attachment

British psychologist Dr John Bowlby was born in 1907 to an upper middle class family in London. Although influenced by the ideas of Freud, Bowlby was not content with his psychoanalytic view of ‘cupboard love’ in which infants stay close to their mothers only because they feed them (Bretherton 1992). In 1948 Bowlby became interested in the work of Tavistock social worker James Robertson, with whom he would work closely with over the years. Together they recorded the responses of children between 12 months and 4 years of age, who had become separated from their mother while staying at the hospital (Van der Horst et al 2008). It was at this time Bowlby began studying new concepts that were emerging in the field of ethology. One of the studies which influenced him in developing his theory was Konrad Lorenz’s (1935) study on imprinting.

Lorenz was an Austrian ethologist who believed that each species of animals are born with a set of “fixed action patterns”, a behavioural sequence that occurs when the appropriate environmental stimulus, known as a releaser, takes place. Imprinting is a fixed action pattern that happens soon after birth in some animal species such as ducks or geese (Meadows 1986). A newly hatched duckling is hard wired to follow the first moving object it sees, usually its mother and become permanently bonded or imprinted on her. In his famous experiment Lorenz divided eggs laid by a greylag goose into two groups. One group were hatched in their natural environment and instantly began to follow their mother goose around, while the other group were hatched in an incubator. The first moving object the goslings saw was Lorenz and they immediately began to follow him around. Lorenz believed that this attachment is of extr...

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...vation theory was also influenced by the work of Harlow (1958) into the effects of maternal deprivation in infant rhesus monkeys. In some of these studies the infant monkeys were raised in a cage that contained two artificial mothers. One was made out of wire mesh that had a nipple mounted on its chest in which the infant monkey could nurse from. The other was made out of soft terry cloth but did not have contain a nipple in which the monkey could be fed.

Works Cited

Birch, A. 1997. Developmental psychology. Basingstoke: Macmillan.

Bretherton, I. 1992. The origins of attachment theory: John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth. Developmental psychology, 28 (5), p. 759.

Birch, A. 1997. Developmental psychology. Basingstoke: Macmillan.

Bowlby, J. 1982. Attachment. New York: Basic Books

Cassidy, J. and Shaver, P. R. 1999. Handbook of attachment. New York: Guilford Press.