Analysts on the Couch: Part III: John Bowlby

[Editor’s Note: In Clio’s Psyche’s last September and December issues, Professor Andrew Brink wrote in-depth review essays of psychobiographies of the prominent psychoanalysts Donald Winnicott, Ronald Fairbairn, and Harry Guntrip. In this issue he concludes the series with a review of a recent book on John Bowlby. Though Bowlby was more of an enigma than are most people, Brink found him to be “a dear man, generous and helpful to me over many years” with “one of his last generous acts” being to work to “get better distribution in the U.K.” for Brink’s “psychobiography of Bertrand Russell, which he really liked and wanted to see readily available.”]

Review Essay of Suzan van Dijken, John Bowlby: His Early Life, A Biographical Journey into the Roots of Attachment Theory. London/New York: Free Association Books, 1998. ISBN: 1853433934 (pb.), viii, 214 pp., $20.00.

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Is a biographical assessment of John Bowlby’s contribution to psychoanalysis yet possible? Compared to the contributions of Winnicott, Fairbairn, and Guntrip, Bowlby’s are of the greatest magnitude and the most scientific, the most exportable to other fields. Yet, Bowlby the man is less known, and less knowable, because he did not wish to be known. Despite psychoanalytic training and a lifetime of practicing child analysis, Bowlby seemed uninterested in the intricacies of his own personality, nor did he leave evidence of an ongoing struggle for which further analysis was sought. He achieved enough sense of personal security to become a confident, even aggressive, scientist of infant and child development — perhaps the leading English-speaking psychological innovator this century. His Attachment and Loss is a classic.

Throughout much of his 83-year life, Bowlby (1907-1990) was controversial and embattled, an uncomfortable presence in his profession. He not only staunchly defended the rights of children, whom he saw often tragically separated from their parents by illness, death, divorce, and wars, he also pursued the theory of separation and loss. His acknowledged starting point was Freud’s (atypical) paper, “Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety” (1926), which countered Otto Rank’s theory of “birth trauma” with one of anxiety generated by the infant’s fear of separation from mother. Bowlby’s studies of juvenile delinquents and children separated from parents in wartime, later reinforced by primate studies, led him to postulate an instinct for attachment. This put into question Freud’s drive theory and showed the importance of pre-oedipal development in the emotional well-being of children. While Bowlby had no intention of attacking Freudian fundamentals, he was seen by many analysts as doing so. Similarly, Melanie Klein and her followers were annoyed with Bowlby for questioning the primacy of “phantasy” in infants and insisting upon observed details of what went on between mothers and their infants. Bowlby, the empiricist, preferred to see emotional disorders of adults in terms of actual relational precursors in their early attachment experiences. Thus, a culturally determined mind-set of Bowlby’s, reinforced by his Cambridge and London education in the biological sciences and medicine, put him at odds with the middle-European founders of psychoanalysis. When World War II brought some of them as refugees to London, the stage was set for a clash which has not yet been resolved.

Bowlby was a post-Victorian Darwinian liberal; he had strong reforming inclinations, hating war and human discord of all kinds. Yet he was a privileged product of his class, confident in his formidable power of intellect, and somewhat military in manner and bearing, reflecting his time as an army psychiatrist. Non-English people have a hard time knowing how to take such persons, even when they are internationally known analysts. Bowlby’s latest and fullest biographer, Suzan van Dijken, is a researcher at the Centre for Child and Family Studies at Leiden University, the Netherlands.

Her English is exceptionally good, but she does not know England from the inside, nor did she know Bowlby himself. The advantage of being an outsider is that her biography is meticulously built up from research data gathered from family, colleagues, and archives. She has ordered and consolidated her gatherings with great skill and the narrative moves well (though her study is taken only to 195l, which is when Bowlby’s famous World Health Organization report on the mental health of children was published). The disadvantage is that Ms. Van Dijken’s documentary thoroughness takes her away from speculating much on the enigma of Bowlby’s personality. Hers is fittingly an “intellectual biography” and she wonders why Bowlby should have chosen to study separation and loss as his life’s work. Bowlby himself gives strong indications of the reasons as being in his personal development and is quoted as saying of his parenting that he had been “sufficiently hurt but not sufficiently damaged.” (p. 11) What exactly did he mean by this? Instead of speculating, Van Dijken quotes analysts Eric Trist and Jock Sutherland about Bowlby’s “‘protective shell’” that “‘John’s own early experience must have included a degree, if not of actual deprivation, of some inhibition of his readiness to express affection’.” (p. 11) Her “Overview” disappointingly emphasizes Bowlby’s separations from his army surgeon father and being sent away to school, though she does mention the early loss of his “much loved nursemaid, Minnie” as sensitizing him to separations. (p. 154; see also p. 26) But Bowlby’s main interest was not with fathers or even nursemaids but with mothers and their infants and children. More should have been said, in terms of Bowlby’s own categories of anxious attachment, about the consequences for children of mothers, especially those temperamentally distant as May Bowlby was, who give up primary care to nurses and nannies. The

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concept of anxious avoidant attachment, as developed by Bowlby’s followers, Mary Ainsworth and Mary Main, would have been especially apt to discuss.

Several attempts have been made by interviewers to elicit personal information from Bowlby, none of them satisfactory. Rosemary Dinnage’s “Understanding Loss: The Bowlby Canon” (Psychology Today, May, 1980) calls him “one of the most reticent of men,” likening him to “a retired military or naval gentleman of the old school.” (p. 56) Dinnage obviously had a thin [lean, unrewarding] time with Bowlby, not experiencing his capacity for engagement and warmth. Similarly, Nora Newcombe and Jeffrey C. Lerner were kept at a distance when interviewing for “Britain Between the Wars: The Historical Context of Bowlby’s Theory of Attachment” (Psychiatry, February, 1982). This astute paper focuses on Bowlby’s theories’ taking their rise in an era of wartime separations and losses; but Bowlby managed to elude the interviewers by not imparting how very close to home such experiences were. Christopher Fortune met with Bowlby to talk about childhood sexual abuse, publishing “Psychoanalytic Champion of ‘Real-Life’ Experience: An Interview with John Bowlby” (Melanie Klein and Object Relations, December, l99l). Fortune was somewhat more successful, beginning his taped interview while walking to a London pub. Later at the Tavistock Institute he found Bowlby’s manner “unpretentious and down-to-earth,” despite “his characteristic upper-class British accent.” (p. 70) This is a wide-ranging and informative interview, but still not very personal as to Bowlby’s motivation for being the crusader he was on behalf of children.

Robert Karen’s Becoming Attached: Unfolding the Mystery of the Infant-Mother Bond and Its Impact on Later Life (l994), an excellent introduction to the theory, also contains the rudiments of a good biography. Karen rightly reports Bowlby as having seemed “emotionally distant,” yet “very direct, admirably, almost touchingly, incapable of being devious, and… possessed of an unshakable integrity.” (p. 29) Still, the best assessment of Bowlby’s inner life is Jeremy Holmes, John Bowlby and Attachment Theory (1993). While Holmes lacked the array of information with which Van Dijken works, his English training as a psychotherapist gave him special powers of insight. Holmes shows the real starting point for a psychobiography of Bowlby when he writes, “Attachment Theory might be seen as a return by Bowlby to the values of his mother which he had rejected when he became a psychoanalyst. Disappointed with his mother’s self-preoccupation and favoritism, he turned to the many mothers of psychoanalysis — Klein, Rivière, and Payne. But these, too, partly through their own limitations, partly because they contained his hostile projections, disappointed in their turn. By marrying the biology of ethology with Freudian theory, he managed to reconcile the discordant elements in his personality: his country-loving mother with her respect for nature, and the intimidating urban medical father whose success and intelligence were inspirational but whose Gradgrindian [excessively practical and unimaginative] devotion to fact and duty dominated his life.” (pp. 27-28) Bowlby was profoundly attuned to the natural world, a lover of trees and plants, and a skilled bird-watcher; he was a kind of nature mystic who saw no use in organized religion. Nature was maternal and nourishing, while paternal intellect was necessarily instrumental in dealing with uncomfortable emotion. He somehow managed to draw together these two aspects of being into an incomparable, unified personality which was both distant and warmly reassuring. Bowlby was a psychobiographer of Charles Darwin (1990) and he must have realized that a similar attempt would be made for himself. The task of putting such a man on the psychobiographer’s couch remains, but we should be grateful for the partial efforts so far made.

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