ABSTRACT
The evolution of parental investment, such that the parent provides sources of protection and care to offspring, and offspring are motivated to stay close rather than disperse after birth or avoid parents, is fundamental to all vertebrate species (MacLean, 1985; Trivers, 1985). The bond that develops between parent and offspring has been referred to as attachment (Bowlby, 1969/1982) and attachment relationships are now often used to describe many types of relationship (bond) where an individual is motivated to stay close to another and seek care. Bowlby (1969/1982) outlined, from an evolutionary perspective, why mammalian infants (especially primates) are born with the innate dispositions to search for closeness to conspecifics when distressed or frightened. He also specified that the inborn, evolved mechanisms of attachment strongly contribute, ‘from the cradle to the grave’ (Bowlby, 1979: 129), to the organization of behaviour, the regulation of emotional experience, social cognition and self-definition. Attachment, in Bowlby’s theory, appears as a major organizing principle that may explain important aspects of human interpersonal relations in general, and of the therapeutic relationship in particular (Bowlby, 1979, 1988). Thus, Bowlby was one of the first psychotherapists to root human experiences in the inborn mechanisms of mind, as they are conceived by evolutionary biology and ethology.
