E J Bowlby - Attachment and loss. Volume 3., Loss: sadness and depression

Contents

In this third and final volume John Bowlby completes the trilogy Attachment and Loss, his much acclaimed work on the importance of the parental relationship to mental health. Here he examines the ways in which young children respond to a temporary or permanent loss of a mother-figure and the expression of anxiety, grief and mourning which accompany such loss.

The theories presented differ in many ways from those advanced by Freud and elaborated by his followers, so much so that the frame of reference now offered for understanding personality developement and psychopathology amounts to a new paradigm.

John Bowlby (19071990) was educated at the University of Cambridge and University College Hospital, London. After qualifying in medicine, he specialised in child psychiatry and psychoanalysis. In 1946 he joined the staff of the Tavistock Clinic where his research and influential publications contributed to far-reaching changes in the ways children are treated and to radically new thinking about the social and emotional development of human beings.

He held honorary degrees from the Universities of Cambridge and Leicester and received awards from professional and scientific bodies, including the Royal College of Psychiatrists, the British Paediatric Association, the Society for Research in Child Development, the American Psychological Association and the New York Academy of Medicine.

To

MY PATIENTS

who have worked hard to educate me

This is the third and final volume of a work that explores the implications for the psychology and psychopathology of personality of the ways in which young children respond to a temporary or permanent loss of mother-figure. The circumstances in which the enquiry was launched are described in the prefaces to the earlier volumes. The overall strategy, which entails approaching the classic problems of psychoanalysis prospectively, is presented in the first chapter of the first volume. It can be summarized as followsthe primary data are observations of how young children behave in defined situations; in the light of these data an attempt is made to describe certain early phases of personality functioning and, from them, to extrapolate forwards. In particular the aim is to describe certain patterns of response that occur regularly in early childhood and, thence, to trace out how similar patterns of response are to be discerned in the later functioning of the personality.

There are many reasons why my initial frame of reference was, and has in many respects remained, that of psychoanalysis. Not the least is that, when the enquiry began, psychoanalysis was the only behavioural science that was giving systematic attention to the phenomena and concepts that seemed central to my taskaffectional bonds, separation anxiety, grief and mourning, unconscious mental processes, defence, trauma, sensitive periods in early life. Yet there are many ways in which the theory advanced here has come to differ from the classical theories advanced by Freud and elaborated by his followers. In particular I have drawn heavily on the findings and ideas of two disciplines, ethology and control theory, that existed only in germinal form at the end of Freuds life. In this volume, moreover, I draw on recent work in cognitive psychology and human information processing in an attempt to clarify problems of defence. As a result the frame of reference now offered for understanding personality development and psychopathology amounts to a new paradigm and is thus alien to clinicians long used to thinking in other ways. The consequent difficulties of communication are as unfortunate as they are inevitable.

Nevertheless, I am much heartened by finding another psychoanalyst who has, independently, adopted a theoretical position almost identical to my own. This is Emanuel Peterfreund whose monograph Information, Systems and Psychoanalysis was published in 1971. Interestingly enough, although influenced by the same scientific considerations as myself, the problems that Dr Peterfreund was initially concerned to solve, problems of the clinical analytic process and the phenomena of insight, were entirely different from mine. Despite that, however, the theoretical frames of reference elaborated by each of us have proven strikingly consistent, to borrow the words he uses in a brief footnote added to his work (p. 149) just before it went to press.

Our two works are in many respects complementary. Special features of Dr Peterfreunds work are, first, his trenchant critique of current psychoanalytic theory; secondly, his brilliant exposition of the basic concepts of information, information processing and control theory; and thirdly, his systematic application of these concepts to the clinical problems with which every analyst treating patients is daily confronted. In particular, he demonstrates how the phenomena subsumed under the terms transference, defence, resistance, interpretation and therapeutic change are explicable by reference to the paradigm we both advocate. Analysts who find my work puzzling, not only because of the unfamiliar paradigm but because my prospective approach is also strange, are therefore encouraged to read Dr Peterfreunds work. Where my work differs from his lies in the central place I give to the concept of attachment behaviour as constituting a class of behaviour having its own dynamic, distinct from feeding behaviour and sexual behaviour, and of at least an equal importance.

There are a number of other psychoanalysts now who are also drawing attention to the merits of a paradigm based on current concepts in biology, control theory and information processing. An example is the work of Rosenblatt and Thickstun (1977).

The first steps I took towards formulating my own schema were in a series of papers published between 1958 and 1963. The present three-volume work is a further attempt. The first volume, Attachment, is devoted to problems originally tackled in the first paper of the series, The Nature of the Childs Tie to his Mother (1958). The second volume, Separation: Anxiety and Anger, covers ground originally tackled in two further papers, Separation Anxiety (1960a) and Separation Anxiety: A Critical Review of the Literature (1961a). This, the third volume, deals with problems of grief and mourning and with the defensive processes to which anxiety and loss can give rise. It comprises a revision and amplification of material first published in the subsequent papers of the earlier series Grief and Mourning in Infancy and Early Childhood (1960b), Processes of Mourning (1961b) and Pathological Mourning and Childhood Mourning (1963)and draws also on drafts of two further papers concerned with loss and defence that were written during the early 1960s and received limited circulation, but remained unpublished.

Since then I have had the immense advantage of having my friend, Colin Murray Parkes, as a close colleague. This has meant that not only have I had privileged access to his valuable collection of data on adult bereavement but have also had constant opportunity to keep in close touch with his thinking.

Many of the basic data from which I start are set out in the opening chapters of the earlier volumes (see especially Volume I, Chapter 2, and Volume II, Chapters i and 3) and have become fairly well known. In the opening chapter of this one, therefore, only a brief summary is given. Yet, in order to remind the reader of the poignancy of the responses observed and to draw his attention to data that I believe to be of special import for understanding the genesis of psychopathological processes, some further illustrative material is given.