Читать книгу The Handy Psychology Answer Book - Lisa J. Cohen - Страница 153

Attachment theory was one of the first movements to provide empirical support for the key concepts of psychoanalytic theory, specifically that early childhood relationships with caregivers have profound impact on later personality development. Similar to Carl Rogers, attachment theorists believed that scientific methods could be usefully applied to the study of emotional and interpersonal phenomena. Thus attachment theory was the first movement to bring scientific methods to bear on psychoanalytic ideas. Not surprisingly, this occasioned resistance at first but over time attachment theory has been accepted by most psychoanalytic schools.

Attachment refers to a biologically based drive in the child to form an enduring emotional bond with the caregiver, generally the mother. Attachment theory originated with John Bowlby, who wrote a trilogy of books entitled Attachment and Loss (1969, 1973, 1980). Bowlby’s theory was greatly expanded by Mary Ainsworth (1913–1999), who developed an experimental procedure to study attachment. It was Ainsworth who put attachment theory into the lab.