BOWLBY, EDWARD JOHN MOSTYN (1907-1990)

An English psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, Edward John Bowlby was born February 26, 1907, in London and died September 2, 1990, in Skye Ball, Great Britain. His childhood was divided between an urban life in London, where he was raised by nannies, and vacations in the countryside with his family. In 1938 he married Ursula Hongstaffs, a musician, with whom he had four children. He began his medical studies in 1929 in London and entered into analysis with Joan Rivière. He worked as a psychiatrist at the London Child Guidance Clinic until the war, when he joined the army. After the war Bowlby joined the Tavistock Clinic, where he served as director of the children's center from 1950 to 1972. As Donald Winnicott's secretary at the British Psychoanalytical Society from 1956 to 1961, he organized training sessions and research activities. From 1950 to 1972 he was a mental health consultant for the World Health Organization. In 1980 he was named professor of psychoanalysis at University College in London.

Bowlby studied psychoanalysis in order to become a child psychoanalyst. His first supervised psychoanalysis with Melanie Klein in 1937 soon revealed a fundamental difference between them: For Bowlby the environment and its role were not sufficiently accounted for in Klein's theories. Based on his highly original clinical training (he worked with handicapped and institutionalized children) and his sensitivity to the function of the mother-child bond and the environment, he developed the position that the instinct for preservation is as important as that of sexuality and that the mother-child bond is independent of infantile sexuality.

His admission to the British Psychoanalytical Society, which was then (in 1940) torn by the struggles between Kleinians and supporters of Anna Freud, is important. Bowlby acknowledged his connection to Anna Freud while regretting her refusal to accept the reality of trauma. In 1958, for the appearance of his article "The Nature of the Child's Tie to his Mother," Bowlby proposed a revision of metapsychology: abandonment of the theory of anaclisis, abandonment of the economic point of view, emphasis on the dynamic point of view, and definition of the unconscious as the interiorization of interpersonal experiences. He was criticized and rejected by the Psychoanalytical Society with unusual severity. Deeply wounded by the reaction of his peers, he gradually withdrew from the Society, and turned to other scientific activities then in vogue (ethology, cybernetics, and systems theory). He worked for more than twenty years on his book on attachment. It was only after 1981 that he was asked to return to analysis and develop the clinical and psychotherapeutic implications of his theory.

Bowlby's work had a tremendous impact on public health especially, in providing a better understanding of the effects of separation on young children, and the prevention of these effects. He also made numerous contributions to social science: contributions to developmental psychology and psychiatry, especially the roles of security, reciprocity, intersubjectivity, and the interpersonal development of thought in the young child; contributions to the understanding and management of borderline states; theorization of so-called non-specific factors in psychotherapy, and treatment of so-called "inaccessible" families subject to multiple risks.

Nicole GuÉdeney

See also: Abandonment; Aphanisis; Attachment; Great Britain; Maternal care; Primary need; Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, The ; Schur, Max; Stranger; Tavistock Clinic; Tenderness.

Bibliography

Bowlby, John. (1944). Forty-four juvenile thieves: Their characters and home life. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 25, 1-57; 207-228.

——. (1951). Maternal care and mental health. Geneva: World Health Organization Monographs.

——. (1969). Attachment and loss (Vol. 1). London: Hogarth Press.

Eagle, Morris. (1995). The developmental perspectives of attachment and psychoanalytic theory. In S. Goldberg, R. Muir, J. Kerr (Eds.), Attachment theory. Social, developmental and clinical perspectives (pp. 123-153). Hillsdale, NJ-London: The Analytic Press.

Holmes, Jeremy. (1993). John Bowlby and attachment theory. London: Routledge.