John Bowlby

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   A child's need for closeness is not a weakness to be corrected but a biological survival system, as undisputed as hunger — and what we call spoiling is in fact the answer to a signal the species selected for.

   Attachment and Loss · 1969

   A child explores exactly to the extent that they have somewhere to return to.

   Bowlby wrote against two powerful currents of his time. Behaviourism said a child attaches to whoever feeds them, so the bond is a learned habit. Classical psychoanalysis put it down to internal fantasy. Bowlby, trained also as an ethologist, proposed something else: crying, clinging, seeking with the eyes, following are behaviours with a function, and the function is to keep a helpless infant close to an adult in the world the species evolved in. The system is not always on; it switches on with fear, illness, tiredness, separation, and switches off once closeness has been obtained. Hence his phrase: secure base. A child explores exactly to the extent that they have somewhere to return to, and exploration and attachment do not contradict each other, they feed each other. He argued that deprivation of constant care in the early years leaves long traces — a thesis set out in his 1951 report for the World Health Organization, which changed the regime of children's hospitals in Europe, where parents were kept outside for hygiene.

   “The child's tie to his mother is a product of the activity of a number of behavioural systems that have proximity to mother as a predictable outcome.”

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