Bowlby and Ainsworth: How Attachment Theory Was Discovered

In the winter of 1950, the World Health Organization asked a British psychiatrist named John Bowlby to study what was happening to children who had been separated from their families during the Second World War. The children he visited in institutions across Europe were, by every external measure, being cared for. They were fed. They were clothed. They had roofs over their heads and adults who were responsible for them. And they were not well. Many of them showed a pattern that Bowlby, who had worked with troubled children for years before the war, recognized as something more than grief. Some had gone quiet in a way that alarmed him , a particular quality of stillness that was less like recovery and more like a system that had given up. They had stopped reaching. They had stopped expecting comfort to come.

What Bowlby took from those visits was a conviction that would define the remaining thirty years of his career: that the bond between infant and caregiver was not a sentimental preference. Not a nice thing to have, not a luxury that enriched development. A biological necessity, as essential to the survival of the human young as food or warmth. And when that necessity was not met , when the bond was broken, when the child was left alone in the sense that mattered most , the consequences were not ordinary sadness. They were damage, visible and measurable, that persisted long after the physical conditions improved.

This was not a popular position to hold in 1950.

What everyone else believed

The prevailing wisdom in psychology and pediatrics in the middle of the twentieth century held that too much maternal attention would spoil a child. The behaviorists who dominated academic psychology at the time were skeptical of any explanation that invoked internal states, preferences, emotional needs. What the infant needed, in the dominant framework, was to have its physical needs met , to be fed when hungry, kept warm, kept clean. The emotional relationship with the caregiver was secondary at best and at worst was considered a potential source of dependency that should be managed down rather than encouraged.

Pediatric advice of the era reflected this. Feeding on a rigid schedule rather than on demand. Not picking up a crying baby too quickly, lest you reinforce the crying. The idea that what the baby needed most was an available, emotionally warm, consistently responsive human being was regarded, in some quarters, as sentimental excess.

Bowlby said the opposite. And because he was a careful scientist as well as a practicing clinician, he set about assembling the evidence.

The work that changed everything

Bowlby’s great achievement was not a single study. It was a synthesis , the bringing together of ethology (the study of animal behavior), control systems theory, cognitive science, and psychoanalysis into a framework that could explain why the infant,caregiver bond was so powerful and why its disruption was so costly. He published the first volume of his Attachment trilogy in 1969, and the argument it made was, at its core, evolutionary: the attachment system was a survival mechanism. The infant who stayed close to its caregiver in a world full of predators survived. The infant who did not, did not. The drive to seek and maintain proximity to a specific person when threatened was not neurosis. It was biology.

But the empirical heart of what we now call attachment theory came from someone else. It came from Mary Ainsworth, who had worked with Bowlby in London in the early 1950s and who then spent the following two decades building the observational and experimental foundation without which his theoretical framework would have remained just that.

Before designing the experiment that would make her famous, Ainsworth spent years watching. First in Uganda, where she conducted fieldwork observing mothers and infants in their homes over several months, recording the details of how caregivers responded to their babies and how the babies responded in return. Then in Baltimore, where she did the same thing with American families, making home visits, recording behavior, amassing the kind of observational detail that is genuinely rare in psychology because it requires extraordinary patience and does not produce the clean data that laboratory experiments produce.

What she was accumulating, visit by visit, was a picture of what attunement actually looked like in real life , how the reliably responsive mother differed from the inconsistently responsive one, what the emotionally unavailable mother did and did not do, how those differences played out in the day-to-day texture of the infant’s experience. By the time she designed the Strange Situation in the late 1960s, she already knew what she was likely to find. She was building the laboratory confirmation of what she had already seen in the field.

What she found in the room

The Strange Situation procedure and its findings I have described in detail elsewhere in these pages. What I want to note here is what those findings meant at the time. When Ainsworth published her landmark monograph in 1978, the data showed something that the field had not previously been able to demonstrate so clearly: the quality of the infant,caregiver relationship in the first year of life predicted the infant’s behavior in a standardized laboratory situation with remarkable consistency. The babies who had experienced consistent, warm, responsive caregiving behaved in ways that reflected that experience. The babies who had experienced inconsistency showed patterns consistent with having learned that the caregiver was unreliable. The babies who had experienced emotional unavailability showed patterns consistent with having learned to manage without seeking comfort.

And the patterns mapped forward. Longitudinal research following Ainsworth’s subjects into childhood and then into adulthood showed that the attachment classification assigned at twelve months predicted, with meaningful if not perfect reliability, functioning in subsequent relationships , peer relationships, romantic relationships, parenting relationships. The template was not the whole story. Other things happened. But it was the first template, and first templates have a weight that later ones do not.

Why it took so long for anyone to believe them

Bowlby’s work was initially rejected by the British Psychoanalytic Society, which considered his evolutionary framework a departure from proper psychoanalytic thinking. His emphasis on real events and actual relationships , rather than on the child’s fantasy life and internal phantasy , put him at odds with the Kleinian wing of British psychoanalysis that was dominant at the time. He was, in some periods of his career, quite isolated.

Ainsworth’s work was received somewhat more warmly by developmental psychology, but the implications of what she had found took decades to fully enter mainstream clinical practice. The idea that what happened in the first year of life was formative in ways that shaped adult relationship functioning was, for a long time, treated as interesting but unproven. The longitudinal studies that demonstrated it required following subjects for years, sometimes decades. The clinical applications required therapists who were trained in a framework that most graduate programs were still not teaching.

By the 1990s, the research had accumulated to the point where dismissal was no longer intellectually defensible. The literature on adult attachment, initiated by Hazan and Shaver’s 1987 paper and expanded by dozens of research groups since, demonstrated that the patterns Ainsworth had observed in one-year-olds were visible and meaningful in adult populations. The idea that the relational environment of early childhood shapes the architecture of how people experience closeness and danger in adult relationships was no longer a hypothesis. It was a finding.

What they were actually arguing

I want to be clear about what Bowlby and Ainsworth were and were not claiming. They were not arguing that childhood is destiny, that what happens in the first year of life permanently determines what happens afterward, that people cannot change. Bowlby was explicit about the plasticity of the attachment system and the possibility that later relational experiences could provide what early ones did not. The concept of earned secure attachment , which the research has since substantiated in detail , was consistent with the framework from the beginning.

What they were arguing was simpler and more radical: that the relationship, the actual ongoing relational experience between infant and caregiver, was the primary environment of early development. Not the genes alone. Not the child’s constitutional temperament alone. Not the physical environment. The relationship. The quality of attunement between the infant’s experience and the caregiver’s response to it. The reliability of the safe haven and the secure base. These were the conditions that built the architecture.

Bowlby sat with orphaned children in postwar Europe and watched what happened to human beings when the relational conditions they required were absent. Ainsworth sat in living rooms in Uganda and Baltimore and watched what happened when those conditions were present in different degrees and forms. Together, what they produced was not just a theory. It was a way of understanding the person sitting across from you , any person, including yourself , that takes seriously the question of how they got there. Not as an excuse for where they are. As the beginning of understanding what it would take to be somewhere different.

Daniel

Daniel Wethington is a Licensed Professional Counselor and the founder of Arise Counseling Services in York, Pennsylvania, where he specializes in attachment trauma, anxiety, and gaming and technology addiction. He is the author of four books, including Shaped in Silence and Breaking Free, which explore how early attachment experiences shape adult relationships and compulsive behaviors, which you can find here. Dan works with individuals and couples across Pennsylvania, both in person and through telehealth. If something in this article resonated with you, you can schedule an appointment or learn more at http://arise-pa.com.