Attachment

“One of the most influential books of the century.”

“[Attachment] is an exhaustive, closely reasoned study with numerous fascinating bypaths…an excellent definitive work of great importance.”

“It seems almost incredible that, until Bowlby, no one had placed attachment at the center of human development.”

“This great work, to paraphrase Goethe, stands as new as on its founding day. Indeed, one of the most outstanding features of Bowlby's trilogy is that it remains undated, thirty years after its original publication. Moreover, and remarkably, all three volumes are even now sources for state-of-the-art research in attachment. Rereading them reveals that more than a few ideas some of us have considered new (including some of my own) appeared first in these pages.”

“Bowlby's focus on attachment relationships blazed a new path for late twentieth-century developmentalists, psychiatrists and psychotherapists. Historians of science will place Bowlby with Freud, Darwin and Lorenz in redefining the role of the person in his social context, and his work—like that of all truly great authors—must be read in the original: its richness and foresight are breathtaking.
In terms of bridging the epistemologies of natural science and psychotherapy, it stands alone; its value increases by the day as discovery upon discovery confirms the basic truth of his insights. No modern researcher on child development, no healer of minds troubled by adversity in childhood, can afford to work in ignorance of Bowlby's writings.”

“Bowlby has done for attachment what Dickens did for poverty by shining his spotlight on an underrepresented universal phenomenon—the human propensity to form affectional bonds and the consequences of their loss and disruption. By mapping the largely uncharted terrain of parent-child attachments and identifying their major configurations (secure and insecure), he has irreversibly reshaped our conceptions of normal and pathological development. Bowlby's work has inspired a generation of developmental researchers as well as a growing number of clinicians who find that attachment theory illuminates both the therapeutic relationship and the therapeutic process. It will remain pivotal to any serious debate on human development.”