John Bowlby's Radical Claim

In the 1940s, a British psychiatrist by the name of John Bowlby attended Cambridge University and worked with delinquent boys in the notoriously rough east part of London. He had a lot of experience with people with severe trauma. When World War II broke out, he also worked with and observed wartime evacuations of nurseries where little children would be separated from their parents for extended periods.

He studied children in hospitals where parents were not allowed to stay overnight, and he saw that brief separations compounded suffering. He would go to parks and notice that when mothers of young children were not fully engaged, the children would get very nervous, and if the mom completely disappeared, the children would fall apart and cry unconsolably until she reappeared.

At that time, psychiatry thought that child bad behavior was essentially all genetic, the child’s fault, or a result of infantile sexual fantasies. Bowlby put off this radical claim: ‘Wait a minute, I think children’s disturbed behavior is a response to actual life events.’ That was radical thinking at the time. Based on this he developed attachment theory.