| Abstract: | Marks the death of John Bowlby, whose Attachment Theory (AT) has had greater impact on American psychology than any theory of personality development since Freud's. Bowlby believed in the importance of real-life experiences in the etiology of mental disorders, rather than in the fantasies that then-current psychoanalytic theory emphasized. He was convinced of the importance to a child's personality development of interaction with its parents. In 1948, he established a research unit at the Tavistock Clinic to continue his work on the effects of early separation and identified 3 phases of response: protest, despair, and detachment. Inspired by the work of Konrad Lorenz, Bowlby seized on ethology and Darwinian evolutionary theory as the foundation of AT. First applied to social development in infancy, AT is now leading to research in later childhood and adulthood. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved) |
