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Attachment theory and John Bowlby:

Some reflections
a
Joan Stevenson-Hinde
a
University of Cambridge , UK
Published online: 29 Nov 2007.

To cite this article: Joan Stevenson-Hinde (2007) Attachment theory and John Bowlby: Some
reflections, Attachment & Human Development, 9:4, 337-342, DOI: 10.1080/14616730701711540

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 Attachment & Human Development,
December 2007; 9(4): 337 – 342

Attachment theory and John Bowlby: Some reflections

JOAN STEVENSON-HINDE

University of Cambridge, UK
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Abstract
The 100th anniversary of Edward John Mostyn Bowlby’s birth (February 26th, 1907) was celebrated at
the Tavistock Clinic in London by his family and colleagues, with presentations of ongoing research as
well as reflections on both the person and his theory. My own reflections include the influence of
ethological thinking on the development of attachment theory, Bowlby’s focus on observations
followed by explanation, his appreciation of emotional communication as well as behavior, and his
recognition of the role of the family as well as the child/caregiver dyad. While always remaining open to
new avenues of research, John Bowlby was firmly insistent on the precise use of attachment
terminology, and quite rightly too!

Keywords: Bowlby, attachment theory, psychological well-being, emotional communication, family

patterns

Introduction
John Bowlby and a young ethologist called Robert Hinde first met in 1954, when they
presented complementary research papers at a meeting of what is now called the Royal
College of Psychiatrists. They had lunch together, and John invited Robert to come along to
his newly-established weekly research seminars at the Tavistock Clinic (Bowlby, 1991;
Hinde, 2005). In searching for a framework to understand the mother – infant relationship,
John spread his net wide. The seminars included Freudian and Kleinian analysts, Hullian
and Skinnerian learning theorists, a Piagetian, psychiatric social workers, and an anti-
psychiatrist. John had already met Konrad Lorenz, and was struck by the possible relevance
of ethological concepts, including imprinting. The discussions were inspiring and led Robert
Hinde, with John’s support, to establish a rhesus monkey colony at Madingley, in order to
observe mother – infant separations in a controlled way. True to an ethological approach,
and in keeping with the Bowlby and Robertson’s observations of ‘‘children going to
hospital,’’ the monkeys were not raised in a social vacuum. Instead, they were kept in as
natural a context as possible, in indoor/outdoor enclosures each with a small group
consisting of one adult male and several females and their infants. Mother – infant
interactions from birth onwards provided a baseline from which to assess effects of brief
separations, in which either mother or infant or both were removed from the colony (Hinde,
1977).

Correspondence: Joan Stevenson-Hinde, Sub-Department of Animal Behaviour, Madingley, Cambridge, CB23 8AA, UK.
E-mail: jgs11@cam.ac.uk

ISSN 1461-6734 print/ISSN 1469-2988 online Ó 2007 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/14616730701711540
 338 J. Stevenson-Hinde

Thus by 1964, when I first came from Brown to Madingley to work on bird song
learning with W. H. Thorpe, the monkey colony was thriving, including visits from this
formal, very English psychiatrist. I recall my trepidation, soon after Robert and I were
married, at having to cook dinner for John as well as for his wife, Ursula, whom I had
never met. She was not only very elegant but also very sharp, challenging Robert on the
ethics of separating infant monkeys from their mothers, even if the separations lasted only
a few days. I was left wondering what Ursula would have said to those learning theorists
who were raising infants in social isolation from birth. Over the years I came to appreciate
that although Ursula did not get directly involved with John’s work, she was well aware of
his thinking. She provided a secure base for him at their home in Hampstead with their
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family of four children, and later their families. The first book in Bowlby’s trilogy (1969/
1982) is dedicated To Ursula.
Unfortunately, the only film footage we have of John at Madingley is from a TV
documentary on ‘‘mothering.’’ There are some lovely shots of John and Robert casually
observing the monkeys. Although the documentary involved Robert, myself, Judy Dunn,
and Martin Richards as well as John, it was our 2-year-old daughter Lara who stole the
show, and the film was named after her father’s nickname for her (‘‘Glub Glub and the
Monkeys,’’ Thames TV, 1975). What was not commented on in the film is the fact that
I was pregnant, and that this was due to John’s advice. I had once asked him what he
thought the best gap between children was, from an attachment point of view. He replied
‘‘not before 2 years,’’ since that would give time for an attachment bond to be well
established and for the older child to begin to understand and talk about what was
happening.
In one of John’s visits in the early 1980s, I recall showing him my newly set-up observation
rooms, and asking his views on my first ‘‘strange situation’’ videotapes, of mothers & their
2.5-year-olds. This was before Mary Ainsworth & the MacArthur Seattle working group had
developed a system for coding 2.5- to 4.5-year-olds (Cassidy & Marvin, 1992; Stevenson-
Hinde & Verschueren, 2002). For the reunion of one little boy, John noted the episodes with
his clinician’s eye, adding ‘‘that is the one I would worry about.’’ Once the coding system
was developed many months later, the child was classified as Disorganized, and difficult
family circumstances came to light as well.
But real ‘‘working memories’’ arise from the two London conferences organized by Colin
Murray Parkes in John’s honor, which led to the publication of The place of attachment in
human behavior (Parkes & Stevenson-Hinde, 1982) and Attachment across the life cycle
(Parkes, Stevenson-Hinde, & Marris, 1991). John thoroughly enjoyed these meetings, and
played an active role. While open to new ideas, John was precise and firm about the use of
attachment terminology. During the first conference, I recall John emphatically stating, ‘‘We
cannot allow ‘attachment to an umbrella’!’’ He insisted that ‘‘attachment’’ be used to
describe an emotional bond to someone (i.e., a person) usually perceived as older or wiser
(e.g., mother or father). While other kinds of bonds undoubtedly exist, they should not be
called ‘‘attachment,’’ in order to keep some precision in the use of terms.
An issue from the second conference concerned ‘‘psychological well-being.’’ Here, John
insisted that security of attachment promoted psychological well-being, in any culture. He
argued that just as ‘‘physical well-being’’ may be defined independently of country or
culture, so too may ‘‘psychological well-being.’’ There followed a lively interchange between
John and the above-mentioned ethologist. True to his upbringing, the ethologist insisted
that behavior cannot be independent of the whole environmental context in which it
develops, and it therefore must ‘‘fit’’ the particular culture. This argument was resolved by
realizing that one may take different perspectives on attachment, and that ‘‘cultural
 John Bowlby: Some reflections 339

desiderata’’ as well as ‘‘biological desiderata’’ may be independent of ‘‘psychological

desiderata,’’ which was of course John’s focus (Hinde & Stevenson-Hinde, 1991).

Observations and explanation

Although Bowlby is famous because of his theoretical framework, what is sometimes
overlooked is his empiricism. He had observed the deleterious effect of separation while
assisting in a school for disturbed children in 1928, and subsequently in his clinical work.
Research projects included a comparison of 44 clinic children who stole with 44 clinic
children who did not steal (Bowlby, 1944) as well as the ‘‘child goes to hospital’’
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observations with James and Joyce Robertson (Bowlby, Robertson, & Rosenbluth, 1952).
These, plus other findings, led to the question, ‘‘If the disruption of a bond is important,
what is the nature of the bond that’s disrupted?’’
We also tend to forget the conventional wisdom of the 1950s, namely that a child’s
interest in mother stems from the food she provides. To Bowlby this did not make any sense,
while Lorenz’s work on imprinting did. Another term borrowed from ethology was the
notion of a ‘‘behavior system.’’ Ethologists explained variation in behavior patterns in terms
of the activation and de-activation of separate but interacting motivational systems.
Creatively building on this, Bowlby postulated an ‘‘attachment behavior system’’ as a
motivational system arising in its own right, independently of other systems such as hunger
or sex. Nevertheless, an attachment system may interact with other systems. For example,
activation of a fear behavior system may lead to activation of the attachment behavior system
and de-activation of an exploratory behavior system. Conversely, when the attachment
behavior system is de-activated, as when in contact with mother, the infant is then free to
explore. Such interplay between separate motivational systems provides a way of thinking of
the need to establish security before moving on to exploration, whether it be exploration of
toys by a toddler, or of thoughts and feelings in a therapeutic setting. Here we come to Mary
Ainsworth’s contribution, of an infant’s use of mother as ‘‘a secure base’’ thereby enabling
exploration. This is a good example of the rapprochement between her and John Bowlby, in
addition to her outstanding contribution in developing a means of assessing the quality of
attachment: The Strange Situation (Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, & Wall, 1978). They
remained close over the years and, although in her late 70s and not very well, Mary came
over in midwinter with the support of Bob Marvin to deliver an address at the Memorial
Service for John in Southwark Cathedral.

Emotional communication
In my view, a central issue in attachment research concerns how security and patterns of
attachment develop and change across time. The behaviorally-based concept of ‘‘sensitive
responsiveness’’ has been shown to promote security in infancy, in studies ranging from
Mary Ainsworth’s pioneering Baltimore one to more recent correlational ones (de Wolff &
van IJzendoorn, 1997), as well as in studies using interventions (Bakermans-Kranenburg,
van IJzendoorn, & Juffer, 2003). In her extensive home observations over the first year of
life, Mary coined the term ‘‘sensitive responsiveness,’’ to reflect the caregiver’s ability to read
emotional signals accurately and respond appropriately. Rather than tally frequencies of
occurrence, she developed an overall rating scale, so that the context and sequencing of
interactions could be taken into account (Ainsworth et al., 1978).
A related construct, also based on observation and best assessed via rating scales, is ‘‘ease
of emotional communication.’’ As a ‘‘goal-corrected partnership’’ develops in early
 340 J. Stevenson-Hinde

childhood, ease of emotional communication-over negative as well as positive feelings-may

come to promote security. Longitudinal studies such as the London Parent-Child Project
(presented by Howard Steele at the Anniversary meeting) allow this suggestion to be tested.
Assessments of emotional communication may be related on the one hand to parental
attachment patterns reflected by the Adult Attachment Interview, and on the other hand to
the child’s attachment patterns at different ages. Intriguingly, Howard and Miriam Steele
suggest ‘‘that the inner world of emotion understanding, and the capacity to speak freely
and openly about negative and positive feelings, is uniquely related to the mother-child
relationship’’ (Steele & Steele, 2005, p. 155).
Emotional communication was central to one of the last chapters that John Bowlby wrote.
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Having stated that ‘‘the principal function of emotion is one of communication — namely,
the communication, both to the self and to others, of the current motivational state of the
individual,’’ John concluded ‘‘Thus what is happening in those early years is that the pattern
of communication that a child adopts towards his mother comes to match the pattern of
communication that she has been adopting towards him’’ (Bowlby, 1991, pp. 294 – 295).
Ease of emotional communication should therefore lie at the heart of the development and
maintenance of patterns of attachment.

Beyond the dyad

We sometimes conveniently overlook the fact that children are raised in families, that
emotional communication occurs beyond the dyad, and that family patterns may not be
predicted from dyadic patterns. As family systems theorists have pointed out for years, the
‘‘whole is greater than the sum of its parts’’ (Minuchin, 1985). In adulthood, as the Adult
Attachment Interview has shown, it is meaningful to classify one’s current state of mind with
respect to attachment in general, rather than to specific attachment figures. Longitudinal
studies (Grossmann, Grossmann, & Waters, 2005), enable one to see how early Strange
Situation classifications to mother and to father relate to the AAI classification in
adolescence or adulthood. It is unlikely that the early classifications to different individuals
will ‘‘add up’’ in any straightforward way to predict the AAI classification.
Therefore research with whole families is needed. A start has been made with outlines of a
general framework (Marvin & Stewart, 1990; Stevenson-Hinde, 1990), followed by a method
for assessing attachment-related emotional communication within the context of a semi-
structured family interview (Akister, Meekings, & Stevenson-Hinde, 1993). However, it is
family therapists who have the richest material, and attachment theory may inform clinical
practice as well as research. For example, a therapist may find it useful to first establish him
or herself as a ‘‘secure base’’ for each family member, with the goal of eventually enabling
each member to use each other and the family as a secure base (Byng-Hall, 1995).
Furthermore, by videotaping family therapy sessions, it is possible to identify recurring
attachment-related patterns of interactions (Byng-Hall & Stevenson-Hinde, 1991).
As noted by John Byng-Hall, who was a colleague of John’s at the Tavistock:

John Bowlby wrote one of the very first family therapy papers (Bowlby, 1949), which
makes fascinating reading. The family therapy that he described consists of some family
sessions that overcame impasses in individual psychotherapy . . . The paper vividly conveys
the sense of excitement that we have all experienced when practicing successful family
therapy for the first time . . . He told me that he had no doubt that the exploration of family
patterns would be undertaken one day, but that he had to start with units that were
researchable at that moment in time (Byng-Hall, 1995, p. 101).
 John Bowlby: Some reflections 341

John Bowlby retained a keen interest in family therapy and promoted it at the Tavistock
Clinic. True to form, he was concerned with terminology. In commenting on a draft
manuscript, as he so generously used to do, John wrote:

There is one dogma in family systems theory which I believe to be totally mistaken,
namely the notion that a pattern of interaction has some particular ‘‘purpose,’’ e.g., that of
keeping the family together as an intact unit. On p. 9 you describe this dogma as a
quotation from the Marvin & Stewart article and you very rightly put purpose in inverted
commas, but it reads as though you are endorsing it. The pattern described is not
uncommon clinically. My experiences of it point to the pattern originating in the mother’s
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childhood, during which she grows up to be anxiously attached. After she marries she
looks to her husband as an attachment figure, but he fails to meet her needs and so,
instead, she looks to one of her children to do so, thus inverting the relationship. Treating
the child as younger than he or she is is one technique for ensuring that the child remains
available as an attachment figure. The pattern may stabilize by the father remaining
around but effectively opting out, or it may result in his departure. To suppose that the
pattern has the purpose of keeping the family together seems to me absurd and to distract
attention away from the true origins of the dysfunctional pattern. A father’s failure to meet
his wife’s attachment needs may in part be due to problems of his own, but is more often
than not a consequence mainly of a wife’s anxious hopes and expectations being such that
he finds them excessive (letter of March 26, 1990, personal communication).

Conclusion
Although John Bowlby was the ‘‘founding father’’ of attachment theory, during meetings, or
in the course of editing, he was never a closed, overpowering father figure. Instead, he was
open to exploring new avenues of research and supporting extensions of attachment theory,
which he viewed as a ‘‘conceptual framework’’ (Bowlby, 1982, p. 310). In his own words,
which remain relevant today, ‘‘The tasks for those who use attachment theory to guide their
research or their clinical work are to see where the ideas already formulated can aid
understanding, to recognize where they need supplementing from elsewhere, and to accept
that there are probably many fields on which they shed no light’’ (Bowlby, 1982, p. 313).
Finally, I must acknowledge the active part that John played in the editing of both volumes
arising from the London meetings in his honor, making valuable comments on all the
chapters. John corrected some proofs for the second volume while on the Isle of Skye, only
days before his death there on September 2, 1990. Much of his writing was done on Skye,
where summer months were spent with his family. This is where John was buried (and later
Ursula), at Trumpan in Waternish, in a windswept cemetery overlooking the sea, with a
headstone inscribed To be a Pilgrim.

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