Quotes from John Bowlby

If a community values its children, it must cherish its mothers.

The propensity to make strong emotional bonds to particular individuals [is] a basic component of human nature

Life is best organized as a series of daring ventures from a secure base

What cannot be communicated to the [m]other cannot be communicated to the self.

The human psyche, like human bones, is strongly inclined towards self-healing.

The stark nakedness and simplicity of the conflict with which humanity is oppressed - that of getting angry with and wishing to hurt the very person who is most loved.

for to have a deep attachment for a person (or a place or thing) is to have taken them as the terminating object of our instinctual responses." Separation anxiety. International Journal of Psycho-Analysts, XLI, 1-25 (1959(

It will happen but it will take time.

young children, who for whatever reason are deprived of the continuous care and attention of a mother or a substitute-mother, are not only temporarily disturbed by such deprivation, but may in some cases suffer long-term effects which persist Bowlby, J., Ainsworth, M., Boston, M., and Rosenbluth, D. (1956). The effects of mother-child separation: A follow-up study. British Journal of Medical Psychology, 29, 211-249.

We do as we have been done by.

risks. Thus we take it for granted that, when a relationship to a special loved person is endangered, we are not only anxious but are usually angry as well. As responses to the risk of loss, anxiety and anger go hand in hand. It is not for nothing that they have the same etymological root.

Ever since Freud made his famous, and in my view disastrous, volte-face in 1897, when he decided that the childhood seductions he had believed to be aetiologically important were nothing more than the products of his patients' imaginations, it has been extremely unfashionable to attribute psychopathology to real-life experiences.

It was regarded as almost outside the proper interest of an analyst to give systematic attention to a person's real experiences.

All knowledge is conjectural and ... science progresses through new theories coming to replace older ones when it becomes clear that a new theory is able to make sense of a greater circle of phenomena than are comprehended and explained by the older one and is able to predict new phenomena more accurately.

Thus in the right place, at the right time, and in right degree, anger is not only appropriate but may be indispensable. It serves to deter from dangerous behaviour, to drive off a rival, or to coerce a partner. In each case the aim of the angry behaviour is the same - to protect a relationship which is of very special value to the angry person.

To ascribe feeling is usually to make a prediction about subsequent behaviour.

Whoever may still be sceptical whether knowledge of animal behaviour can help our understanding of man can find no support from Freud.

The fact that emotional feeling can be experienced during sleep is a reminder that not all processes having an emotional feeling phase originate in the environment.

Regular monitoring both of behavioural progress and of consequences is of course necessary if the organism is to learn.

the consequences of some behaviour are experienced as pleasurable or painful, the quicker and more persistent is the ensuing learning likely to be.

We must conclude therefore that the processes of interpreting and appraising sensory input must unquestionably be assigned a causal role in producing whatever behaviour emerges. Like the other causal factors already discussed they are necessary but not often sufficient.

Freud only rarely draws on the data of direct observation, one or two of the occasions when he does so are key ones. Instances are the cotton-reel incident on which he bases much of his argument in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (S.E., 18, pp. 14–16), and the agonising reappraisal of the theory of anxiety that he undertakes in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926).

Propositions of a genetic and adaptive sort are found throughout this book; and, in any theory of defence, there must be many of a structural kind. The points of view not adopted are the dynamic and the economic.

Since, pending more evidence, there is no reason to suppose that the so-called transitional objects play any special role in a child's development, cognitive or other, a more appropriate term for them would be simply 'substitute objects'.