John Bowlby

John Bowlby, born into an upper-class conservative family, attended the Naval College and later the University of Cambridge, where he studied Natural Sciences and Psychology before ultimately settling on Medicine. His practical training in Psychology took place at the Institute of Psychoanalysis under the supervision of Joan Riviere, a follower of Melanie Klein. As a qualified psychiatrist, Bowlby began working at the Child Guidance Training Centre, where he closely interacted with troubled children from broken families. He disagreed with Melanie Klein and the psychoanalysts of the British Society, who focused exclusively on the patient's internal world. Bowlby's experience at the Child Clinic led him to believe that understanding the internal world depends on knowledge of the events and situations the patient has experienced. In 1944, his monograph "Forty-Four Juvenile Thieves" reached conclusions similar to those advocated by Anna Freud and Donald Winnicott. After the war, Bowlby was appointed head of the Children's and Families Department at the Tavistock Clinic, where he remained until his death. In 1951, he published the monograph "Maternal Care and Mental Health," where he developed his theory that a child's good mental health requires a close, warm, and stable relationship with their mother. Subsequently, his interest shifted towards biological orientations, leading to a break with psychoanalysts and his departure from the British Psychoanalytical Society. His reputation is primarily based on his approach to the parent-child relationship as a biologist. The difference from the psychoanalytic view is that he placed significant emphasis on the direct observation of mothers and children. It took approximately thirty years of pioneering work by Bowlby for systematic research through direct observation to begin being taken seriously by psychoanalysts. His trilogy on the mother-child relationship, "Attachment, Separation, Loss," was completed in 1980 with the works "Grief and Mourning."