No More Learning

The ill effects (or otherwise) of maternal deprivation; the importance of bonding between parents and children; the need for a secure base and to feel attached; the realisation that grief has a course to run and can be divided into stages - these are concepts with which people far removed from the worlds of psychology and psychotherapy are familiar. All may be traced, in whole or in part, to the work of John Bowlby.
Yet Bowlby's familiarity and acceptance by the general public and his influence in a number of specialist fields such as pediatrics, developmental psychology, social work and psychiatry have never been matched within the domain of psychotherapy. In his chosen profession of psychoanalysis his influence is honoured more often in the breach than the observance. Between his papers delivered in the late 1950s and early 1960s to psychoanalytic societies in Britain and the States, and polite obsequies of the early 1990s, there has for the most part been a resounding silence from the psychoanalytical movement in response to the challenges and opportunities which his work represents. A major aim of this book is to try to understand this discrepancy between public recognition and professional avoidance, and the
Introduction 3
attempt to remedy it by showing how Attachment Theory can inform the practice of adult psychotherapy.
The details of the relationship between Bowlby and psychoanalysis will emerge gradually in the course of the book but, as an overture, a brief summarising overview will now follow. The answers to the riddle of Bowlby's rift with the psychoanalytic movement can be found at three distinct but interrelated levels: Bowlby's own personality, background and outlook; the atmosphere within the psychoanalytic society just before and in the aftermath of Freud's death; and the social and intellectual climate in the years surrounding and including the 1939-45 world war.
John Bowlby, described in an obituary as 'one of the three or four most important psychiatrists of the twentieth century' (Storr 1991), came from a conventional upper-middle class background. Cambridge educated, very 'English' in his reserve and empiricism, a 'nineteenth century Darwinian liberal' (Rycroft, 1985), he entered a psychoanalytical society in the 1930s that was riven between two warring factions led by Melanie Klein on the one hand and Anna Freud on the other (Grosskurth 1986). Melanie, a Berliner, divorced and separated from her children, the great innovator, faced the unmarried Viennese Anna, devoted to the orphans in her Hampstead nursery, defender of the true Freudian faith. Klein was powerful and domineering, but with a helpless side that meant that she depended on utter loyalty from her supporters. Anna Freud was shy and diffident, but with a steely determination not to be done down, and the confidence of her father's blessing.
The battle between the two women was ostensibly about theory. For Freud the Oedipus complex was the 'kernel of the neuroses' and he had had little to say about the early mother- infant relationship. Klein put the mother on the psychoanalytic map, arguing for the importance of phantasy in the early weeks and months of life; the primacy of the death instinct as an explanation for infantile aggression; and the need in therapy to lay bare and put into words these primitive impulses of infancy. Anna Freud - Antigone to her father's Oedipus - questioned Klein's speculations about the mind of the infant, continued to see the Oedipus complex arising at the age of two to three years as the starting point for the neuroses, and saw the role of therapy as strengthening the ego in its efforts to reconcile id and superego. Bowlby struggled
4 John Bowlby and Attachment Theory
to find his bearings in the charged atmosphere of the psychoanalytic society created by the rivalrous antagonism of these two daughters of the psychoanalytical movement, each vying for supremacy. With characteristic independence he steered a course between them, trying to work things out for himself. He took his stand on two main battlefields: the scientific status of psychoanalysis, and the role of the environment in the causation of neurosis.
Although both sides invoked the name of science in support of their ideas, this was, in Bowlby's view, little more than a genuflection to Freud's insistence that psychoanalysis should take its place as a new science of the mind. Bowlby saw both women and most of their followers as hopelessly unscientific. Neither Klein nor Anna Freud had any kind of scientific background. Both argued from intuition and authority rather than subjecting their claims to empirical testing. Neither had made any attempt to keep abreast of contemporary developments in science, or to revise Freudian metapsychology in the light of the emerging ideas about information processing and feedback which were to have such an impact on academic psychology and ethology. In rejecting Bowlby, his psychoanalytic critics on the other hand felt that by restricting himself to a narrow definition of science - to what could be observed and measured - Bowlby was missing the whole point of psychoanalysis. Any so-called 'science' of the mind which did not take account of the inner world of phantasy was worthless and certainly had no place within psychoanalytic discourse.
A similar polarisation took place around the role of the environment in the causation of neurosis. Bowlby was struck by the extent to which his patients had suffered from privation and loss, and horrified by the apparent disregard of real trauma as compared with an emphasis on the importance of autonomous phantasy in the Kleinian approach. Matters came to a head when Bowlby presented to the psychoanalytic society his famous film made with James Robertson (Robertson 1952; Bowlby and Robertson 1952b) documenting the distress shown by a small girl when separated from her parents on going into hospital. While Anna Freud endorsed Bowlby's views, the Kleinians in the audience were unimpressed, and felt that the girl's distress was due more to her unconscious destructive phantasies towards her pregnant mother's unborn baby than to the separation itself.
Bowlby was in an unusual position within the psychoanalytic society in that he was someone with non-Kleinian views who had been analysed
Introduction 5
and supervised by members of the Kleinian group (Joan Riviere and Miss Klein herself). Finding himself stuck in his analysis he decided to change to a non-Kleinian analyst, but extreme pressure was placed on him not to do so, to which, uncharacteristically, he submitted (Grosskurth 1986). He was cited by the Kleinians as evidence that they were not out to brainwash or convert all psychoanalytical candidates to their persuasion. As someone with evident ability and reputation he would have been quite a catch for whichever group he chose to join.
But both sides had reckoned without Bowlby's originality and ambition and preparedness to go out on a limb on his own. His discovery of ethology in the early 1950s provided the opportunity he was looking for to put psychoanalysis on a sound scientific footing. His World Health Organisation monograph (Bowlby 1951) and later observations of children separated from their parents enabled him to establish once and for all the importance of environmental trauma as a cause of neurosis and character disturbance. Attachment Theory was born, but rather than illuminating and strengthening Object Relations Theory as Bowlby had hoped, it was perceived by many analysts as a threat or even a betrayal. Bowlby had hoped to reconcile the warring factions within the society with his new theory, but instead they were for the most part united in either outright opposition or polite indifference to his ideas. Bowlby gradually drifted away from the society, and Attachment Theory came to stand as a discipline in its own right, owing much to psychoanalysis, but with links also to systems theory and cognitive psychology, and making a contribution as much to family and cognitive therapies as to psychoanalysis.
In retrospect the splits within the British Psycho-Analytical Society seem comparatively trivial. As Pedder (1987) puts it:
an innocent might . . . ask what all the fuss was about. Because really it could be argued that there was not a lot of disagreement. They argued about phantasy: how wide the concept should be. . . . They argued about . . . how early the Oedipus complex starts, whether at two or three or sooner. . . . They argued about the emphasis that should be placed on aggression and the death instinct, and whether neurosis is precipitated by the frustration of libido, as the Viennese thought, or [as the Kleinians saw it] by the awakening of aggression. . . . All these could be seen as matters of degree which you might think reasonable people could well discuss.
(Pedder 1987)
6 John Bowlby and Attachment Theory
But as every psychotherapist should know, things are rarely that simple. The psychoanalytical movement was still struggling with the death of its founder, searching for a direction in which to go. The polarisation between those who idealised the dead leader (the Anna Freudians) and those who dealt with their depression by a kind of manic triumphalism, a celebration of the new (the Kleinians), can be understood in terms of the very concepts that those two groups espoused. A female principle was needed to balance the phallocentrism of the earlier Freudian movement. 'The King is dead, long live the Queen' might have been their slogan. But which queen should it be? The battle for psychoanalysis was going on against a backdrop of world war, of death, dislocation and genocide. The Kleinian emphasis on autonomous phantasy, on the death instinct, on the power of psychoanalysis to heal, irrespective of environmental factors, can be seen as a desperate attempt to bring some sense of order and the possibility of control - at times omnipotently - into a world in which one could not but feel powerless and helpless. Anna Freud's emphasis on the need to strengthen the ego was an effort to hold on to reason and sanity in the face of the irrational destructiveness unleashed by war.
Bowlby was perhaps the perfect scapegoat, with his cool Englishness, his social and intellectual powers, his espousal of a narrow version of science that could not encompass the cultural breadth of the Jewish-European intelligentsia, his comparative insulation from the full horrors of war, and his Whiggish belief in the possibilities of progress based on social and scientific reason. His attempt to open out psychoanalysis to ethology and contemporary science was premature. He threatened the closed world of psychoanalysis and, offered a cold shoulder, like others before him (Jung, Adler, Ferenczi, Reich), he gave up the fight after a while and moved away to follow his own interests.
The loss was both his and that of psychoanalysis. There is something in the kernel of psychoanalysis which Bowlby seems not to have fully assimilated. In comparison with Freud's and Klein's passionate world of infantile sexuality, Attachment Theory appears almost bland, banal even. An appreciation of the power of phantasy, and the complexity of its relationship with external reality, is somehow lacking in his work. It is not loss alone that causes disturbance, but the phantasies stirred up by loss - the lack of this appreciation makes Bowlby appear at times simplistic
Introduction 7
in his formulations. But in eschewing the scientific rigour which Bowlby saw it so badly needed, psychoanalysis was held back in its development as a discipline and a therapy, a setback from which it is only just beginning to recover (see Peterfreund 1983; Stern 1985). Perhaps there was something in the climate of the 1950s which made such a split inevitable. The divide between the 'two cultures' epitomised by the belief in the possibility of progress based on science advocated by C. P. Snow, and Leavis's moral condemnation of an illiterate and degenerate society was just too great to bridge (Holmes 1992). Psychoanalysis became increasingly identified with 'culture' - with the imagination, linguistics and the moral and aesthetic dimension (Rycroft 1985; Rustin 1991), while Attachment Theory gathered momentum as a part of scientific psychology, taking root in the United States in a way that seemed less possible in a Britain that was so split in its educational and bureaucratic structures between art and science.
But times have changed. The old certainties no longer hold. Psychoanalysis has lost its dogmatism and is much more open to empirical evidence and to cross-disciplinary influence. The Berlin wall which separated psychoanalysis from the superficiality but also the stimulus of other disciplines has come down. The debate about the scientific status of psychoanalysis, and the role of the environment in neurosis, continues, but it is no longer a matter of life and death. Each side can claim partial victories. Klein was right in her emphasis on the early weeks and months of life - there is abundant evidence of psychic life from the moment of birth (Stern 1985). She was probably wrong in her insistence on the universality of the paranoid-schizoid position - it seems likely that splitting and projection predominate only in anxiously attached infants. She was right to emphasise loss and separation as central themes in character formation from the earliest years, but wrong in the concreteness of her thinking - she believed that bottle feeding could never substitute for the breast and that the events surrounding weaning were critical determinants of character. It seems likely that it is the style and general handling of the infant that matters, not the specific events, unless these are overwhelmingly traumatic. In therapy she was right to emphasise the central importance of the relationship between therapist and patient, but wrong in her belief that only 'deep', 'Kleinian' interpretations would be effective: the strength of the therapist- patient attachment is a crucial determining factor in the outcome
8 John Bowlby and Attachment Theory
of therapy, but the nature of the interpretations, as long as they are reasonably sensible, coherent and brief, is not (Holmes 1991). As increasing evidence of early trauma appears in the histories of patients with major character disorder (Grant 1991), Bowlby's emphasis on the importance of the environment as a determinant of pathology appears to be vindicated, but he also tended to be too concrete and specific in his hypotheses - it is not the loss of a parent in itself that is traumatic but the family discord or disruption surrounding it that causes the damage (Rutter 1981).
Klein showed how an individual's inner world shapes their perception of the object, and how, through projective identification, the object is coerced into feeling and behaving according to the projections it receives. In contrast with this near solipsistic account, Bowlby is concerned primarily with the impact of the object on the self. The self, which in his theories tends to be almost passive, is moulded by the inadequacies and absences of the object. We shall explore how the interactive view of self and object postulated by Winnicott (1965) and Bion (1978) and observed by developmental psychologists like Stern (1985) and Brazelton and Cramer (1991) offers the possibility of a long overdue climate of reconciliation and new understanding.
Bowlby was always careful to distinguish between the scientific and therapeutic aspects of psychoanalysis. As a scientist he was struggling for simplicity and clarity and for general principles, while therapy inevitably concerns itself with complexity and concreteness of the individual case. Much of the disagreement between Bowlby and psychoanalysis appears to rest on a confusion of these two aspects. Bowlby's main concern was to find a firm scientific underpinning to the Object Relations approach, and Attachment Theory, with its marrying of ethology to the developmental ideas of psychoanalysis, can be seen in that light. Although couched in the language of science, psychoanalytic therapy has come increasingly to be seen as a hermeneutic discipline, more concerned with meanings than mechanism, in which patient and therapist collaboratively develop a coherent narrative about the patient's experience. Such objectification and coherence are in themselves therapeutic, irrespective of the validity or otherwise of the meanings that are found. An extreme illustration of this comes from the finding that schizophrenic patients with complex and coherent delusional systems are better able to function socially than those who lack such meanings,
Introduction 9
however idiosyncratic (Roberts 1992). Bowlby's work has ensured that clinical hypotheses based on Object Relations Theory with a scientific underpinning of Attachment Theory are unlikely to be far removed from the truth, or to be tainted by totally unjustified speculation.
As we shall see in Chapter 6, recent developments in Attachment Theory suggest an exciting bridge between the narrative approach of contemporary psychoanalysis and the science of developmental psychology. There is a strong link between the kinds of attachment patterns found in infancy and the narratives that people tell about themselves several years later. Put briefly, securely attached children tell coherent stories about their lives, however difficult they have been, while insecurely attached children have much greater difficulty in narrative competence, either dismissing their past or remaining bogged down in it, and in neither case being able to talk objectively about it. The therapeutic implications of this are self-evident. Good therapy, like good parenting, provides the security and space within which a healing narrative can begin to emerge.
Psychoanalysis, perhaps more than it would care to admit, is influenced by the prevailing cultural climate. The Oedipus complex with its emphasis on castration anxiety reflected the patriarchy of its day. With the weakening of paternal power within the family came the rise of the female principle within psychoanalysis. The Society which Bowlby joined in the 1930s was dominated by strong women: Melanie Klein, Anna Freud, Joan Riviere, Sylvia Payne, Susan Isaacs, Paula Heimann and many others. Ernest Jones's power was waning, and Glover's grip on the Society was gradually being loosened. The main theorists of the post-war period - Klein, Bion, Winnicott and Bowlby - were all concerned with the role of the mother. A new phase of deconstruction has begun which emphasises the reciprocities of reader and writer, social, cultural and racial pluralism. We are entering an era of therapeutic co-constructionism - far removed from the ex- cathedra interpretations of classical therapy - where therapist and patient collaboratively build up a picture of their world and history. We have moved, perhaps, from the father principle, through the maternal, to the era of the sibling, in which, however different in their roles, there is a fundamental symmetry between patient and therapist.
This brings us to a concluding note about the nature of biography. A biographer is, in a sense, both patient and therapist
10 John Bowlby and Attachment Theory
in relation to the person he chooses to write about. As Gathorne- Hardy (1992) points out, there is an inevitable positive transference to one's subject; how else could one justify the long hours spent (far exceeding any psychoanalysis, however interminable) reading, studying, thinking about them? Biographers identify with their subjects, just as patients identify with their therapists, and see them in a way that is inevitably influenced and may be biased by their own themes and preoccupations. At the same time, biographers as 'therapists' have an opportunity to see their subjects as they really are: but with that privilege must also take into account their own counter-transferential tendencies towards voyeurism, prurience, envy, denigration and idealisation. Biographers should approach their subjects in the same spirit in which therapists see their patients: compassionately without becoming over-involved, with objectivity but without excessive detachment, with a sense of the uniqueness and specialness of the individual but without indulgence. The aim of this book is to form a working alliance with Attachment Theory and its originator - to see them in their strengths and limitations, their possibilities and blind spots. Although this book is not primarily a biography, some biographical preliminaries are therefore inevitably needed and it is to them that we must now turn.
Part Origins
Chapter 2 Biographical
Parents, especially mothers, are much-maligned people. (Bowlby 1988a)
A family photograph, taken just before the First World War, shows Lady Bowlby surrounded by her six children. Her husband, Sir Anthony, the King's surgeon, is not there - he is, as usual, at work. She is flanked by her two favourite sons, John and Tony, aged about four and five, looking boldly and brightly into the camera. On her lap sits the baby Evelyn. The two older girls, aged eight and eleven, stand dutifully and demurely to one side. Finally there is two-year-old Jim, the weak member of the family, dubbed a 'late developer', lacking the physical and intellectual vigour of his brothers and sisters. A hand appears around his waist, partly propping him up. But whose hand can it be? Is it his mother's? No, hers are firmly around the baby - a rare moment of physical closeness, as it turned out. Can it be one of his older sisters? No, their hands are politely by their sides. It is in fact the hand of an invisible nurse, crouching behind the tableau vivant, the tiny and perfectionist 'Nanna Friend' who, with the nursemaids and governess, provided the child care in this fairly typical example of the English haute bourgeoisie on the threshold of the modern era.
Bowlby was notoriously reticent about his background and early family life. In the Adult Attachment Interview (see Chapter 6) he might have been rated as 'dismissive', giving the kind of response in which a person describes their childhood as 'perfectly all right' and refuses to be drawn further - a pattern that is strongly correlated with an insecure-avoidant pattern of attachment. But, as his book on Darwin testifies, Bowlby found the task of psychobiography worthwhile, making a strong case
14 Origins
for considering Darwin's recurrent anxiety attacks as a manifestation of his inability to grieve loss, the pattern for which was set by his mother's death when he was eight. Whereas the main purpose of this book is an exposition of Attachment Theory, the aim of this chapter is to consider Bowlby's life and personality as a background to his ideas and to explore the relationship between them. The chapter is divided into three parts: the first is a chronological account of his life and career, touching on much that will be developed in subsequent chapters; the second consists of an assessment of his character, based on reminiscences of his family, friends and colleagues; and the third considers some of the major personal themes and preoccupations which inform Bowlby's work.
BOWLBY'S LIFE Childhood and youth
Edward John Mostyn Bowlby was born on 26 February 1907. His father, whom he resembled in many ways, was Major-General Sir Anthony Bowlby (1855-1929), a successful London surgeon who had operated on one of Queen Victoria's sons, and was rewarded with a knighthood for his appointments as Royal Surgeon to King Edward VII and King George V, and a baronetcy on becoming President of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1920. John's grandfather, 'Thomas Bowlby of The Times', was a foreign correspondent for The Times who was murdered in Peking in 1861 during the Opium Wars when Sir Anthony was a small child. Anthony felt responsible for his mother, who did not remarry, and he only began to look for a wife after her death when he was forty. He was introduced by a mutual friend at a house party to the well-connected May Mostyn, then thirty, and pursued her (mainly on bicycles - they shared a love of the countryside and outdoor life) until they were married less than a year later. The train of May's wedding dress was embroidered with violets in deference to her dead mother-in-law as the statutory period of mourning had not yet passed. May was the eldest daughter of the Hon. Hugh Mostyn, who, despite grand origins (he was the youngest child, of ten, of Lord Mostyn of Mostyn in North Wales), was content to be a country parson in a remote Hunting-donshire village for all his working life. Bowlby's mother
Biographical 15
revered her father ('Grampy' in the Bowlby household) and invoked him as a model for all acceptable behaviour. She had little time for her mother, whom, when she was not having babies (May resented her numerous younger brothers and sisters and considered that first-borns were the only ones who really mattered) she described as 'always in the kitchen'.
John's parents were well into middle age by the time he was born: his mother forty, his father fifty-two. Each had had a special relationship with one parent and may have found the very different atmosphere of a large and vigorous family overwhelming. May had resented the demands of her younger brothers and sisters, and Sir Anthony was used to his bachelor ways. In any case, like many parents of their class and generation, they mainly entrusted the upbringing of their children to their numerous servants.
The children fell into three groups by age: the two older girls, Winnie and Marion, who were talented musicians from an early age; Tony and John, only 13 months apart; then Jim and Evelyn. Tony was their mother's clear favourite and could get away with almost anything. He later became a successful industrialist, and as eldest son inherited his father's title. John and Tony were close in age and temperament, good friends, but extremely rivalrous. They were treated as twins - put in the same clothes and in the same class at school. This meant that John was always making superhuman efforts to overtake his brother, who was equally as keen to retain his advantage. (Years later as a parent John would be renowned in the family for resisting his children's clamouring demands with the phrase, 'Now, don't bully me, don't bully me'. ) They both teased and were concerned about their slightly backward brother Jim. John read delightedly in a newspaper about the miraculous effects of 'monkey gland extract' (presumably thyroxine), hoping that it would be the answer to their brother's difficulties, but of course they were disappointed. Jim struggled throughout his life, farmed not very successfully for a while and never married. It seemed contrary to the Bowlby spirit to have a family member who was not a 'success'. John's combination of competitiveness and his concern for disadvantaged and sick children may be not unrelated to his position between these two very different brothers. At fifteen he fought and defeated Tony when he discovered that he had destroyed a picture that Jim had made
16 Origins
out of dried flowers. The two older sisters did not marry. According to John, 'the men they might have married were killed in the First World War' (Bowlby et al. 1986) - a curiously unpsychological explanation. Evelyn shared her brother's interest in psychoanalysis. She married the distinguished economist Professor Sir Henry Phelps Brown. Their daughter Juliet Hopkins is a child psychotherapist at the Tavistock Clinic.
Bowlby describes his family as a 'straightforward, fairly close - not all that close - but fairly close, professional class family living a pretty traditional lifestyle, with nurses of course' (Bowlby in Hunter 1991). Nanny Friend, whose hand appears in the photograph, joined the family when John's older sister Winnie was one month old and after the children were grown up stayed with Lady Bowlby until she died at the age of ninety- seven. She was highly intelligent and well read, a disciplinarian, whose firm regime would occasionally be lightened by her capacity for entrancing and elaborate story-telling and by reading Dickens to the children in the nursery.
Evelyn remembers life in their London house in Manchester Square as rather joyless - regulated by order, innumerable clocks, a sense of propriety, humourless governesses, and interminable slow processional walks in nearby Hyde Park. Tony, in contrast, describes a happy childhood. The reality perhaps was that they had two childhoods - one in the country and one in the town. Lady Bowlby boasted that she never worried about her children and, especially in London, left them mostly to their own devices. She would visit the nursery to receive a report from Nanny after breakfast every day, and the children, clean and brushed, would come down to the drawing room from 5 to 6 p. m. after tea, where she would read to them, especially from her beloved Children of the New Forest. May Mostyn had vowed that she would never marry a 'city man', and Sir Anthony loved fishing and shooting. Every spring and summer there was a ritual of family holidays. At Easter the children were dispatched to Margate with the nurses while Sir Anthony and Lady Bowlby went to Scotland for fishing. In July May would take the children to the New Forest, in those days a wild and idyllic place. For the whole of August and half of September the entire family decamped to Ayrshire in Scotland, travelling by train in a specially hired railway carriage. (Sir Anthony and Lady Bowlby never owned a car: he used a
Biographical 17
brougham for his rounds in London and after his death she would travel around Gloucestershire in pony and trap well into the 1950s.
)
On holiday John's mother seemed to come alive and, as 'Grampy' had done with her, ensured that her children were well versed in nature and country sports. From her and 'Grampy' they learned to identify flowers, birds and butterflies, to fish, ride and shoot, and John and Tony became and remained passionate naturalists. Sir Anthony seemed to be a fairly remote and intimidating figure, especially in London, but he gave the children special animal nicknames: John was known as 'Jack' the jackal (other nursery nicknames for John were 'Bogey' and the prophetic 'Admiral Sir Nosey Know-all'); Tony was 'Gorilla'; Evelyn 'Cat'. They saw little of him during the week but would walk with him in family procession across Hyde Park most Sundays to church, when he would instruct and occasionally amuse them with his deep factual knowledge about the world and its ways.
The war came in 1914 when John was seven. John and his elder brother were immediately dispatched to boarding school, because of the supposed danger of air raids on London. John later maintained that this was just an excuse, being merely the traditional first step in the time-honoured barbarism required to produce English gentlemen. The English preparatory school system took its toll: John was beaten for defining a 'cape' in a geography lesson as a cloak rather than a promontory, but, a resilient and self-assured little boy, he flourished. Sir Anthony was away in France as a surgeon-general for most of the war. When the war came to an end, John went as naval cadet to Dartmouth where he learned to sail, and gained a discipline and organisation which lasted a lifetime. Tony was destined to follow in his father's footsteps and become a surgeon, but he decided against this in his teens, feeling that it would mean 'failure' since he could never equal his father's eminence. This left the way clear for John to go into medicine, who, despite having passed out top in his Dartmouth exams, was already dissatisfied with the narrow intellectual horizons and rigidity of the Navy (as he was to become two decades later with the British Psycho-Analytical Society), as well as suffering badly from seasickness! Somewhat to John's surprise, Sir Anthony agreed to buy him out. Although not driven by a strong
18 Origins
vocational pull, John felt that a medical career would be least unacceptable to his father and, together with a close Dartmouth friend, applied to Cambridge and duly entered Trinity college as a medical student in 1925. His intellectual distinction was already in evidence at university where he won several prizes and gained a first class degree in pre-clinical sciences and psychology.
Already mature and independent-minded, with an 'inner calm' (Phelps Brown 1992) that was to stand him good stead throughout his life, John's next move proved decisive. Rather than going straight on to London to study clinical medicine, which would have been the conventional thing to do, he got a job instead in a progressive school for maladjusted children, an offshoot of A. S. Neill's Summerhill. His father, who would undoubtedly have opposed such a move, had, in John's words 'fortunately' already died when John was twenty-one, so he was free to chart his own course. At the school he had two sets of experiences which were to influence the whole course of his professional life. The first was the encounter with disturbed children, with whom he found he could communicate, and whose difficulties seemed to be related to their unhappy and disrupted childhood. Like one of Lorenz's (1952) greylag geese, who were to play such an important part in the development of Attachment Theory, one boy followed Bowlby round wherever he went:
There I had known an adolescent boy who had been thrown out of a public school for repeated stealing. Although socially conforming he made no friends and seemed emotionally isolated - from adults and peers alike. Those in charge attributed his condition to his never having been cared for during his early years by any one motherly person, a result of his illegitimate birth. Thus I was alerted to a possible connection between prolonged deprivation and the development of a personality apparently incapable of making affectional bonds and, because immune to praise and blame, prone to repeated delinquencies.
(Bowlby 1981a)
The second seminal encounter at the school was with another man working there, John Alford, who had had some personal therapy, and who advised John to go to London to train as a psychoanalyst.
Biographical 19
Psychoanalytical training
In the autumn of 1929, aged twenty-two, John came to London, to start his medical studies. He found these so tedious and wearisome that he started and managed 'Bogey's Bar', a sandwich bar patronised by his friends. While at University College Hospital (which was, and has remained, a home for would-be psychoanalysts wanting to acquire a medical degree) he entered the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, going into analysis with Mrs Riviere, a close friend and associate of Melanie Klein. His intention was to become a child psychiatrist, a profession which was then just emerging. After medical qualification in 1933, he went to the Maudsley to train in adult psychiatry, and then was appointed in 1936 to the London Child Guidance Clinic, where he worked until he became an Army psychiatrist in 1940.
The 1930s were a time of intellectual ferment. Progressive thought centred on Freud and Marx. Bettelheim vividly captures the atmosphere of debate:
In order to create the good society, was it of first importance to change society radically enough for all persons to achieve full self- realisation? In this case psychoanalysis could be discarded, with the possible exception of a few deranged persons. Or was this the wrong approach, and could persons who had achieved full personal liberation and integration by being psychoanalysed create such a good society? In the latter case the correct thing was to forget for the time being any social or economic revolution and to concentrate instead on pushing psychoanalysis; the hope was that once the majority of men had profited from its inner liberation they would almost automatically create the good society for themselves and all others.
(Bettelheim 1960)
Although by nature irreverent and at times iconoclastic, Bowlby tempered his rebelliousness with a belief in science and the need for evidence to back up ideas. He shared a house with his friend the Labour politician and academic Evan Durbin, who challenged his newly acquired psychoanalytic ideas - as did Aubrey Lewis at the Maudsley. While he believed in the practical efficacy of psychoanalysis, he was always sceptical about its theoretical basis. He came into conflict with his first psychoanalytical supervisor, 'a rather prim old maid . . . we never seemed to be on the same
20 Origins
wavelength' (Bowlby 1991), but got on very well with his next, Ella Sharpe, who supported Anna Freud against Klein in the 'Controversial Discussions', 'a warm hearted middle-aged woman who had a good understanding of human nature and a sense of humour' (Bowlby 1991). He qualified as an analyst in 1937, and immediately started training in child analysis with Mrs Klein as his supervisor. Here too there was conflict, especially when Bowlby felt that she paid insufficient attention to the part played by the environment in causing his patient's disturbance - in this case a hyperactive little boy of three whose mother was having a breakdown and had been admitted to mental hospital.
Meanwhile, Bowlby was beginning to develop his own ideas, based mainly on his experience at the Child Guidance Clinic. There he worked with two analytically orientated social workers who introduced him to the idea of the transgenerational transmission of neurosis in which unresolved problems from a parent's own childhood can play a large part in causing and perpetuating the problems of their children.
I was particularly struck by two cases, one of sibling rivalry in which the mother had herself been intensely jealous of her sister, and the other in which a father was deeply troubled by his seven-year-old son's masturbation and had dipped him under a cold tap whenever he found him touching his genitals, and who, it transpired, had himself fought an unsuccessful battle against masturbation all his life.
(Bowlby 1977)
With his stress on the role of the environment in causing psychological difficulty, Bowlby was aligned with a group of British psychiatrists who, while influenced by Freud and sympathetic to the analytic cause, also maintained some distance from it. These included David Eder, a left-wing intellectual associated with the Bloomsbury Group; Bernard Hart, psychiatrist at University College Hospital, whose influential Psychology of Insanity Bowlby would certainly have read; W. H. Rivers, famous as an anthropologist as well as psychiatrist, who had applied Freud's ideas to victims of shell-shock in the First World War and who felt that the self-preservative instinct was as important as Freud's sexuality; and, above all, Ian Suttie, whose Origins of Love and Hate proposed a primary bond between mother and child, unrelated to infantile sexuality (Heard 1986; Pines 1991;
Biographical 21
Newcombe and Lerner 1982), an idea which, as we shall see in Chapter 4, Bowlby was to develop and put at the heart of Attachment Theory.
In order to qualify as a full member with voting rights in the analytic society Bowlby had to read a paper. Many of his later ideas are to be found in embryonic form in 'The influence of the environment in the development of neuroses and neurotic character', which was published in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis in 1940. It consists of a description of cases treated in the Child Guidance Clinic. He emphasises the scientific value of such one-weekly 'clinic cases' to complement more intensive analytic work. He boldly puts forward a 'general theory of the genesis of neurosis', in which environmental factors in the early years of a child's life are causative, especially separation from the mother through death or 'broken home'. He explicitly challenges the Kleinian view - actually something of a caricature, a product of the polarisation within the Society at that time, since Kleinians have never entirely denied the importance of the environment - that childhood phantasy is unrelated to actual experience: 'Much has been written about the introjection of phantastically severe parents, an imaginary severity being itself the product of projection. Less perhaps has been written recently about the introjection of the parents' real characters' (Bowlby 1940a). He cautions against unnecessary separation of children from parents - 'if a child must be in hospital the mother should be encouraged to visit daily' - and insists that
If it became a tradition that small children were never subjected to complete or prolonged separation from their parents in the same way that regular sleep and orange juice have become nursery traditions, I believe that many cases of neurotic character development would be avoided.
(Bowlby 1940a)
He advocates working with the mothers of disturbed children so as to elucidate their own childhood difficulties which are interfering with their role as parents, and thereby helping them to feel less guilty. A second paper, 'Forty-four juvenile thieves, their characters and home life' (which led to Bowlby's wartime nickname of Ali Bowlby and his Forty Thieves), was also based on his work in the Child Guidance Clinic and continues the same ideas in a more systematic way. His capacity for coining a telling phrase emerges in his notion of the 'affectionless psychopath' - a
22 Origins
juvenile thief for whom the lack of good and continuous childhood care has created in him (it almost always is a him) an absence of concern for others.
In this early work Bowlby shows a strong reforming drive: he saw psychotherapy as preventative medicine which would help to change not just individuals but also society. But he would not have accepted Bettelheim's view that one had to choose between Marx or Freud, nor was he prepared to swallow either whole. His attitude towards extremism, whether Kleinian or communist, might be compared with A. S. Neill's account of a wedding he had attended:
Filled with followers of Melanie Klein . . . they can't laugh; Melanie has evidently shown them humour is a complex which no normal man should have. To my asking what Klein was doing to prevent complexes there was a silence. I said: you can't analyse humanity but you can attempt to get a humanity that won't need analysis. No answer. Gott, they were a dull crowd. . . . Rather like talking to communists with a blank curtain that you could not penetrate.
(Grosskurth 1986)
Several of John's friends of both sexes were acquired through his more sociable older brother. Tony shared a 'staircase' at Oxford with Evan Durbin, later to become a minister in the post-war Attlee labour administration. Similar in physique, intelligence and temperament, he and John soon struck up a close friendship, based on shared intellectual interests and a love of walking (it was hard to keep up with them as they strode rapidly through the Cotswolds, deep in conversation). They collaborated in their book Personal Aggressiveness and War (Durbin and Bowlby 1938). In Bowlby's contribution we see again later talents and themes prefigured. He introduces psychoanalytic ideas in a common-sense (if slightly old-fashioned) way: in exemplifying the concept of unconscious aggression he ways, 'It is impossible to criticise some maids without paying for it in breakages. Plates "come apart in my hands" far more frequently after the maid has been reprimanded than when she has been praised' (Durbin and Bowlby 1938). He surveys the literature on aggression in apes and other higher mammals drawing parallels with human behaviour, just as he was to do in the 1950s when he applied ethological ideas to
Biographical 23
mother-infant behaviour. He also subjects Marxist ideas about war to the same critical scrutiny with which he had approached psychoanalysis as an ideology, pointing out the dangers of any global theory of human behaviour.
Bowlby's friendship with Durbin continued until the latter's untimely death by drowning while on holiday in Cornwall in the late 1940s. Bowlby, who was on holiday nearby, was called in to help and in his typically practical way immediately organised with Durbin's close parliamentary colleagues a trust fund which supported the Durbin children through their education. Durbin's death was the most overwhelming loss of John's life, and certainly influenced his interest in the themes of grief and loss which were to figure so centrally in his work.
The war years
Bowlby volunteered in 1940 at the age of thirty-three, but was not called up and joined instead a group of Army psychiatrists whose main job was, by using statistical and psychotherapeutic methods, to put officer selection on a scientific footing - to put, as it was said, the 'chi' into psychiatry. His organisational and intellectual qualities soon showed themselves and he worked closely with members of the 'invisible college' (Pines 1991) of psychoanalytic soldiers like Wilfred Bion, Eric Trist and Jock Sutherland on the selection boards.
By 1944 the War Office had established a Research and Training Unit in Hampstead, of which Bowlby was a member. This enabled him to continue active participation in the affairs of the Psychoanalytic Society, riven at that time by factional fighting between the Kleinian and Freudian groups. Emerging from the 'Controversial Discussions' these differences were contained by the 'gentlemen'sagreement'betweenthetwoladies,AnnaFreudandMelanieKlein. Thisestablishedtwotrainingstreams:'A',theFreudians,and'B',whichcomprised the Kleinians and 'Independents' (who later split off as a separate 'middle group' of which Bowlby was a member). The President of the Society, Sylvia Payne, herself an Independent, proposed Bowlby as Training Secretary in 1944, and despitenotbeingaTrainingAnalyst,andagainststrongoppositionfromMelanie Klein, his balance and organisational ability were recognised, and he was duly elected. Bowlby'spassionateanduncompromisingfeelingsweremuchinevidence at meetings of the Psycho-Analytic Society during that period. As well as the Klein-Freudsplittherewasamoregeneraldivisionabouttheaimsandmethods oftheSociety. UnderJones'sandlaterGlover'sleadershiptheSocietyhadadopted
24 Origins
something of the features of a secret cell: purist, esoteric, autocratically led, unwilling to sully itself with anything but the 'pure gold' of psychoanalysis, and refusing to have anything to do with the analytic fellow travellers represented by the Tavistock Clinic, who included several Christian psychiatrists like J. R. Rees and Suttie, and which was referred to contemptuously by the psychoanalysts as the'parson'sclinic'(Pines1991). AllthiswasanathematoBowlby,whobelieved in democratic methods and was appalled by what he saw as the Society's indifference towards the emergence of a National Health Service which was clearly going to be established after the war. He advocated full participation in the discussions between the Government and the medical profession:
We find ourselves in a rapidly changing world and yet, as a Society, we have done nothing, I repeat nothing, to meet these changes, to influence them or to adapt to them. That is not the reaction of a living organism but a moribund one. If our Society died of inertia it would only have met the fate it had invited.
(King and Steiner 1990)
Bowlby and the progressives carried the day, and Bowlby was delegated as a member of the Government's Mental Health Standing Committee, where he proceeded to have the same effect on the civil servants as he did on the older members of the Society, and he was described in a Whitehall report as 'a "live" member, with embarrassing enthusiasm for his own speciality. An advanced theorist who does not always give weight to practical considerations' (Webster 1991).
Family life
Tony Bowlby married young: a beautiful musician and actress whom he met through his sisters who were at the Royal Academy of Music. John had had several tempestuous liaisons, but as his analysis progressed and he approached his thirties, began to wish to settle down. On holiday in the New Forest he encountered the Longstaffs, a family of seven attractive daughters living with their pipe-smoking mother whose father, Dr Longstaff, the famous alpinist, had abandoned her for a younger woman. Ursula, the third daughter, intelligent and beautiful but more diffident than her older sisters, attracted his interest. On a shooting holiday in Ireland she and John fell for each other. They were married in 1938. John, like his father, was some ten years older than his
Biographical 25
bride. Ursula proved a devoted and loyal companion. Although highly intelligent and literate, she had no knowledge of psychology, and claims not to have read any of his books except the biography of Darwin on which she collaborated extensively. She also helped to supply the quotations for the chapter headings in the 'trilogy'.
The Bowlbys had four children, the day-to-day care of whom John left almost entirely to Ursula. The family was afflicted by dyslexia, a condition unrecognised at the time, and his children's academic difficulties were a source of some sorrow and frustration to their father, although they were fully compensated by their practical and technical abilities. John had had little experience of close parent-child relationships, and found fatherhood a difficult role. He was, by contrast, in his daughter Mary's words, a 'brilliant grandfather' ('Grampy's' good influence making itself felt again) - tolerant, funny and adoring. John and Ursula's grandson, Ben, in the Bowlby tradition of independence and originality, received first-class honours in engineering for designing and building his own racing car - an 'external working model' (see Chapter 4). John, a slightly remote father, followed his own father's tradition of hard work and long holidays, so much so that his eldest son asked, around the age of seven, 'Is Daddy a burglar? He always comes home after dark and never talks about his work! ' Family holidays were in Scotland, and a house was first rented and then bought on Skye where John, Ursula and the children could enjoy the walking, boating, bird-watching, shooting and fishing in beautiful and remote surroundings that repeated the pattern of his own childhood.
The Bowlbys and the Durbins had shared a house in York Terrace (where Adrian and Karen Stephens and Ernest Jones had their consulting rooms). This pattern was continued after the war when John's democratic ideas and recognition of the benefits of an extended network of friends and family when bringing up small children were realised, when he and Ursula and their growing family shared a large house in Hampstead with the Sutherlands (Jock Sutherland was soon to become director of the Tavistock Clinic) and with a young psychologist, later to become Mrs Mattie Harris, who became organising tutor of the child psychotherapy training programme at the Tavistock (Sutherland 1991).
26 Origins
The post-war years: the Tavistock Clinic
Immediately after the war the 'invisible college' of Army psychoanalysts re-grouped themselves around the Tavistock Clinic, hitherto ruled out of bounds by the autocratic Jones. An election was held and, although neither had previously worked there, Jock Sutherland was elected Director, with Bowlby as Deputy, given the specific task of developing a Department for Children.
John went about this with his usual energy, efficiency and determination. He established a clinical service, treating patients, seeing mothers and children together, spending one day a week in a well-baby clinic, supervising, and chairing case conferences. Together with Esther Bick he set up the child psychotherapy training and continued to support it, even when its Kleinian orientation began to diverge sharply from his own views.
About a third of his week was devoted to clinical and administrative duties. The rest was for research. One of John's unsung qualities was his ability to raise research funds. On the basis of his pre-war experiences in the Child Guidance Clinic, he had decided to make a systematic study of the effects of separation on the personality development of young children. He recruited James Robertson, a conscientious objector in the war who had worked as a boilerman in Anna Freud's Hampstead residential children's nursery, and who later became an analyst and filmmaker. Mary Ainsworth, later to become the co-founder of Attachment Theory, also joined the team, as did Mary Boston. The outcome of Bowlby's collaboration with Robertson was the famous film A Two-year-old Goes to Hospital, which showed the intense distress of a small child separated from her mother, made with a hand- held cine-camera without artificial light, almost impossible to watch dry-eyed, and which did so much to liberalise hospital visiting rules. As mentioned in the previous chapter, the film met with a mixed reception when shown to the Psycho-Analytical Society, the Kleinians being particularly unimpressed, a foretaste of the response Bowlby was to meet when he presented his breakthrough papers on Attachment Theory a few years later.
Bowlby's research interests, together with his Forty-four Thieves paper, made him an obvious choice when the World Health Organisation was looking for an expert to prepare a report on the mental health of homeless children. Bowlby travelled widely
Biographical 27
in Europe and the United States, meeting the leading figures in child development, and combined their views with his own in a review of the world literature, Maternal Care and Mental Health (Bowlby 1951). This was published in a popular edition as Child Care and the Growth of Love (Bowlby 1953), which became an instant best-seller, selling 450,000 in the English edition alone, and was translated into ten different languages.
Bowlby's reputation was by now secure and he was able to follow his innovative instincts without anxiety. He was keen to break down the ivory towerism of the Tavistock and to foster links with local health visitors, GPs and social workers. His efforts to establish liaison were blocked until the Minister of Health issued a directive asking the London County Council to pay more attention to mental health. The Chief Medical Officer of the LCC invited Bowlby to give a lecture on the subject. He refused, saying that mental health could not be properly taught by didactic methods, but offering to join a study group if one were set up. A week later he received a message from the Chief Medical Officer: 'Your "study group" is ready. When would you like to start? ' (Mackenzie 1991).
Ainsworth (1982) believes that the idea of attachment came to Bowlby 'in a flash' when in 1952 he heard about and then read Lorenz's and Tinbergen's work in ethology, having been lent an advance copy of King Solomon's Ring by Julian Huxley. The ethological approach provided the scientific grounding that Bowlby believed was needed to update psychoanalytic theory. Seen psychobiographically, Attachment Theory might be seen as a return by Bowlby to the values of his mother which he had rejected when he became a psychoanalyst. Disappointed with his mother's self-preoccupations and favouritism, he turned to the many mothers of psychoanalysis - Klein, Riviere, Payne. But these too, partly through their own limitations, partly because they contained his hostile projections, disappointed in their turn. By marrying the biology of ethology with Freudian theory, he managed to reconcile the discordant elements in his personality: his country-loving mother with her respect for nature, and the intimidating urban medical father whose success and intelligence were inspirational but whose Gradgrindian devotion to fact and duty dominated his life. Bowlby soon organised regular attachment seminars which were attended by a talented and eclectic group including the ethologist Robert Hinde and, for a
28 Origins
time, R. D. Laing. A year as a fellow at the Centre for Behavioural Sciences in Stanford, California, gave him an opportunity to reread Freud and to prepare the breakthrough papers of the late 1950s, starting with 'The nature of the child's tie to his mother' (Bowlby 1958).
Bowlby remained active in the Psycho-Analytical Society in the post-war years. He was Deputy President to Donald Winnicott between 1956 and 1961, responsible for 'everything administrative' (Bowlby 1991). He set up and chaired the Research Committee, and initiated several other committees, including the Public Relations Committee; a committee to look at indemnity insurance for non-medical members (typical of Bowlby to be alert to the possible hazards to members uncushioned by the secure base of medicine); and the Curriculum Committee (set up to prevent trainings becoming interminable - another typically practical move).
While the society was happy to benefit from his organisational skills, Bowlby's theoretical papers, presented between 1957 and 1959, excited considerable discussion but little enthusiasm, and were received by the Kleinians with outright hostility. Typical comments were: from Guntrip, 'I think it is very good for an eminent psychoanalyst to have gone thoroughly into the relation of ethology to psychoanalysis, but my impression is that he succeeds in using it to explain everything in human behaviour except what is of vital importance for psychoanalysis' - (1962, letter to Marjorie Brierley, in Archives, Institute of Psychoanalysis); from Winnicott, although generally friendly and sympathetic to Bowlby's contribution (Malan 1991), 'I can't quite make out why it is that Bowlby's papers are building up in me a kind of revulsion although in fact he has been scrupulously fair to me in my writings'; and, from an anonymous analyst, 'Bowlby? Give me Barabbas' (Grosskurth 1986). The analysts found his patrician manner and 'orotund' (Rycroft 1992) delivery offputting, although these may well have been exaggerated in the intimidating atmosphere of the Psycho-Analytical Society at the time. Bowlby had an impish quality and a capacity for amusing tomfoolery which was clearly not evident to the analysts. Whether Bowlby did indeed betray psychoanalysis, or breathed new life into it, will form much of the discussion in subsequent chapters.
Biographical 29
The trilogy
Partly no doubt because of his hostile reception, and partly because of his growing reputation elsewhere, Bowlby spent little time in the Psycho-Analytical Society after the mid-1960s although, unlike other distinguished dissidents such as Rycroft and Meltzer, he did not discontinue his membership. While continuing his clinical role at the Tavistock, in 1963 he became a part-time member of the Medical Research Council, which enabled him to devote yet more time to writing. The years 1964 to 1979 were devoted to his monumental trilogy Attachment (1969b), Separation (1973a), and Loss (1980). These have also been bestsellers, with the first volume selling well over 100,000, the second 75,000, and the third 45,000 (Bowlby et al. 1986). Colin Murray Parkes and Dorothy Heard joined him at the Tavistock in the 1960s. Like Bowlby, Parkes had been struck by the relevance of Darwin's ideas about grief to abnormal mourning, and a fruitful partnership developed (Parkes 1964, 1971, 1975). Bowlby was much in demand as a lecturer, especially in the United States where, through the work of Ainsworth (1969), Attachment Theory was exciting increasing interest.
Bowlby held numerous important positions and consultancies, and received many honours, including the CBE, Honorary Doctorates at Cambridge and Leicester, Honorary Fellowships of the Royal Society of Medicine and College of Psychiatrists, Fellowship of the British Academy, and several Distinguished Scientist awards and medals in the United States, including that of the American Psychological Association. As befits an innovator and original thinker, he was probably slightly more honoured abroad than at home, and neither received a knighthood nor became an FRS, both of which many thought were his due (Kraemer 1991). He did, however, do 'better' than his lifelong friend and rival, his brother Tony.
He retired from the NHS and the MRC in 1972, but remained at the Tavistock Clinic, dividing his time between London and his beloved Skye. He continued to encourage students and to receive many foreign visitors. During 1980 he was Freud Memorial Professor of Psychoanalysis at University College London, a post which gave him great satisfaction. His lectures from there and his trips abroad were collected in The Making and Breaking of Affectional Bonds (1979c) and A Secure Base (1988a). Mentally and
30 Origins
physically active as ever, he began an entirely new project in his seventies, a psychobiography of Darwin (Bowlby 1990), which was published a few months before his death, and was well reviewed.
His eightieth birthday was celebrated in London with a conference with many distinguished speakers from around the world. The affection he inspired was palpable, as, garlanded with flowers, he embraced his many friends and colleagues to loud claps and cheers. A few weeks later he collapsed unconscious with a cardiac arrhythmia, but made a complete recovery, and was able to finish the Darwin biography. Three years later he suffered a stroke, while in Skye with his family, who had gathered as they did every year for the Skye Ball, where John had been a skilled exponent of Scottish reels. He died a few days later on 2 September 1990, and was buried at Trumpan on the Waternish peninsula, a hillside graveyard overlooking the cliffs of Waternish and the Ardmore peninsula. It was a favourite spot, wild and remote, from which John, with his great feeling for nature, often used to walk, and he had asked to be buried there. He had a traditional Skye funeral with three 'lifts' from the hearse to the grave. His friend Hyla Holden, a former Tavistock colleague, one of the bearers, concludes: 'his funeral and burial were in keeping with the straight-forward and loving simplicity which lay behind his formidable intellect' (Trowell 1991). His constancy and steadfastness of purpose are celebrated in the inscription on the headstone of pale grey Aberdeen granite, which reads: 'To be a pilgrim'.
BOWLBY THE MAN
What was John Bowlby like? In his work his greatest achievement was his bringing together of psychoanalysis and, via ethology, evolutionary biology.