Children’s hunger for mother-love and presence is as great as children’s hunger for food (Bowlby 1969, p. xiii). This position was maintained by John Bowlby and his colleagues, particularly James Robertson and later Mary Salter Ainsworth. This premise undergirded their compelling work on instinctive behavior and the ontogeny of human attachment.
Bowlby and his associates focused on disturbances and separations in the early relationships between young children and their primary caretakers, most often mothers or mother-surrogates. Whereas psychoanalytic theory at that time connected psychopathology more with child fantasy and the internal events or process of the child, Bowlby and his associates connected psychoneurosis and other forms of emotional disturbance in the child primarily with rather external events. Bowlby undertook training at the British Psychoanalytic Institute and received supervision from Melanie Klein. In her reconstruction of attachment theory, Inge Bretherton relays...
Bibliography
Bowlby, J. (1951). Maternal care and mental health (World Health Organization monograph, Vol. 2). Geneva: World Health Organization.
Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and loss: Attachment (Vol. 1). New York: Basic.
Bowlby, J. (1973). Attachment and loss: Separation, anxiety and anger (Vol. 2). New York: Basic.
Bowlby, J. (1980). Attachment and loss: Loss sadness and depression (Vol. 3). New York: Basic.
Bowlby, J., & Robertson, J. (1952). A two-year-old goes to hospital. A copy of this scientific film is in the National Archives. London: Tavistock Child Development Research Unit.
Bretherton, I. (1992). The origins of attachment theory: John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth. Developmental Psychology, 28(5), 759–775.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer Science+Business Media New York
About this entry
Cite this entry
Stevenson-Moessner, J. (2014). Attachment and Loss. In: Leeming, D.A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6086-2_9126
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6086-2_9126
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
Print ISBN: 978-1-4614-6085-5
Online ISBN: 978-1-4614-6086-2
eBook Packages: Behavioral Science