ABSTRACT
A liability to experience separation anxiety and grief are the ineluctable results of a love relationship, of caring for someone.
(Bowlby 1973a)
Towards the end of his long life Bowlby advised one of his former research students: ‘Always choose a central topic when doing research. That way you know you can get sufficient data. That’s why I studied separation. You can’t miss it. Whatever people say, it is there in the data’ (Hamilton 1991). As we have seen in Chapter 3, Bowlby’s insistence that people had missed the significance of separation and loss as a cause of unhappiness, delinquency and psychiatric illness met a receptive audience in the post-war era of recuperation and reparation. The early work of Bowlby and his associates on loss comprised a systematic description of the psychological reactions to separation and bereavement in children and adults (Bowlby 1953b: Bowlby et al. 1952; Parkes 1964); once Attachment Theory was in place, he could then go on to develop a theoretical account of mourning, based on psychoanalysis but supplemented by the insights of ethology (Bowlby 1980).
