Parents, especially mothers, are much-maligned people.
(Bowlby 1988a)
A family photograph, taken just before the First World War in 1913, shows Lady Bowlby surrounded by her six children. Her husband, Sir Anthony, the King's surgeon, is not there – he is, as usual, at work. She is flanked by her two favourite sons, John and Tony, aged about four and five, looking boldly and brightly into the camera. On her lap sits the baby Evelyn. The two older girls, aged eight and eleven, stand dutifully and demurely to one side. Finally there is two-year-old Jim, the weak member of the family, dubbed a ‘late developer’, lacking the physical and intellectual vigour of his brothers and sisters. A hand appears around his waist, partly propping him up. But whose hand can it be? Is it his mother's? No, hers are firmly around the baby – a rare moment of physical closeness, as it turned out. Can it be one of his older sisters? No, their hands are politely by their sides. It is in fact the hand of an invisible nurse, crouching behind the tableau vivant, the tiny and perfectionist ‘Nanna Friend’ who, with the nursemaids and governess, provided the childcare in this fairly typical example of the English haute bourgeoisie on the threshold of the modern era.
Bowlby was notoriously reticent about his background and early family life. In his last book, Charles Darwin: A New Life, Bowlby made a strong case for considering Darwin's recurrent anxiety attacks as a manifestation of his inability to grieve, the pattern for which was set by his mother's death when he was eight. Whereas the main purpose of this book is an exposition of Attachment Theory, in this chapter we shall consider Bowlby's life and personality as a background to his ideas and to explore the relationship between them. The chapter is divided into three parts: the first is a chronological account of his life and career, touching on much that will be developed subsequently; the second consists of an assessment of his character, based on reminiscences of his family, friends and colleagues (see also van Dijken, 1998; van Dijken et al., 1998; Karen, 1994; van de Horst et al., 2008); the third surveys some of the major personal themes and preoccupations which inform Bowlby's work.
Edward John Mostyn Bowlby (JB) was born on 26 February 1907. His father, whom he resembled in many ways, was Major-General Sir Anthony Bowlby (1855–1929), a successful London surgeon who had operated on one of Queen Victoria's sons, and was rewarded with a knighthood for his appointments as Royal Surgeon to King Edward VII and King George V, and a baronetcy on becoming President of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1920. John's grandfather, ‘Thomas Bowlby of The Times’, was a foreign correspondent for The Times who was murdered in Peking in 1861 during the Opium Wars, when Sir Anthony was a small child. Anthony, John's father, felt responsible for his mother, who did not remarry, and he only began to look for a wife after her death, when he was forty. He was introduced by a mutual friend at a house party to the well-connected May Mostyn, then thirty, and pursued her (mainly on bicycles – they shared a love of the countryside and outdoor life) until they were married less than a year later. The train of May's wedding dress was embroidered with violets in deference to her dead mother-in-law as the statutory period of mourning had not yet passed.
May was the eldest daughter of the Hon. Hugh Mostyn, who, despite grand origins (he was the youngest child, of ten, of Lord Mostyn of Mostyn in North Wales), was content to be a country parson in a remote Huntingdonshire village for all his working life. Bowlby's mother revered her father (‘Grampy’ in the Bowlby household) and invoked him as a model for all acceptable behaviour. She had little time for her mother, whom, when she was not having babies (May resented her numerous younger brothers and sisters and considered that first-borns were the only ones who really mattered) she described as ‘always in the kitchen’.
John's parents were thus well into middle age by the time he was born: his mother forty, his father fifty-two. Each had had a special relationship with one parent and may have found the very different atmosphere of a large and vigorous family overwhelming. May had resented the demands of her younger brothers and sisters, and Sir Anthony was used to his bachelor ways. Like many parents of their class and generation, they entrusted the upbringing of their children to their numerous servants.
The children fell into three groups by age: the two older girls, Winnie and Marion, who were talented musicians from an early age; Tony and John, only 13 months apart; then Jim and Evelyn. Tony was their mother's clear favourite and could get away with almost anything. He later became a successful industrialist, and as the eldest son inherited his father's title (which, since he was childless and died after John, eventually passed to JB's oldest, Sir Richard Bowlby). John and Tony were close in age and temperament, good friends, but there was a strong rivalry between them. They were treated as twins – put in the same clothes and in the same class at school. This meant that John was always making superhuman efforts to overtake his brother, who was equally as keen to retain his advantage. Years later, as a parent, JB was renowned in the family for resisting his children's clamouring demands with the phrase, ‘Now, don't bully me, don't bully me’. Both Tony and John teased and worried about their slightly backward brother Jim. JB read delightedly in a newspaper about the miraculous effects of ‘monkey gland extract’ (presumably thyroxine), hoping that it would be the answer to their brother's difficulties, but they were disappointed. Jim struggled throughout his life, farmed not very successfully for a while, and never married. It seemed contrary to the Bowlby family ethos to have a family member who was not a ‘success’. JB's combination of competitiveness and his concern for disadvantaged and sick children may be not unrelated to his position between these two very different brothers. At fifteen he fought and defeated Tony when he discovered that he had destroyed a picture that Jim had made out of dried flowers. The two older sisters also remained single. According to JB, ‘the men they might have married were killed in the First World War’ (Figlio and Young, 1986) – a curiously un-psychological explanation, and yet close to JB's preoccupation with the impact of loss. JB's younger sister Evelyn, however, shared her brother's interest in psychoanalysis. She married the distinguished economist, Professor Sir Henry Phelps Brown. Their daughter Juliet Hopkins was a well-known child psychotherapist at the Tavistock Clinic. JB described his family as a ‘straightforward, fairly close – not all that close – but fairly close, professional class family living a pretty traditional lifestyle, with nurses of course’ (Bowlby in Hunter, 1991). Nanny Friend, whose hand appears in the photograph, joined the family when JB's older sister Winnie was one month old, and after the children were grown up remained with Lady Bowlby until she died at the age of ninety-seven. She was highly intelligent and well read, a disciplinarian, whose firm regime would occasionally be lightened by her capacity for entrancing and elaborate story-telling and by reading Dickens to the children in the nursery.
Evelyn remembered life in their London house in Manchester Square as rather joyless – regulated by order, innumerable clocks, a sense of propriety, humourless governesses, and interminable slow processional walks in nearby Hyde Park. Tony, in contrast, describes a happy childhood. The reality perhaps was that they had two childhoods – one in the country and one in the town. Lady Bowlby boasted that she never worried about her children and, especially in London, left them mostly to their own devices. She would visit the nursery to receive a report from Nanny after breakfast every day, and the children, clean and brushed, would come down to the drawing room from 5 to 6 p.m. after tea, where she would read to them, especially from her beloved Children of the New Forest.
May Mostyn had vowed that she would never marry a ‘city man’; Sir Anthony loved fishing and shooting. Every spring and summer came the ritual of family holidays. At Easter the children were dispatched to Margate with the nurses, while Sir Anthony and Lady Bowlby went to Scotland for fishing. In July, May would take the children to the New Forest, in those days a wild and idyllic place. For the whole of August and half of September the entire family decamped to Ayrshire in Scotland, travelling by train in a specially hired railway carriage. Sir Anthony and Lady Bowlby never owned a car: he used a brougham for his rounds in London, and after his death she would travel around Gloucestershire in pony and trap well into the 1950s.
On holiday, John's mother seemed to come alive and, as ‘Grampy’ had done with her, ensured that her children were well versed in natural history and country sports. From her and ‘Grampy’ they learned to identify flowers, birds and butterflies, to fish, ride and shoot. JB and Tony became and remained passionate naturalists.
Sir Anthony seemed to be a fairly remote and intimidating figure, especially in London, but he gave the children special animal nicknames: John was known as ‘Jack’ the jackal (other nursery nicknames for John were ‘Bogey’ and the prophetic ‘Admiral Sir Nosey Know-all’); Tony was ‘Gorilla’; Evelyn ‘Cat’. They saw little of their father during the week but would walk with him across Hyde Park most Sundays to church, when he would instruct and occasionally amuse his children with his deep factual knowledge about the world and its ways.
The First World War came in 1914 when JB was seven. John and his elder brother were immediately dispatched to boarding school, because of the supposed danger of air raids on London. John later maintained that this was just an excuse, being merely the traditional first step in the time-honoured barbarism required to produce an English gentleman, so-called. The English preparatory school system took its toll: JB was beaten for defining a ‘cape’ in a geography lesson as a cloak rather than a promontory, but, a resilient and self-assured little boy, he flourished.
Sir Anthony was away in France as a surgeon-general for most of the 1914'18 war. When the war ended, John went as naval cadet to Dartmouth where he learned to sail, gaining a discipline and organisation which lasted a lifetime. Tony was destined to follow in his father's footsteps and become a surgeon, but he decided against this in his teens, feeling that it would mean ‘failure’ since he could never equal his father's eminence. This left the way clear for JB to go into medicine, who, despite having passed out top in his Dartmouth exams, was already dissatisfied with the narrow intellectual horizons and rigidity of the Navy (as he was to become similarly dissatisfied two decades later with the narrow confines of the British Psychoanalytical Society), as well as suffering badly from seasickness! Somewhat to JB's surprise, Sir Anthony agreed to buy him out. Although not driven by a strong vocational pull, John felt that a medical career would be least unacceptable to his father and, together with a close Dartmouth friend, applied to Cambridge and duly entered Trinity College as a medical student in 1925. His intellectual distinction was immediately in evidence at university where he won several prizes and gained a first class degree in pre-clinical sciences and psychology.
Already mature and independent-minded, with an ‘inner calm’ (Phelps Brown 1992) that was to stand him good stead throughout his life, John's next move proved decisive. Rather than going straight on to London to study clinical medicine, the conventional route, he got a job instead in a progressive school for maladjusted children, an offshoot of A. S. Neill's Summerhill. His father, who would undoubtedly have opposed such a move, had, in JB's words ‘fortunately’ already died when John was twenty-one (a possible echo of Darwin's denial of grief at his mother's premature death here), so he was free to chart his own course. At the school he had two experiences which were to influence the course of his professional life. The first was the encounter with disturbed children, with whom he found he could communicate, and whose difficulties he could relate to their unhappy and disrupted childhood. Like one of Lorenz's (1952) greylag geese, a model that was later to play an important part in Attachment Theory, one of these boys followed Bowlby round wherever he went:
There I had known an adolescent boy who had been thrown out of a public school for repeated stealing. Although socially conforming, he made no friends and seemed emotionally isolated – from adults and peers alike. Those in charge attributed his condition to his never having been cared for during his early years by any one motherly person, a result of his illegitimate birth. Thus I was alerted to a possible connection between prolonged deprivation and the development of a personality apparently incapable of making affectional bonds and, because immune to praise and blame, prone to repeated delinquencies.
(Bowlby, 1981a)
The second seminal encounter at that school was with a fellow teacher, John Alford, who had himself had undergone psychoanalysis. It was he who advised John, in addition to his medical studies, to undertake training as a psychoanalyst.
In the autumn of 1929, aged twenty-two, John came to London to embark on his clinical medical studies. He found these so tedious and wearisome that he set up and managed ‘Bogey's Bar’, making sandwiches for his friends. While at University College Hospital (which was for many years a home for would-be psychoanalysts wanting to acquire a medical degree) he entered the Institute of Psychoanalysis, going into analysis with Joan Riviere, a close friend and associate of Melanie Klein. His intention was to become a child psychiatrist, a profession which was then just emerging. After medical qualification in 1933, he went to the Maudsley Hopital to train in adult psychiatry, and then was appointed in 1936 to the London Child Guidance Clinic, where he worked until becoming an Army psychiatrist in 1940.
The 1930s were a time of intellectual ferment. Progressive thought centred on Freud and Marx. Bettelheim vividly captures the atmosphere of debate:
In order to create the good society, was it of first importance to change society radically enough for all persons to achieve full self-realisation? In this case psychoanalysis could be discarded, with the possible exception of a few deranged persons. Or was this the wrong approach, and could persons who had achieved full personal liberation and integration by being psychoanalysed create such a good society? In the latter case the correct thing was to forget for the time being any social or economic revolution and to concentrate instead on pushing psychoanalysis; the hope was that once the majority of men had profited from its inner liberation they would almost automatically create the good society for themselves and all others.
(Bettelheim, 1960)
Although by nature irreverent and at times iconoclastic, Bowlby tempered his rebelliousness with a belief in science and the need for evidence to back up ideas. He shared a house with his friend the Labour politician and academic Evan Durbin, who challenged his newly acquired psychoanalytic ideas – as did Aubrey Lewis, the doyen of the Maudsley scepticism. While JB believed firmly in the practical efficacy of psychoanalysis, he questioned its theoretical basis. He came into conflict with his first psychoanalytical supervisor, ‘a rather prim old maid … we never seemed to be on the same wavelength’ (Bowlby, 1991), but got on very well with his next, Ella Sharpe, who had supported Anna Freud against Klein in the ‘Controversial Discussions’: ‘a warm hearted middle-aged woman who had a good understanding of human nature and a sense of humour’ (Bowlby, 1991). JB qualified as an analyst in 1937, and immediately started training in child analysis with Mrs Klein as his supervisor. Here too there was conflict, especially when Bowlby felt that she paid insufficient attention to the part played by the environment in causing his patient's disturbance – in this case a hyperactive little boy of three whose mother was having a breakdown and had been admitted to mental hospital.
Meanwhile, Bowlby was beginning to develop his own ideas, based mainly on his experience at the Child Guidance Clinic. There he worked with two analytically orientated social workers who introduced him to the idea of the intergenerational transmission of neurosis, in which unresolved problems from a parent's childhood play a part in causing and perpetuating the problems of their own children.
I was particularly struck by two cases, one of sibling rivalry in which the mother had herself been intensely jealous of her sister, and the other in which a father was deeply troubled by his seven-year-old son's masturbation and had dipped him under a cold tap whenever he found him touching his genitals, and who, it transpired, had himself fought an unsuccessful battle against masturbation all his life.
(Bowlby, 1977)
With his stress on the role of the environment in causing psychological difficulty, Bowlby was aligned with a group of British psychiatrists who, while influenced by Freud and sympathetic to the analytic cause, also maintained some distance from it. These included David Eder, a left-wing intellectual associated with the Bloomsbury Group; Bernard Hart, psychiatrist at University College Hospital, whose influential Psychology of Insanity Bowlby would certainly have read; W. H. Rivers, famous as an anthropologist as well as psychiatrist, who had applied Freud's ideas to victims of shell-shock in the First World War and who felt that the self-preservative instinct was as important as Freud's sexuality; and, above all, Ian Suttie, whose Origins of Love and Hate proposed a primary bond between mother and child, unrelated to infantile sexuality (Heard, 1986; Pines, 1991; Newcombe and Lerner, 1982), an idea which Bowlby was to develop and put at the heart of Attachment Theory.
In order to qualify as a full member with voting rights in the analytic society Bowlby had to present a paper. Many of his later ideas are to be found in embryonic form in ‘The influence of the environment in the development of neuroses and neurotic character’, which was published in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis in 1940 (Bowlby, 1940a). It consists of a series of cases treated in the Child Guidance Clinic. He emphasises the scientific value of such once-weekly ‘clinic cases’ to complement more intensive analytic work. He boldly puts forward a ‘general theory of the genesis of neurosis’, in which environmental factors in the early years of a child's life are causative, especially separation from the mother through death or ‘broken home’. He explicitly challenges the Kleinian view – actually something of a caricature, a product of the polarisation within the Society at that time, since Kleinians have never entirely denied the importance of the environment – that childhood phantasy is unrelated to actual experience: ‘Much has been written about the introjection of phantastically severe parents, an imaginary severity being itself the product of projection. Less perhaps has been written recently about the introjection of the parents’ real characters’ (Bowlby, 1940a). He cautions against unnecessary separation of children from parents – ‘if a child must be in hospital the mother should be encouraged to visit daily’ – and insists that:
If it became a tradition that small children were never subjected to complete or prolonged separation from their parents in the same way that regular sleep and orange juice have become nursery traditions, I believe that many cases of neurotic character development would be avoided.
(Bowlby, 1940a)
He advocated working with the mothers of disturbed children so as to elucidate those of their own childhood difficulties which might be interfering with their role as parents, thereby helping them to feel less guilty. A second paper (Bowlby, 1944), ‘Forty-four juvenile thieves, their characters and home life’ (which led to Bowlby's wartime nickname of Ali Bowlby and his Forty Thieves), was also based on his work in the Child Guidance Clinic and develops the same ideas in a more systematic way. His capacity for coining a telling phrase emerges in his notion of the ‘affectionless psychopath’ – a juvenile thief for whom the lack of good and continuous childhood care has created in him (it almost always is a ‘him’) an absence of concern for others.
In this early work Bowlby shows a strong reforming drive: he saw psychotherapy as preventative medicine which would help to change not just individuals but also society, but he would not have accepted Bettel-heim's view that one had to choose between Marx or Freud, and nor was he prepared to swallow either whole. His attitude towards extremism, whether Kleinian or communist, might be compared with A. S. Neill's account of a wedding he had attended:
Filled with followers of Melanie Klein… . they can't laugh; Mela-nie has evidently shown them humour is a complex which no normal man should have. To my asking what Klein was doing to prevent complexes there was a silence. I said: you can't analyse humanity but you can attempt to get a humanity that won't need analysis. No answer. Gott, they were a dull crowd… . Rather like talking to communists with a blank curtain that you could not penetrate.
(Grosskurth, 1986)
Several of JB's friends of both sexes were acquired through his more sociable older brother. Tony Bowlby had shared a ‘staircase’ at Oxford with Evan Durbin, already mentioned, who was later to become a minister in the post-war Attlee labour administration. Similar in physique, intelligence and temperament, Durbin and JB soon struck up a close friendship, based on shared intellectual interests and a love of walking (rather like the poets Robert Frost and Edward Thomas before the First World War, it was hard to keep up with them as they strode rapidly through the Cotswolds, deep in conversation). They collaborated in their book Personal Aggressiveness and War (Durbin and Bowlby, 1938). In Bowlby's contribution we see again later talents and themes prefigured. He introduces psychoanalytic ideas in a common-sense (if class-bound) way: in exemplifying the concept of unconscious aggression he says, ‘it is impossible to criticise some maids without paying for it in breakages. Plates “come apart in my hands” far more frequently after the maid has been reprimanded than when she has been praised’ (Durbin and Bowlby, 1938a). He surveys the literature on aggression in apes and other higher mammals, drawing parallels with human behaviour, just as he was to do in the 1950s when he applied ethological ideas to mother–infant behaviour. He also subjects Marxist ideas about war to the same critical scrutiny with which he had approached psychoanalysis as an ideology, pointing out the dangers of any global theory of human behaviour.
Bowlby's friendship with Durbin continued until the latter's untimely death by drowning while on holiday in Cornwall in the late 1940s. Bowlby was on holiday nearby, and was called in to help; in his typically practical way, he immediately organised – with Durbin's close parliamentary colleagues – a trust-fund which supported the Durbin children through their education. Durbin's death was the most devastating loss of John's life, and certainly influenced his interest in the themes of grief and loss which were to figure so centrally in his work.
Bowlby volunteered in 1940 at the age of thirty-three, but was not called up; instead he joined a group of Army psychiatrists whose main job was, by using statistical and psychotherapeutic methods, to put officer selection on a scientific footing – to put, as it was said, the ‘chi’ (that is, statistics) into psychiatry. His organisational and intellectual qualities soon showed themselves and he worked closely with members of the ‘invisible college’ (Pines, 1991) of psychoanalytic soldiers including Wilfred Bion, Eric Trist and Jock Sutherland on the selection boards.
By 1944 the War Office had established a Research and Training Unit in Hampstead, of which Bowlby was a member. This enabled him to continue active participation in the affairs of the Psychoanalytic Society, typified at that time by factional fighting between the Kleinian and Freudian groups. Following the ‘Controversial Discussions’, these differences were eventually contained by a ‘gentlemen's agreement’ between two ladies, Anna Freud and Melanie Klein. This established two training streams: ‘A’, the Freudians, and ‘B’, which comprised the Kleinians and ‘Independents’ (who later split off as a separate ‘middle group’ of which Bowlby was a member). The President of the Society, Sylvia Payne, herself an Independent, proposed Bowlby as Training Secretary in 1944, and despite not being a Training Analyst, and against strong opposition from Melanie Klein, his balance and organisational abilities were recognised, and he was duly elected.
Bowlby's passionate and uncompromising feelings were much in evidence at meetings of the Psychoanalytic Society during that period. As well as the Klein–Freud split there was a more general division about the aims and methods of the Society. Under Ernest Jones's and later Glover's leadership, the Society had adopted something of the features of a secret cell: purist, esoteric, autocratically led, unwilling to sully itself with anything but the ‘pure gold’ of psychoanalysis, and refusing to have anything to do with the analytic fellow-travellers represented by the Tavistock Clinic, who included several Christian psychiatrists like J. R. Rees and Suttie, and which was referred to contemptuously by the psychoanalysts as the ‘parson's clinic’ (Pines, 1991). All this was anathema to Bowlby, who believed in democratic methods and was appalled by what he saw as the Society's indifference towards the emergence of a National Health Service (NHS) which was clearly going to be established after the war. He advocated full participation in the discussions between the Government and the medical profession:
We find ourselves in a rapidly changing world and yet, as a Society, we have done nothing, I repeat nothing, to meet these changes, to influence them or to adapt to them. That is not the reaction of a living organism but a moribund one. If our Society died of inertia it would only have met the fate it had invited.
(King and Steiner, 1990)
Bowlby and the progressives carried the day, and Bowlby was delegated as a member of the Government's Mental Health Standing Committee, where he proceeded to have the same effect on the civil servants as he did on the older members of the Society, described in a Whitehall report as ‘a “live” member, with embarrassing enthusiasm for his own speciality; an advanced theorist who does not always give weight to practical considerations’ (Webster, 1991).
Tony Bowlby married young: a beautiful musician and actress whom he met through his sisters. JB had had several tempestuous liaisons, but as his analysis progressed and he approached his thirties, began to wish to settle down. On holiday in the New Forest he encountered the Longstaffs, a family of seven attractive daughters living with their pipe-smoking mother. Their father, Dr Longstaff, a famous alpinist, had abandoned his wife for a younger woman. Ursula, the third daughter, intelligent and beautiful, but more diffident than her older sisters, attracted JB's interest. On a shooting holiday in Ireland she and John fell for each other. They were married in 1938. John, like his father, was some ten years older than his bride. Ursula proved a devoted and loyal companion. Although highly intelligent and literate (and a superb correspondent), she had no knowledge of psychology, and claims not to have read any of his books except the biography of Darwin, on which she collaborated extensively. She also helped to supply the quotations for the chapter headings in the ‘trilogy’.
The Bowlbys had four children, the day-to-day care of whom John left almost entirely to Ursula. The family was afflicted by dyslexia, a condition unrecognised at the time, and his children's academic difficulties were a source of some sorrow and frustration to their father, although they were fully compensated by their practical and technical abilities. John had had little experience of close parent–child relationships, and found fatherhood a difficult role. He followed his own father's tradition of hard work and long holidays, to the extent that his eldest son asked, around the age of seven, ‘is Daddy a burglar? He always comes home after dark and never talks about his work!’ Family holidays were in Scotland, and a house was first rented and then bought on the island of Skye where John, Ursula and the children could enjoy walking, boating, bird-watching, shooting and fishing in beautiful and remote surroundings, echoing the pattern of JB's own childhood. He was, in his daughter Mary's words, a ‘brilliant grandfather’ (‘Grampy's’ good influence making itself felt again) – tolerant, funny and adoring. John and Ursula's grandson, Ben, in the Bowlby tradition of independence and originality, received first-class honours in engineering for designing and building his own racing car – an ‘external working model’ (see Chapter 4).
The Bowlbys and the Durbins had shared a house in York Terrace (where Adrian and Karen Stephens and Ernest Jones also had their consulting rooms). This collaborative living arrangement was continued after the war, when John's recognition of the benefits of an extended network of friends and family in child-rearing were realised. The Bowlby family shared a large house in Hampstead with the Sutherlands (Jock Sutherland became director of the Tavistock Clinic), and with a young psychologist, later to become Mrs Mattie Harris, who became organising tutor of the child psychotherapy training programme at the Tavistock Clinic (Sutherland, 1991).
Immediately after the war the ‘invisible college’ of Army psychoanalysts re-grouped themselves around the Tavistock Clinic, hitherto ruled out of bounds by the autocratic Jones. An election was held and, although neither had previously worked there, Jock Sutherland was elected Director, with Bowlby as Deputy, given the specific task of developing a Department for Children.
John went about this with his usual energy, efficiency and determination. He established a clinical service, treating patients, seeing mothers and children together, spending one day a week in a well-baby clinic, supervising, and chairing case conferences. Together with Esther Bick he set up the child psychotherapy training and continued to support it, even when its Kleinian orientation began to diverge sharply from his own views.
About a third of his week was devoted to clinical and administrative duties. The rest was for research. One of John's unsung qualities was his ability to raise research funds. On the basis of his pre-war experiences in the Child Guidance Clinic, he had decided to make a systematic study of the effects of separation on the personality development of young children. He recruited James Robertson, a conscientious objector in the war who had worked as a boilerman in Anna Freud's Hampstead residential children's nursery, and who later became an analyst and filmmaker. Mary Ainsworth, co-founder of Attachment Theory, also joined the team, as did Mary Boston.
The outcome of Bowlby's collaboration with Robertson was the famous film A Two-year-old Goes to Hospital, which showed the intense distress of a small child separated from her mother, made with a handheld cine-camera without artificial light. The film is almost impossible to watch dry-eyed, and did much to liberalise hospital visiting rules. As previously described, the film met with a mixed reception when shown to the Psychoanalytical Society, the Kleinians being particularly unimpressed, a foretaste of the response Bowlby was to meet when he presented his breakthrough papers on Attachment Theory a few years later.
Bowlby's research interests, together with his Forty-four Thieves paper, made him an obvious choice when the World Health Organisation was looking for an expert to prepare a report on the mental health of post-war homeless children. Bowlby travelled widely in Europe and the United States, meeting the leading figures in child development, and combined their views with his own in a review of the world literature, Maternal Care and Mental Health (Bowlby, 1951). This was published in a popular edition as Child Care and the Growth of Love (Bowlby, 1953b), which became an instant best-seller, selling 450,000 copies in the English edition alone. It was translated into ten different languages.
Bowlby's reputation was by now secure and he was able to follow his innovative instincts without anxiety. He was keen to break down the ivory tower reputation of the Tavistock Clinic and to foster links with local health visitors, Family Doctors and social workers. His efforts to establish liaison were blocked until the Minister of Health issued a directive asking the London County Council (LCC) to pay more attention to mental health. The Chief Medical Officer of the LCC invited Bowlby to give a lecture on the subject. He refused, saying that mental health could not be properly taught by didactic methods, but offering to join a study group if one were set up. A week later he received a message from the Chief Medical Officer: ‘Your “study group” is ready. When would you like to start?’ (Mackenzie, 1991).
Ainsworth (1982) believes that the idea of attachment came to Bowlby ‘in a flash’ when in 1952 he heard about and then read Lorenz's and Tinbergen's work in ethology. The ethological approach provided the scientific grounding that Bowlby saw was needed to update psychoanalytic theory. Seen psycho-biographically, Attachment Theory might be seen as a return by Bowlby to the ‘natural history’ values of his mother which he had rebelled against in choosing to train as a psychoanalyst. Disappointed with his mother's self-preoccupation and favouritism, he turned to the many mothers of psychoanalysis – Klein, Riviere, Payne. But these too, partly through their own limitations, partly because they embodied his hostile projections, disappointed in their turn. By marrying the biology of ethology with Freudian theory, he managed to reconcile the discordant elements in his personality: his country-loving mother with her respect for nature, and the intimidating urban medical father whose success and intelligence were inspirational but whose Gradgrindian devotion to fact and duty dominated his life. Bowlby soon organised regular attachment seminars which were attended by a talented and eclectic group including the ethologist Robert Hinde and, for a time, the ‘anti-psychiatrist’, R. D. Laing. A year as a fellow at the Centre for Behavioural Sciences in Stanford, California, gave him an opportunity to re-read Freud and to prepare the breakthrough papers of the late 1950s, starting with ‘The nature of the child's tie to his mother’ (Bowlby, 1958d).
Bowlby remained active in the Psychoanalytical Society in the postwar years. He was Deputy President to Donald Winnicott between 1956 and 1961, responsible for ‘everything administrative’ (Bowlby, 1991). He set up and chaired the Research Committee, and initiated several other committees, including the Public Relations Committee; a committee to look at indemnity insurance for non-medical members (it was typical of Bowlby to be alert to the possible hazards to members uncushioned by the secure base of medicine); and the Curriculum Committee (set up to prevent trainings from becoming interminable – another typically practical move).
While the society was happy to benefit from his organisational skills, Bowlby's theoretical papers, presented between 1957 and 1959, excited considerable discussion but little enthusiasm, and were received by the Kleinians with outright hostility. Typical comments were: from Guntrip:
‘I think it is very good for an eminent psychoanalyst to have gone thoroughly into the relation of ethology to psychoanalysis, but my impression is that he succeeds in using it to explain everything in human behaviour except what is of vital importance for psychoanalysis’ (1962, letter to Marjorie Brierley, in Archives, Institute of Psychoanalysis)
from Winnicott, although generally friendly and sympathetic to Bowlby's contribution (Malan, 1991):
‘I can't quite make out why it is that Bowlby's papers are building up in me a kind of revulsion although in fact he has been scrupulously fair to me in my writings’
and, from an anonymous analyst, ‘Bowlby? Give me Barabbas’ (Grosskurth, 1986). The analysts found his patrician manner and ‘orotund’ (Rycroft, 1992) voice off-putting, although these may well have been exaggerated as a means of coping with the intimidating atmosphere of the Psychoanalytical Society at the time. Bowlby had an impish quality and a capacity for amusing tomfoolery which was clearly not evident to the analysts. Whether Bowlby did indeed betray psychoanalysis, or helped to breathe new life into it, forms one of the themes of this book.
Partly no doubt because of his hostile reception, and partly because of his growing reputation elsewhere, Bowlby spent little time in the Psychoanalytical Society after the mid–1960s although, unlike other distinguished dissidents such as Charles Rycroft, he did not discontinue his membership. While continuing his clinical role at the Tavistock, in 1963 he became a part-time member of the Medical Research Council, which enabled him to devote yet more time to writing. The years 1964 to 1979 were devoted to his monumental trilogy Attachment (1969b), Separation (1973a, and Loss (1980). These have also been bestsellers, with the first volume selling well over 100,000 copies, the second 75,000, and the third 45,000 (Bowlby, 1980). Colin Murray Parkes and Dorothy Heard joined him at the Tavistock in the 1960s. Like Bowlby, Parkes had been struck by the relevance of Darwin's ideas about grief to the clinical phenomena of abnormal mourning, and a fruitful partnership developed (Parkes, 1964; 1971; 1975). Bowlby was much in demand as a lecturer, especially in the United States where, through the work of Ainsworth (1969) and her students, Attachment Theory was exciting increasing interest.
Bowlby held numerous important positions and consultancies, and received many honours, including the CBE, Honorary Doctorates at Cambridge and Leicester, Honorary Fellowships of the Royal Society of Medicine and College of Psychiatrists, Fellowship of the British Academy, and several Distinguished Scientist awards and medals in the United States, including that of the American Psychological Association. In common with many an innovator and original thinker, he was perhaps more honoured abroad than at home, and received neither a knighthood nor Fellowship of the Royal Society, both of which were undoubtedly his due (Kraemer, 1991).
He retired from the NHS and the MRC in 1972, but continued to work in an honorary role at the Tavistock Clinic, dividing his time between London and his beloved Skye. He supervised and encouraged students and received many foreign visitors. During 1980 he was Freud Memorial Professor of Psychoanalysis at University College London, a post which gave him great satisfaction. His lectures there and from his trips abroad were collected in The Making and Breaking of Affectional Bonds (1979c) and A Secure Base (1988a). Mentally and physically active as ever, he began an entirely new project in his seventies, a psychobiography of Darwin (Bowlby, 1990); this was published a few months before his death, and was well reviewed.
His eightieth birthday was celebrated in London with a conference with many distinguished speakers from around the world. The affection he inspired was palpable, as, garlanded with flowers, he embraced his many friends and colleagues to loud claps and cheers. A few weeks later he collapsed unconscious with a cardiac arrhythmia, but made a complete recovery, and was able to finish the Darwin biography. Three years later he suffered a stroke while in Skye with his family, who had gathered as they did every year for the Skye Ball, where John had been a skilled exponent of Scottish reels. He died a few days later on 2 September 1990, and was buried at Trumpan on the Waternish peninsula, a hillside graveyard overlooking the cliffs of Waternish and the Ardmore peninsula. It was a favourite spot, wild and remote, from which John, with his great feeling for nature, often used to walk, and he had asked to be buried there. He had a traditional Skye funeral with three ‘lifts’ from the hearse to the grave. His friend Hyla Holden, a former Tavistock colleague, one of the bearers, concludes: ‘his funeral and burial were in keeping with the straight-forward and loving simplicity which lay behind his formidable intellect’ (Trowell, 1991). His constancy and steadfastness of purpose are celebrated in the inscription on the headstone of pale grey Aberdeen granite, which reads: ‘To be a pilgrim’.
What was John Bowlby like? In his work his greatest achievement was his bringing together of psychoanalysis and, via ethology, evolutionary biology. A similar capacity to reconcile divergent elements is to be found in his personality which, although remarkably coherent and consistent, contained many contradictory aspects. He was reserved, yet capable of inspiring great affection; quintessentially ‘English’ and yet thoroughly cosmopolitan in outlook; conventional in manner yet revolutionary in spirit; equally at home with the sophistication of Hampstead and in the wilds of Skye; outstandingly intelligent and yet not in a conventional sense an intellectual; a man of action who devoted his life to the inner world; determined in his convictions and yet without overt aggression; an explorer of the psyche who mistrusted the purely subjective; someone who believed passionately in the importance of expressing emotion, whose own feelings were an enigma; an enfant terrible who was always slightly formal.
It is hard to get an impression of Bowlby as a therapist because personal clinical material is so sparse in his writings. He was fierce in his opposition to rigid and punitive methods of child-rearing, detested the ways in which children are deprived of love and affection in the name of not ‘spoiling’ them, and insisted on the enduring nature of dependency which he refused to see as a childlike quality to be outgrown, but rather an essential aspect of human nature. One guesses that he had first-hand experience of the child-rearing philosophy he rejected so vigorously. He consistently advocated flexibility and acceptance:
‘An immense amount of friction and anger in small children and loss of temper on the part of their parents can be avoided by such simple procedures as presenting a legitimate plaything before we intervene to remove his mother's best china, or coaxing him to bed by tactful humouring instead of demanding prompt obedience, or by permitting him to select his own diet and eat it in his own way, including, if he likes it, having a feeding bottle until he is two years of age or over. The amount of fuss and irritation which comes from expecting small children to conform to our own ideas of what, how, and when they eat is ridiculous and tragic.’
(Bowlby, 1979c)
He repeatedly emphasised the dangers of suppressing feelings:
‘a main reason why some find expressing grief extremely difficult is that the family in which they have been brought up, and with which they still mix, is one in which the attachment behaviour of the child is regarded unsympathetically as something to be grown out of as soon as possible … crying and other protests over separation are apt to be dubbed as babyish, and anger and jealousy as reprehensible.’
(Bowlby, 1979c)
He describes one such patient:
‘I well remember how a silent inhibited girl in her early twenties given to unpredictable moods and hysterical outbursts at home responded to my comment ‘it seems to be as though your mother never really loved you’ (she was the second daughter, to be followed in quick succession by two much wanted sons). In a flood of tears she confirmed my view by quoting, verbatim, remarks made by her mother from childhood to the present day, and [describing] the despair, jealousy, and rage her mother's treatment roused in her.’
(Bowlby 1979)
Bowlby himself came from a family in which there were two daughters, to be followed in quick succession by two much-wanted sons, with a mother whose love her children may well have doubted (with the possible exception of Tony), so he probably knew what he was talking about. Even if he did not have a particularly loving mother, Bowlby had learned enough from her, and perhaps from his much-loved nursemaid Minnie who left when he was no more than four, to know what it takes to be one. In adult life he relied greatly on his wife Ursula's intuition and sensitivity. In a posthumously published self-portrait Bowlby modestly asserts:
I am not strong on intuition. Instead, I tend to apply such theories as I hold in an effort to understand the patient's problems. This works well when the theories are applicable but can be a big handicap when they are not. Perhaps my saving graces have been that I am a good listener and not too dogmatic about theory. As a result several of my patients have succeeded in teaching me a great deal I did not know…. I often shudder to think how inept I have been as a therapist and how I have ignored or misunderstood material a patient has presented. Clearly, the best therapy is done by a therapist who is naturally intuitive and also guided by the appropriate theory. Fortunately, nowadays I meet many such people in clinical seminars, and among supervisees.
(Bowlby, 1991)
One such was Victoria Hamilton, who confirms Bowlby's listening skills, painting a vivid portrait:
a very unassuming person who at the same time displayed an unusual acuity…. My most constant image of John Bowlby … is of him sitting back in a chair, his legs crossed indicating an expression of relaxed concentration, and a very alert face. He had penetrating but responsive eyes, beneath raised eyebrows which expressed both interest and a slight air of surprise and expectation … a remarkable ability to listen to the thoughts and beliefs of others, combined with a capacity for objectivity and a rare facility with the English language. He could step back from an idea and reformulate it in a succinct articulate way…. Despite his somewhat military manner, expressed in a certain abruptness and stiffness very far from ‘small talk’, he was perfectly able to ‘take turns’, the essential ingredient of conversation.
(Hamilton, 1991)
A lifelong friend, Jock Sutherland (1991), describes his first encounter with John during the war, in which he appeared ‘somewhat formal and even aloof’. Sutherland and Eric Trist, another of John's half-century friends, speculated that Bowlby's description of the ‘affectionless character’ was based on empathic understanding (rather as Freud's discovery of the Oedipus complex was based on his own rivalry with his father):
We speculated that John's own early experience must have included a degree, if not of actual deprivation, of some inhibition of his readiness to express emotional affection … so that he developed in some measure a protective shell of not showing his feelings as readily as many people do…. John's slightly formal and even detached manner struck many people on first knowing him. Eric Trist and I were always convinced he was the possessor of a deep and powerful fund of affection – the source of his intensely caring concern for those who worked with him.
(Sutherland 1991)
John Byng-Hall, another Tavistock colleague, sees Bowlby as a perfect embodiment of his idea of the secure base, capable of holding together family therapists and child psychotherapists despite their very different philosophies, alert to real dangers faced by patients and therapists, and above all ‘very reliable. I have images of him, even last winter [that is, in his eighty-second year], shaking the rain off his green mackintosh and hat as he arrived on time for some evening meeting; while others sent their apologies’ (Byng-Hall, 1991a).
Those clocks that Bowlby had grown up with did have their uses.
It seems to be a characteristic of many outstanding men and women that they retain the freshness and innocence of childhood, however clothed it is with responsibility and the burdens of maturity. This was certainly true of Bowlby's great hero, Darwin (Bowlby, 1990), with whom he strongly identified, and had much in common, although he would have been embarrassed by the comparison. Like Darwin, Bowlby had a boyhood love of outdoor sports, of the countryside and of exploration, with a keenness of intellect that was not precociously evident. Like Darwin, Bowlby had a strong and successful medical father; both seem to have aroused in their sons a rebelliousness hedged about with caution. Both were younger sons, with clever and rather overshadowing older brothers and sisters. Darwin's mother died when he was eight; Bowlby's was (at least in her London life) remote and self-centered. Both lived in times of social turmoil and had a strongly held but restrained sense of social justice, and of the responsibilities of the fortunate towards the disadvantaged, in the best Whig tradition. They both believed passionately in the power of reason to illuminate both the natural and social world. Bowlby admired Darwin's openness to all available evidence, as shown by the long hours he spent in smoke-filled public houses discussing breeding methods with pigeon fanciers in search of support for his theory of natural selection. Bowlby, too, mixed with mothers in nurseries and baby clinics, ever-observant of patterns of attachment. Both showed generosity towards their supporters, and lacked rancour towards their detractors. Finally, it might be said of their theories that they have the quality of immediacy and ‘obviousness’ – of which it might be said, ‘Why on earth did no one think of that before?’ In retrospect it seems obvious that species have evolved by natural selection, that people are attached to one another and suffer when they separate – but it took child-like simplicity of vision combined with mature determination and attention to detail to root out the obvious and to create for it a secure theoretical and evidential base.
Bowlby describes an early boyhood memory of Darwin's concerning showing off:
He recalls ‘thinking that people were admiring me, in one instance for perseverance, and another for boldness in climbing a low tree, and what is odder, a consciousness, as if instinctive, that I was vain, and a contempt for myself’. This reference to self-contempt for being vain thus early in his life is of much significance, since we find it persisting as a major feature of his character into his final years.
(Bowlby 1990)
Here we see Bowlby's extreme sensitivity to the uncertainties, miseries and vulnerability of childhood, to the gulf between a child's fragile self-esteem and a potentially hostile or indifferent world. Bowlby cared intensely about the mental pain of children, and his life's work was directed towards trying to prevent, remove and alleviate it. Behind the disturbed child's tough, ‘affectionless’ carapace Bowlby had a sixth sense for the sadness and sense of betrayal. Apparently bolder than Darwin, Bowlby kept his vulnerability well hidden. But in his rebelliousness we see perhaps the protest of the child who has been hurt and neglected. In his application and indefatigability we find the attempt to make good the unthinking damage the adult world so often does to children.
Many of Bowlby's metaphors were medical. Famously, ‘mother love is as important for mental health as are vitamins and proteins for physical health’ (Bowlby, 1953a); ‘deprived children … are a source of social infection as real and serious as are carriers of diphtheria and typhoid’ (Bowlby, 1953a); ‘the basic fact that people really do want to live happily together … gives confidence [to the family therapist], much as a knowledge of the miraculous healing powers of the body gives confidence to the surgeon’ (Bowlby, 1949a).
Bowlby's ideas were forged in the era of two world wars. Millions died in the first war. The enormity of the loss went unmourned by society in the triumphalism of Versailles and the manic activity of the twenties. The second war saw the horror of the Holocaust, 50–70 million deaths, and the traumatic disruption of the lives of children throughout Europe. As early as the 1930s, Bowlby saw loss and separation as key issues for psychotherapy and psychiatry. It was the men – the fathers, sons, brothers, husbands, lovers – who died; it was a men's world that went to war. And yet in Bowlby's work men are conspicuous by their absence. It is maternal deprivation that made Bowlby's name. Bowlby's strong identification with his much-absent father comes through in his medical imagery, but he does not emerge as a live figure in the family drama as depicted by Bowlby, or indeed by the other outstanding analysts of his generation, Klein and Winnicott. Bowlby's contribution, and that of his contemporaries, has been to rehabilitate the female principle, the missing mother who until then was absent from social and psychoanalytic discourse (Freud's main preoccupation was with fathers and sons). In his concept of maternal deprivation Bowlby was perhaps simultaneously reproving and idealising his own mother. Unlike Winnicott he seems uncertain of his intuitive feminine side, just as he may have mistrusted his mother with her fickle and uneven affections. In his theories of motherhood it is as though Bowlby is enacting the male role – the guardian of evidence and objectivity – but without really examining it. His father is there in the metaphors, but not at the meal table. Bowlby's maleness is in the counter-transferential blind spot through which he sees mother and child, but not himself seeing them – a typical example of the modern ‘patriarchal but father-absent’ family (Leupnitz, 1988). To consider these and other issues we must now turn to the topic for which Bowlby was best known, that misnamed miscreant, maternal deprivation.