Attachment: Attachment and Loss Volume One(Basic Books Classics)

Attachment: Attachment and Loss Volume One(Basic Books Classics)

John Bowlby

Language: English

Pages: 436

ISBN: 0465005438

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


This first volume of John Bowlby’s Attachment and Loss series examines the nature of the child’s ties to the mother. Beginning with a discussion of instinctive behavior, its causation, functioning, and ontogeny, Bowlby proceeds to a theoretical formulation of attachment behavior—how it develops, how it is maintained, what functions it fulfills.In the fifteen years since Attachment was first published, there have been major developments in both theoretical discussion and empirical research on attachment. The second edition, with two wholly new chapters and substantial revisions, incorporates these developments and assesses their importance to attachment theory.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

control puppies whose approaches had been rewarded with uniform petting and kindness. Cairn’s experiments with lambs gave similar results (Cairns, 1966a and b; Cairns and Johnson, 1965). From about six weeks of age a lamb was kept isolated but in visual and auditory contact with an operating television set. Not only did the lamb maintain proximity to the set but when, after nine weeks of confinement, the lamb was separated from the set it immediately sought for it and approached it when found.

cry are likely to affect a mother’s behaviour, but each is likely to affect it differently. The pain-type of cry, Wolff found, is among the most powerful of all stimuli for bringing a mother hurrying to her child. To a cry that starts at low intensity, on the other hand, her response is likely to be more leisurely. In the one case she is prepared to take emergency action on the baby’s behalf; in the other to rock him or to feed him. Smiling and babbling occur in quite different circumstances

fathers who were not frequently available interacted strongly with their infants whenever they were with them. In such families, Schaffer and Emerson found, a child tended to become more intensely attached to father than to mother. Several of the mothers . . . indeed complained that their policy of not ‘spoiling’ was being ruined by their husbands and that the infant who was quite undemanding as long as only the mother was about would make intense demands for his father’s presence and attention

Ego-control varies from over-control, through moderate-control to under-control, with the optimum in the middle. Ego-resilience varies from high to low, or brittle, with the optimum at the high end. Among characteristics of the over-controlled person are constrained and inhibited responses, reduced expression of emotion, and narrow restriction of the information processed. Among characteristics of the under-controlled person are impulsiveness, distractability, open expression of emotion, and too

many species of bird and mammal. No one doubts that such behaviour falls into the general class we are calling instinctive, yet the exact advantage (or advantages) that it confers on a species often remains unclear. Nevertheless it is characteristic of contemporary biological thought that any instinctive behaviour is confidently presumed to have some particular function (or functions) that aids survival, even though the nature of that function is not yet agreed by students of the subject. The

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