ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that John Bowlby’s attachment theory. Bowlby’s ideas and theories of attachment were at odds with the theories of both Melanie Klein and Anna Freud. He believed they had strayed from the path of psychoanalysis as a science. Science follows the rigour of empirical lines of enquiry, whereas Melanie Klein and Anna Freud were making psychoanalysis into a philosophical debate, where its primary thinkers extolled their theories “concerning meaning and imagination rather than validated knowledge”. Attachment theory is responsible more than any other psychoanalytic theory for the changing way in which children are looked after in hospital and in children’s homes, and the way it has become accepted social policy that children should remain with their families whenever it is humanly possible. Attachment theory became known internationally as a psychological approach linking psychoanalysis with developmental psychology, ethology, and systems theory.
