John Bowlby

An Ethological Approach to Personality Development

attachment that we have jointly developed is that it is an ethological approach to personality development. We have had a long and happy partnership in pursuing this approach. In this article we wish to give a brief historical account of the initially separate but compatible approaches that eventually merged in the partnership, and how our contributions have intertwined in the course of developing an ethologically oriented theory of attachment and a body of research that has both stemmed from the theory and served to extend and elaborate it.

Forty-four juvenile thieves : their characters and home-life

are probably few people who do not work in the court system who realize that in nine criminal cases out of ten the charge is theft. During 1938 for instance there were about 78,500 persons found guilty of an indictable offence, a category which excludes drunkenness, traffic offences and other minor delinquencies. Of these over 56,000 (or 72 per cent.) were found guilty of larceny and another 16,000 (or 20 per cent.) found guilty of breaking and entering, frauds or receiving stolen goods. This leaves only 6,500 (or 8 per cent.) for all other offences. Another fact perhaps little realized is that for some years past exactly half of those found guilty have been under 21 years of age and that over one. sixth of the total were under 14. Indeed of all age-groups in the population it is the thirteen-year-olds who appear most often in court. Thus theft, like rheumatic fever, is a disease of childhood and adolescence , and, as in rheumatic fever, attacks in later life are frequently in the nature of recurrences. Of the men and women sent to prison in 1930 not only had half been there before but nearly one quarter were going for at least their sixth time. Even at the age of 16, one-third of those charged in the courts had been charged before (5). These figures are remarkable and may do something to impress upon us the magnitude and social importance. of youthful stealing. But still they are inadequate, for what official statistics do not tell us is the age at which the offenders first developed delinquent habits. The evidence strongly suggests that in many, perhaps the majority, of serious cases it is well before puberty. It is in this period therefore that the origins of the trouble are to be sought. Many attempts have been made to find the causes of habitual delinquency, the most notable being the studies of Burt in this country and Healy in America. But despite these valuable researches much remains obscure. The great advances made in child psychology during the past decade have however suggested new lines of enquiry and these have been followed in the research reported in this paper. Almost all recent work on the emotional and social development of children has laid emphasis upon the childs relation to his mother. Consequently in this enquiry very great attention was given to the elucidation …

Pathological Mourning and Childhood Mourning

HIS IS the fifth in a series of papers in which I am exploring the theoretical implications of the behavior to be observed T when young children are removed from the mother figures to whom they are attached and are placed with strangers. The thesis I am advancing is twofold: “first, that once the child has formed a tie to a mother-figure, which has ordinarily occurred by the middle of the first year, its rupture leads to separation anxiety and grief and sets in train processes of mourning; secondly, that in the early years of life these mourning processes not infrequently take a course unfavourable to future personality development and thereby predispose to psychiatric illness.” Since in earlier papers I have discussed the theory of separation anxiety and mourning, it is to the second part of the thesis that this and later papers are directed. In the preceding paper “Processes of Mourning” (5) reasons were given for dividing healthy mourning, whether it occurs in human infants or adults or in. lower species, into three main phases. Particular attention was given to the first phase, during which the instinctual response systems binding the bereaved to the lost object remain focused on the object, because during this

Disruption of affectional bonds and its effects on behavior

F AMILY DOCTORS, priests and perceptive laymen have long been aware that there are few blows to the human spirit so great as the loss of someone near and dear. Traditional wisdom knows that we can be crushed by grief and die of a broken heart, and also that a jilted lover is apt to do things that are foolish or dangerous to himself and others. It knows, too, that neither love nor grief are felt for just any other human being but for one, or a few, particular and individual human beings. The core of what I am terming an affeetional bond is the attraction that one individual has for another individual. Until recent decades science has had little to say about these matters. Experimental scientists in the physiological or Hullian learning theory traditions of psychology have never shown interest in affeetional bonds, and have sometimes talked and acted as though they do not exist. Psychoanalysts, by contrast, have long recognized the immense importance of affeetional bonds in the lives and problems of their patients, but have been slow to develop an adquate scientific framework within which the formation, maintenance and disruption of bonds can be understood. The void has been filled by ethologists--starting with Lorenzs (1) classical paper on The Companion in the Birds World, progressing through a multitude of experiments on imprinting .(2, 3) to studies of bonding behavior in sub-human primates (4, 5), and inspiring psychologists to make similar studies of humans (6,7).

On knowing what you are not supposed to know and feeling what you are not supposed to feel

Much psychopathology stems from“impressions, scenes and experiences” of childhood having, apparently, been forgotten yet continuing to influence thought, feeling and action. The problem of how best to conceptualize the processes responsible for shutting memories away is eased by drawing on the findings and concepts of cognitive psychology. In explaining both the nature of the material shut away and the causes of its being so, attention is called to the role that a childs parents play, wittingly or unwittingly. Children not infrequently observe scenes their parents would prefer they did not observe; they form impressions their parents would prefer they did not form; and they have experiences their parents would like to believe they have not had. Examples are given of parents who seek to disconfirm their childs observations of events, to disapprove or condemn their natural emotional responses to distressing situations, and who discourage their children from registering aspects of their (the parents’) personalities and behaviour. Pressure exerted on the children to conform to their parents’ wishes can be crude or subtle, but its effectiveness depends always on the childs insistent desire to be loved and protected.

The Role of Childhood Experience in Cognitive Disturbance

The evidence that adverse experiences with parents during childhood play a large part in causing cognitive disturbance is now substantial. For example, at least some cases in which perceptions and attributions are distorted and some states of amnesia, both minor and major including cases of multiple personality, can be shown with considerable confidence to be the outcome of such experiences. Yet systematic research into these causal sequences is still scarce. Having myself recognized the importance of the area a little belatedly, all that I can do in this brief chapter is to open a door to a field calling urgently for a major research effort.

By ethology out of psycho-analysis: An experiment in interbreeding.

When I received the invitation to give the 1979 Niko Tinbergen Lecture not only did I regard it as a great honour but I welcomed it as giving me an opportunity to express to Dr. Tinbergen himself and to a wider public the admiration, affection and gratitude I and my colleagues feel for him. In describing the way that ethological ideas have influenced our thinking, the theme suggested to me, the deep debt we owe him and his students will I hope become apparent. I first heard of ethology and the names of Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen in the summer of 1951. I became an instant enthusiast. Let me describe the circumstances.

A Two-Year-Old Goes to Hospital

Dr. John Bowlby: The theme of this film is a very commonplace one-simply the story of a child of 2i years who spends eight days in hospital for a minor operation and who frets a good deal of this time. It may be asked why bother to make and show a film of something so commonplace? The reason is that we believe that fretting should no longer be looked upon as an unavoidable inconvenience but as something of serious importance and worthy of scientific study. There is now evidence that prolonged periods of maternal deprivation in very young children can, in some cases, give rise to extremely serious psychiatric disturbances. There has been a succession of papers and monographs on this subject during the last fifteen years and two years ago WHO published a review of this evidence (Bowlby, 1951). Furthermore, it is becoming fairly well known that the majority of children under 4 years old who have spent only a brief period in hospital, or otherwise away from their mothers, show emotional upsets of shorter or longer duration. Since the existence of the problem is no longer in doubt, the Research Team investigating it at the Tavistock Clinic is concentrating its attention on the psychological processes which lead to these adverse effects. We are giving special attention to the emotional responses of very young children during the first days and weeks following separation from their mothers. After a number of semisystematic studies we decided eighteen months ago to attempt as full a coverage as possible of one child throughout her stay in hospital. It was during this pilot study that this film was made. It is because we believe it permits of an objective examination of what actually happens when a young child has this experience that we think it may be of value in furthering our understanding of fretting and the emotional disturbances to which it can lead. We believe that it is only on the basis of this knowledge that improved methods of care can be developed.

RESEARCH INTO THE ORIGINS OF DELINQUENT BEHAVIOUR

We have not done much more than establish his hypothesis a little more firmly. The explanation of the higher level of haemoglobin found in multiparac may be that although primiparae and multiparae undergo similar weight changes in pregnancy (Stander and Pastore 1940) the primiparae possibly tend to return more slowly towards their original weight; their blood may therefore be a little more dilute on the seventh day. No satisfactory reason can be offered to account for the difference in the mothers haemoglobin according to the sex of the child. It is not related to the different weights of male and female children at birth, because the weight seems to be without influence on the mothers haemoglobin. It may possibly bear some relation to different amounts of circulating sexual hormones which have some effect on water balance, but this is conjecture which cannot at the moment be supported.

Human Personality Development in an Ethological Light

In this chapter I describe a problem in human psychopathology and some of the many ways in which studies of animals are contributing to its solution.