Attachment - (Basic Books Classics) by John Bowlby (Paperback)

About the Book

Bowlby's magisterial trilogy analyzes the impact of attachment, separation, and loss, and this first volume focuses on the critical role of the bond between mother and infant in emotional development. Allan Schore, whose pioneering synthesis of neurobiology with attachment research has shown how the brain gets into the act, contributes a foreword that catapults Bowlby's legacy into the new millennium.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"[Attachment] is an exhaustive, closely reasoned study with numerous fascinating bypaths...an excellent definitive work of great importance."--The New York Times

"Bowlby has done for attachment what Dickens did for poverty by shining his spotlight on an underrepresented universal phenomenon--the human propensity to form affectional bonds and the consequences of their loss and disruption. By mapping the largely uncharted terrain of parent-child attachments and identifying their major configurations (secure and insecure), he has irreversibly reshaped our conceptions of normal and pathological development. Bowlby's work has inspired a generation of developmental researchers as well as a growing number of clinicians who find that attachment theory illuminates both the therapeutic relationship and the therapeutic process. It will remain pivotal to any serious debate on human development."--Diana Diamond

"Bowlby's focus on attachment relationships blazed a new path for late twentieth-century developmentalists, psychiatrists and psychotherapists. Historians of science will place Bowlby with Freud, Darwin and Lorenz in redefining the role of the person in his social context, and his work--like that of all truly great authors--must be read in the original: its richness and foresight are breathtaking.
In terms of bridging the epistemologies of natural science and psychotherapy, it stands alone; its value increases by the day as discovery upon discovery confirms the basic truth of his insights. No modern researcher on child development, no healer of minds troubled by adversity in childhood, can afford to work in ignorance of Bowlby's writings."--Peter Fonagy

"It seems almost incredible that, until Bowlby, no one had placed attachment at the center of human development."--Daniel N. Stern

"One of the most influential books of the century."--Stephen A. Mitchell

"This great work, to paraphrase Goethe, stands as new as on its founding day. Indeed, one of the most outstanding features of Bowlby's trilogy is that it remains undated, thirty years after its original publication. Moreover, and remarkably, all three volumes are even now sources for state-of-the-art research in attachment. Rereading them reveals that more than a few ideas some of us have considered new (including some of my own) appeared first in these pages."--Mary Main

About the Author

John Bowlby (1907-1990) was a British psychiatrist and longtime director of child psychology at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations. Celebrated as "one of the most fertile, incisive thinkers about children of our century" (New York Times), his work pioneered attachment theory. He was the author of A Secure Base as well as the highly influential Attachment and Loss trilogy, whose Attachment, Separation, and Loss transformed psychoanalysis, childcare, and the study of attachment behavior.