This influential series delves into the profound psychology of human connection. It explores the fundamental need for bonding from infancy through adulthood. Each volume focuses on different facets of how early experiences shape our relationships and emotional well-being. The works illuminate the impacts of separation and loss, offering insights into development and therapeutic strategies.
The first book in a psychology trilogy, this study examines the processes that take place in attachment and separation and shows how experimental studies of children reveal a recognizable behaviour pattern which is confirmed by discoveries in the biological sciences.
The second volume of Attachment and Loss continues Bowlby's work on the importance of the parental relationship to mental health and considers separation and the anxiety that accompanies it: the fear of imminent or anticipated separation, the fear induced by parental threats of separation, and the inversion of the parent-child relationship.
Helping both parents and psychologists to arrive at a better understanding of the inner emotional world of the infant, this selection of key lectures by Bowlby includes the seminal one that gives the volume its title. Informed by wide clinical experience, and written with the author's well-known humanity and lucidity, the lectures provide an invaluable introduction to John Bowlby’s thought and work, as well as much practical guidance of use both to parents and to members of the mental health professions.