprehensive observational studies informed much of the theory, expanded its concepts and enabled some of its tenets to be empirically tested.
He did, however, consider that attachment behavior was best explained as instinctive in nature, an approach that does not rule out the effect of experience, but that stresses the readiness the young child brings to social interactions.
In particular he was influenced by observations of young children separated from familiar caregivers, as provided during World War II by Anna Freud and her colleague Dorothy Burlingham.
[43] Thinking in terms of primary attachment and neo-darwinism, Bowlby identified as what he saw as fundamental flaws in psychoanalysis, namely the overemphasis of internal dangers at the expense of external threat, and the picture of the development of personality via linear "phases" with "regression" to fixed points accounting for psychological illness.
According to Craik, prediction occurs when a "small-scale model" consisting of brain events is used to represent not only the external environment, but the individual's own possible actions.
At about the same time that Bowlby was applying Craik's ideas to the study of attachment, other psychologists were using these concepts in discussion of adult perception and cognition.
[54][55][56] Peter Fonagy and Mary Target have attempted to bring attachment theory and psychoanalysis into a closer relationship by way of such aspects of cognitive science as mentalization, the ability to estimate what the beliefs or intentions of another person may be.
[47] A "natural experiment" has permitted extensive study of attachment issues, as researchers have followed the thousands of Romanian orphans who were adopted into Western families after the end of Nicolae Ceauşescu's regime.
The English and Romanian Adoptees Study Team, led by Michael Rutter, has followed some of the children into their teens, attempting to unravel the effects of poor attachment, adoption and new relationships, and the physical and medical problems associated with their early lives.
Some authors have noted the connection of attachment theory with Western family and child care patterns characteristic of Bowlby's time.
Adoptions and births to same-sex couples have increased in number and even gained some legal protection, compared to their status in Bowlby's time.
Importantly, some researchers and theorists have begun to connect attachment with the study of mentalization or Theory of Mind, the capacity that allows human beings to guess with some accuracy what thoughts, emotions, and intentions lie behind behaviours as subtle as facial expression or eye movement.
She analysed the dozens of studies undertaken in the field and concluded that the basic assertions of the maternal deprivation hypothesis were sound although the controversy continued.
This way of thinking saw the secure base concept (the organisation of exploration of an unfamiliar situation around returns to a familiar person) as "central to the logic and coherence of attachment theory and to its status as an organizational construct.
Like other members of the British object-relations group, Bowlby rejected Melanie Klein's views that considered the infant to have certain mental capacities at birth and to continue to develop emotionally on the basis of fantasy rather than of real experiences.
But Bowlby also withdrew from the object-relations approach (exemplified, for example, by Anna Freud), as he abandoned the "drive theory" assumptions in favor of a set of automatic, instinctual behaviour systems that included attachment.
"[83] Robert Hinde expressed concern with the use of the word "attachment" to imply that it was an intervening variable or a hypothesised internal mechanism rather than a data term.
"[84] Bowlby's reliance on Piaget's theory of cognitive development gave rise to questions about object permanence (the ability to remember an object that is temporarily absent) and its connection to early attachment behaviours, and about the fact that the infant's ability to discriminate strangers and react to the mother's absence seems to occur some months earlier than Piaget suggested would be cognitively possible.
For example, Skuse based criticism of a basic tenet of attachment theory on the work of Anna Freud with children from Theresienstadt, who apparently developed relatively normally in spite of serious deprivation during their early years.
This discussion concluded from Freud's case and from some other studies of extreme deprivation that there is an excellent prognosis for children with this background, unless there are biological or genetic risk factors.
[89] The psychoanalyst Margaret Mahler interpreted ambivalent or aggressive behaviour of toddlers toward their mothers as a normal part of development, not as evidence of poor attachment history.
But in developing his grief and mourning theory, Bowlby, without adducing non-institutional data, has generalized Robertson's concept of protest, despair and denial beyond the context from which it was derived.
[52][53] Recent critics such as J. R. Harris, Steven Pinker and Jerome Kagan are generally concerned with the concept of infant determinism (Nature versus nurture) and stress the possible effects of later experience on personality.
