James Robertson (psychoanalyst)

James Robertson (1911–1988) was a psychiatric social worker, psychoanalyst and filmmaker who based at the Tavistock Clinic and Institute, London from 1948 until 1976.

During World War II, the late 1940's both worked at the Pacifist Service Unit in East London with the victims of the bombing.

After the war, James trained as a psychiatric Social Worker and joined John Bowlby at the Tavistock Clinic in 1948, to make observations on separated young children.

[2] As a convenient way to do so, he was sent to the short stay children's ward at the Central Middlesex Hospital in London.

The competent, efficient doctors and nurses gave good medical care but seemed unaware of the suffering around them.

Robertson and Bowlby saw breaks in a child's attachment bonds as responses to 'phases of protest despair and detachment'.

[10] In the denial/detachment phase, the child shows more interest in his surroundings and interacts with others, but seems hardly to know the mother when she visits or care when she leaves, which is why 'the third stage – "detachment" – is the most serious'.

[13] Robertson contributed evidence from his research to the Platt Report 1959 regarding the welfare of children in hospitals.

Because her mother is not there and the nurses change frequently, she has to face the fears, frights and hurts with no familiar person to cling to.

But many young children still go to hospital without the mother and, despite the play ladies and volunteers, the depth of their distress and the risks to later mental health remain an insufficiently recognised problem.

This film study of typical emotional deterioration in an unaccompanied young patient, and of the subtle ways in which she shows or conceals deep feelings of distress, remains as vivid and relevant as when it was made.

"The restraint and objectivity of the film may at first reassure, for the child is unusually composed for her age, but few nurses will doubt the degree of her distress, the signs of which they have so often felt powerless to relieve.

convincing and brilliant demonstration ad oculos of the outward manifestations of the inner processes that occur in infants who find themselves unexpectedly and traumatically without their families.

"—Anna Freud, LL.D., International Journal of Psychoanalysis"...a connected and credible demonstration of stress, separation anxiety, early defensive manoeuvres, and topics akin.

The Robertsons went on to make 'a series of harrowing films that revealed the true nature and extent of distress shown by separated young children'.

[15] The Robertsons found of the fostered children that, 'in varying degree, reflecting their different levels of object constancy and ego maturity, all made a relationship to the substitute mother...The relationship with the foster-mother gave comfort and an emotional anchor which prevented them from deteriorating and held them safely until they were reunited with the mother'.

[16] 'In 1971, Robertson, in co-ordination with his wife Joyce, began to publish influential articles...us[ing] the term bonding for parent-to-infant attachment'.

But the attachment of child to parent is an immature form of loving – unstable in the early months and years'.