ABSTRACT
The origins of John Bowlby's ideas lay in his early work with children displaced through war or institutionalisation. Bowlby's work created a bridge over the chasm between individual and social experience and hence between the personal and the political. Bowlby seeks to bridge the chasm between clinician and researcher. His preparedness to leave the closed world of the psychoanalysis of his time in order to make links with other disciplines, such as animal studies and academic psychology, was vital in the building up of attachment theory. Attachment theory's basic premise is that, from the beginning of life, the baby human has a primary need to establish an emotional bond with a caregiving adult. Attachment is seen as a source of human motivation as fundamental as those of food and sex. Mary Ainsworth, an American psychologist who became Bowlby's lifelong collaborator, established the interconnectedness between attachment behaviour, caregiving in the adult, and exploration in the child.
