The Significance Of Affectional Bonds

John Bowlby (1907-1990) is a psychoanalyst and child psychiatrist in British. He is the advocate of attachment theory. Through the study of adverse impacts caused by maternal deprivation, Bowlby presented the new theory based on the psychoanalysis, evolutionary biology and ethology. Though the methods of theoretical generalization and logical analysis, this article which bases on the analysis of the related English data intends to study Bowlby’s attachment theory systematically. There are five chapters in this article.The first chapter carefully reviewed the Bowlby’s growth background, the traces of intellectual development and idea source. In the second chapter, the author gave a detailed account of the research method which Bowlby used. Then, on the foundations of researches about anxiety and sadness, the article emphatically considered the basic viewpoints of Bowlby’s attachment theory. Combining with related cases, the article introduced the implication, the developmental stages, the internal working models and different patterns of attachment. The third chapter of the article mainly introduced Bowlby’s thinking of family treatment on the basis of attachment theory and clinical experience which includes therapeutic models, processes, and cases. In the forth chapter, the author compared Bowlby’s attachment theory with the attachment theories of the psychoanalysis, the learning theory, and the cognitive development theory. In the last chapter, the paper gives a overall appraisal about Bowlby’s attachment theory, pointing out the contributions and limitations and demonstrating the influences.