Mario Marrone - Attachment and Interaction: From Bowlby to Current Clinical Theory and Practice Second Edition

ATTACHMENT
AND INTERACTION

FROM BOWLBY TO CURRENT CLINICAL THEORY AND PRACTICE

MARIO MARRONE

WITH A CONTRIBUTION BY NICOLA DIAMOND

Jessica Kingsley Publishers
London and Philadelphia

First published in 1998 by Jessica Kingsley Publishers

This second edition published in 2014

by Jessica Kingsley Publishers

73 Collier Street

London N1 9BE, UK

and

400 Market Street, Suite 400

Philadelphia, PA 19106, USA

www.jkp.com

Copyright Mario Marrone 1998, 2014

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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Marrone, Mario.

Attachment and interaction : from Bowlby to current clinical theory and practice / Mario Marrone. -

Second edition.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-84905-209-2

1. Attachment behavior. 2. Attachment behavior in children. 3. Parent and child. 4. Object relations

(Psychoanalysis) 5. Psychoanalysis. I. Title.

BF575.A86M38 2014

155.92--dc23

2013047026

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 84905 209 2

eISBN 978 0 85700 444 4

CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1

John Bowlby

Introduction

Perhaps the best way of introducing attachment theory is to talk first about John Bowlby, its creator. In doing this, I shall mix some biographical details with some personal impressions and give an outline of the way his ideas developed. The main theme of this book relates to the study of: (1) the evolution of John Bowlbys ideas; and (2) his legacy: how attachment theory has developed up to the present day and its clinical applications.

I do not expect this synthesis to be impeccable and comprehensive, because we are dealing here with a paradigm which is developing quickly, with all sorts of implications and ramifications. There is thus no way of encompassing all the available information. I shall be satisfied if I succeed in producing a coherent reference framework from which the reader can develop his or her own inquiries. In fact, since I published the first edition of this book important developments have taken place and many more books have been published on this subject.

I had regular contact with John Bowlby during a period of ten years (from 1980 until shortly before his death in 1990). Initially we met regularly at the Tavistock Clinic in London, often once a week, to discuss clinical cases and psychoanalytic theory. In later years I often visited him at his home. Also, as I shall explain later, we met in seminars held at the Institute of Group Analysis. I remember him with the greatest affection. I can still hear his voice, when I knocked on the door of his room on the fourth floor of the Tavistock Clinic and he said in his strong low-pitched voice: Come in, Mario!

He was a tall, well-built man, not very expressive. Yet he had a natural and amicable freshness. He dressed neatly but informally. During the time of our relationship, he often wore cotton checked shirts and a light-coloured sports jacket.

Bowlby was not prone to intrusive questioning or to unnecessary self-disclosure. He never commented on my personal issues unless I offered them for discussion. Similarly, he was reserved about his personal life, including his family. His wife, Ursula Bowlby, said that this style of self-restraint was part of his character.

Bowlbys early years

Bowlby was born in London on 26 February 1907. His father, Major-General Sir Anthony Bowlby, son of a journalist, was a successful surgeon. His mother, May Mostyn, was the daughter of a clergyman who lived in a Huntingdonshire village. John was one of six children in the family.

His parents attitude was rather aloof, with little capacity to express affection and show playful enjoyment of life. John made valiant efforts as a boy to lighten the sombre, bad-tempered atmosphere at home. Ursula Bowlby says that this side of his family never left him completely. However, there were long family holidays in Scotland, when the family atmosphere improved. Probably, John also found secondary attachment figures in Minnie, his first, much-loved, nursemaid and, subsequently, in Nanna Friend, an intelligent disciplinarian.

Colin Murray Parkes (1995) says:

it is hard to explain why [Bowlby] showed so few of the cognitive and other impairments which he attributed to such deprivation, for John Bowlby stands as one of the most brilliant and intrepid thinkers of his time and those who knew him well found loyalty and warmth behind his reserved behaviour. Perhaps the question that we need to ask is how the many influences on his life converged to influence the formation of his truly exceptional character. (pp.247248)

In 1914, when John was seven years old, the war came. He and his elder brother were sent to boarding school. John deplored the emotional atmosphere in that school. Yet his intellectual development was not impaired and he did well with his studies.

His father worked as surgeon-general in France for most of the war. When the war came to an end John went as a naval cadet to Dartmouth. However, he did not find the navy satisfying and decided to move on. In 1925 he went to university in Cambridge, where he stayed until 1928. There he read natural sciences and psychology. He then became interested in what we would now call developmental psychology.

Subsequently John spent a year in a progressive school for maladjusted children, which was run like a home. There he learned that behavioural disturbances in children seemed to be related to family dysfunction. John began to think that real-life experiences in childhood had an effect, often a pathogenic effect, on personality development. This idea is in fact the hallmark of attachment theory.

Perhaps we are now ready to jump to a formulation of the central point of attachment theory. The individual lives from the moment he is born until the moment he dies in an interpersonal or intersubjective context. In this context he becomes attached to his parents or parental substitutes and a few other people with whom he develops a close relationship. In the course of the experiences he has with these people (or in relation to them, both in their presence and in their absence), he develops mental representations of the quality of these attachment relationships. These mental representations act as organizing factors in the individuals intrapsychic world and influence personality development in an optimal or pathological way.

Of course, what Bowlby observed early in his career was the fact that disturbances or disruptions of the childs attachment to his significant others and family dysfunction often appear in the history of individuals with serious psychological problems. A more sophisticated understanding of these processes only began to emerge many years later.