Essay On John Bowlby's Attachment Theory

John Bowlby was a mid-twentieth-century English psychologist who was known all over the world for putting a scientific label to motherly love and its importance to a child. He called his evidences Attachment Theory. Bowlby’s thesis was that the success of all relationships in life is dependent on the success of the first one, specifically the bond between the infant or small child and his mother or primary guardian. As unemotional as the sound of the word “attachment” may sound, it defines a phenomenon that a mother’s love does so only imperfectly and that is the mutual love of a mother or guardian a child for each other. There is no other way to express the term “motherly love”. No term in English exists to describe the other side of the equation of “motherly love”, the love of a child for its parent. Bowlby furthered his theory to cover not just the bond between a mother or guardian and their child, but all human relationships involving an emotional connection between one person and another. An attachment is a powerful bond between an infant and its caregiver. Infants form attachments because they are helpless at birth and need caregivers to provide for and protect them. (Mercer 2006 p2). John Bowlby’s attachment theory states that in order for a child to develop normally, he or she must develop a relationship with at least one
Compare, for example, the degree of behavioral organization underlying the actions of a schoolboy when he seeks to find his mother in a neighbor’s house, or pleads with her to include him on a visit she intends to pay on relatives... with that of the same individual when as an infant he first attempted to follow his mother out of a room. (p.