Career
In an interview with Dr. Milton Stenn in 1977, Bowlby explained that his career started off in the medical direction as he was following in his surgeon father's footsteps. His father was a well-known surgeon in London and Bowlby explained that he was encouraged by his father to study medicine at Cambridge. Therefore, he followed his father's suggestion, but was not fully interested in the lessons in anatomy and natural sciences that he was reading about. However, during his time at Trinity College, he became particularly interested in developmental psychology, which led him to give up medicine by his third year. When Bowlby gave up medicine, he took a teaching opportunity at a school called Priory Gates for six months where he worked with maladjusted children. Bowlby explained that one of the reasons why he went to work at Priory Gates was because of an intelligent staff member, John Alford. Bowlby explained that the experience at Priory Gates was extremely influential on him "It suited me very well because I found it interesting. And when I was there, I learned everything that I have known; it was the most valuable six months of my life, really. It was analytically oriented". He further explained that the experience at Priory Gates was extremely influential to his career in research as he learned that the problems of today should be understood and dealt with at a developmental level.
Bowlby studied psychology and pre-clinical sciences at Trinity College, Cambridge, winning prizes for outstanding intellectual performance. After Cambridge, he worked with maladjusted and delinquent children until, at the age of twenty-two, he enrolled at University College Hospital in London. At twenty-six, he qualified in medicine. While still in medical school, he enrolled himself in the Institute for Psychoanalysis. Following medical school, he trained in adult psychiatry at the Maudsley Hospital. In 1936, aged 30, he qualified as a psychoanalyst.
During the first six months of World War II, Bowlby worked at the London Child Guidance clinic in Canonbury as a physician. Later on in the war, Bowlby became a lieutenant colonel in the Royal Army Medical Corps, where he conducted research on psychological methods of officer selection (which contributed to the creation of War Office Selection Boards) and where he came into contact with members of the Tavistock Clinic. Alongside his job in the Royal Army Medical Corps, Bowlby explained that he also worked for the Emergency Medical Services (EMS) during the months of May and June in 1940 where he dealt with tragic war neurosis cases. Additionally, the children that were being treated at the Canonbury clinic were evacuated to the child guidance clinic in Cambridge, due to the air raids from the War. Bowlby explained in an interview that he spent time going back and forth from Cambridge to London, where he would see patients in private. From this experience, Bowlby was able to work with several children at Cambridge that were evacuated from London and separated from their families and nannies. This actually extended his research on separation that he was focused on pre-war.
During the first winter of World War II, Bowlby began working on his first published work Forty-four Juvenile Thieves. Although he began working on this book at the beginning of the Second World War, it was not published until 1944. Bowlby studied several children during his time at the Canonbury clinic, and developed a research project based on case studies of the children's behaviors and family histories. Bowlby examined 44 delinquent children from Canonbury who had a history of stealing and compared them to "controls" from Canonbury that were being treated for various reasons but did not have a history of stealing. Bowlby categorized the delinquent children into six different character types which included: normal, depressed, circular, hyperthymic, affectionless, and schizoid.
One of Bowlby's main findings through his research with these children was that 17 out of the 44 thieves experienced early and prolonged separation (six months or more) from their primary caregiver before the age of five. In comparison, only two out of the 44 children who did not steal had experienced prolonged separation from their primary caregiver before the age of five. More specifically, Bowlby found that 12 out of the 14 children who were categorized as affectionless were found to have experienced complete and prolonged separation before the age of five. These findings were important and brought more attention to the impact of early environmental experiences on healthy child development.
After the war, he was deputy director of the Tavistock Clinic, and from 1950, Mental Health Consultant to the World Health Organization.
Because of his previous work with maladapted and delinquent children, he became interested in the development of children and returned to work at the London Child Guidance Clinic in Islington. His interest was probably increased by a variety of wartime events involving separation of young children from familiar people. These included the rescue of Jewish children by the Kindertransport arrangements, the evacuation of children from London to keep them safe from air raids, and the use of group nurseries to allow mothers of young children to contribute to the war effort. Bowlby was interested from the beginning of his career in the problem of separation, the wartime work of Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham on evacuees, and the work of René Spitz with orphans.
By the late 1950s, he had accumulated a body of observational and theoretical work to indicate the fundamental importance for human development of attachment from birth. He contributed evidence to the Platt Report 1959 about how separation from mother whilst in hospital could be harmful to children.
Bowlby was interested in finding out the patterns of family interaction involved in both healthy and pathological development. He focused on how attachment difficulties were transmitted from one generation to the next. In his development of attachment theory, he proposed the idea that attachment behaviour was an evolutionary survival strategy for protecting the infant from predators. Mary Ainsworth joined Bowlby's research unit at Tavistock and further extended and tested his ideas. She played the primary role in suggesting that several attachment styles existed.
Seven important experiences for Bowlby's future work and the development of attachment theory were:
Bowlby's teaching experience at Priory Gates School, where he worked with maladapted and delinquent children.
His opportunity to work with children who were evacuated from their families due to the war, leading to his work on the forty-four juvenile thieves.
The addition of an ethology perspective to his thoughts and observations of mother-child separations, which helped him move beyond a psychoanalytic perspective.
Mary Ainsworth's structured observation technique known as strange situation and the development of the different types of attachment styles as well as her contributions and introduction of the secure base to Bowlby.
James Robertson (in 1952) in making the documentary film A Two-Year Old Goes to Hospital, which was one of the films about "young children in brief separation". The documentary illustrated the impact of loss and suffering experienced by young children separated from their primary caretakers. This film was instrumental in a campaign to alter hospital restrictions on visiting by parents. When he and Robertson presented their film A Two Year Old Goes to Hospital to the British Psychoanalytical Society in 1952, psychoanalysts did not accept that a child would mourn or experience grief on separation but instead saw the child's distress as caused by elements of unconscious fantasies (in the film because the mother was pregnant). Bowlby also incorporated Robertson's naturalistic observation methods of children's behaviors.
Melanie Klein during his psychoanalytic training. She was his supervisor; however, they had different views about the role of the mother in the treatment of a three-year-old boy. Specifically and importantly, Klein stressed the role of the child's fantasies about his mother, but Bowlby emphasised the actual history of the relationship. Bowlby's views—that children were responding to real life events and not unconscious fantasies—were rejected by psychoanalysts, and Bowlby was effectively ostracised by the psychoanalytic community. He later expressed the view that his interest in real-life experiences and situations was "alien to the Kleinian outlook". Furthermore, Bowlby explained in an interview with Milton Stenn in 1977 that the psychoanalytic community did not accept his developmental theories as they were completely different from the unconscious fantasy theories surrounding psychoanalysis during that time. He further explained that:
There were certain groups who took to it with great enthusiasm, other groups were directly lukewarm and other hostile, each profession reacted differently. The social workers took to it with enthusiasm; the psychoanalysts treated it with caution, curiously and for me infuriatingly pediatricians were initially hostile but subsequently many of them became very supporting; adult psychiatrists totally uninterested, totally ignorant, totally uninterested.
Donald Winnicott, who was a paediatrician and child psychoanalyst, had an immense influence on Bowlby's work and career. Bowlby and Winnicott had several similarities within their professional work as they were the first to explain the importance of social interactions at an early age. Both Bowlby and Winnicott argued that humans come into the world with a predisposition to be sensitive to social interactions and to need these interactions in order to have a healthy development. However, although Bowlby and Winnicott's ideas were similar, they took vastly different approaches when dealing with their research. For example, Bowlby was interested in how a child's environment is internalized and affects the child's development, while Winnicott was more interested in "the way the inner world engages with and thereby is affected by external events". Despite their differences in approaching their research interests, Bowlby explained in an interview that his research for the World Health Organization influenced policies regarding child care; however, none of this would have been possible without the help of Winnicott. Winnicott worked more at a clinical level than Bowlby which influenced several social workers as he spent his career working to change policies. Bowlby explained that Winnicott is one of the more important individuals who was able to push Bowlby's work to change policies.
