Bowlby Attachment Theory Summary

Bowlby’s career started off in the medical direction as he was following in his surgeon father’s footsteps. 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. Bowlby studied several children during his time working in world war two at the Canonbury clinic, and developed a research project based on case studies of the children’s behaviours 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.One of Bowlby’s main findings through
The emotional attachments of young children are shown behaviourally in their preferences for particular familiar people, their tendency to seek proximity to those people, especially in times of distress, and their ability to use the familiar adults as a secure base from which to explore the environment.
The formation of emotional attachments contributes to the foundation of later emotional and personality development, and the type of behaviour toward familiar adults shown by toddlers has some continuity with the social behaviours they will show later in