Bowlby regards a close attachment to one or more people as just as important as food and drink. A baby is born with the ability to develop behaviour patterns that make his mother respond. For instance, a baby quickly learns that as a rule his crying will bring his mother to him. Later he begins to smile and thus obtains another form of attention. Gradually he can hold tightly, follow her, seek and call. The goal of this contacting behaviour is to have his mother in the close proximity which gives the child most security. This may be contact as close as sitting on her lap if he is afraid or upset. If he is three years old, it may be enough for her to be within sight. Later the optimum distance may be within earshot. Age and needs are continually changing the distance which gives the ‘appropriate’ security. Adolescence is a period in which the youngster is uncertain of the optimum distance, but attachment to parents is still crucial to his development. Later new bonds are normally developed to a partner, children and friends. Bowlby stresses that individual needs for a close attachment with a flexible optimum distance vary throughout life.

People who have difficulties with what Erik Erikson calls basic trust and Bowlby calls the optimum distance to others often need professional help in their grief work. They find it especially hard to let go of control. In their earliest childhood they experienced fear, emptiness and the feeling of being abandoned, and they know intuitively that they risk experiencing these feelings again if they give up control. As adults they have attached themselves to others in an unhealthy and rigid way.

John Bowlby and Alice Miller both look upon psychoanalysis as their foundation and have both, after a lifetime’s work on the concepts of psychoanalysis, found it necessary to make some revision of them in various areas. What has been most intriguing to us is that, apparently independently, they agree on the great importance for the child’s development of external losses and traumas. It is not the traumatic occurrence itself that leaves its traces, but the way the parents accommodate the child’s emotional reaction to the loss or trauma.

In this third and final volume, Bowlby completes the trilogy Attachment and Loss, his work on the importance of the parental relationship to mental health and examines the ways in which young children respond to a temporary or permanent loss of a mother-figure and the expressions of anxiety, grief and mourning which accompany such loss.

Counselling