2009 | OriginalPaper | Chapter
Attachment Theory
Published in:
A Brief Introduction to Social Work Theory
John Bowlby was a British child psychiatrist. His initial thinking was influenced by the British School of Psychoanalysis. The main departure point, though, was Bowlby’s determinedly scientific attempt to understand early parent-child relationships and their impact on development. To this end, and unusually for the time, he studied the ideas being generated by a wide range of developmental sciences including evolutionary theory, ethology, biology, cognitive psychology and systems theory.