John Bowlby Quotes

• “What cannot be communicated to the [m]other cannot be communicated to the self.”

  John Bowlby

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• “The stark nakedness and simplicity of the conflict with which humanity is oppressed - that of getting angry with and wishing to hurt the very person who is most loved.”

  John Bowlby

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• “for to have a deep attachment for a person (or a place or thing) is to have taken them as the terminating object of our instinctual responses."
  Separation anxiety. International Journal of Psycho-Analysts, XLI, 1-25 (1959(”

  John Bowlby

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• “The human psyche, like human bones, is strongly inclined towards self-healing.”

  John Bowlby

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• “It will happen but it will take time.”

  John Bowlby

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• “young children, who for whatever reason are deprived of the continuous care and attention of a mother or a substitute-mother, are not only temporarily disturbed by such deprivation, but may in some cases suffer long-term effects which persist
  Bowlby, J., Ainsworth, M., Boston, M., and Rosenbluth, D. (1956). The effects of mother-child separation: A follow-up study. British Journal of Medical Psychology, 29, 211-249.”

  John Bowlby

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• “risks. Thus we take it for granted that, when a relationship to a special loved person is endangered, we are not only anxious but are usually angry as well. As responses to the risk of loss, anxiety and anger go hand in hand. It is not for nothing that they have the same etymological root.”

  John Bowlby

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• “Ever since Freud made his famous, and in my view disastrous, volte-face in 1897, when he decided that the childhood seductions he had believed to be aetiologically important were nothing more than the products of his patients' imaginations, it has been extremely unfashionable to attribute psychopathology to real-life experiences.”

  John Bowlby

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• “It was regarded as almost outside the proper interest of an analyst to give systematic attention to a person's real experiences.”

  John Bowlby

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• “Thus in the right place, at the right time, and in right degree, anger is not only appropriate
  but may be indispensable. It serves to deter from dangerous behaviour, to drive off a rival, or to coerce a partner. In each case the aim of the angry behaviour is the same - to protect a relationship which is of very special value to the angry person.”

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• “We do as we have been done by.”

  John Bowlby

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• “All knowledge is conjectural and ... science progresses through new theories coming to replace older ones when it becomes clear that a new theory is able to make sense of a greater circle of phenomena than are comprehended and explained by the older one and is able to predict new phenomena more accurately.”

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• “To ascribe feeling is usually to make a prediction about subsequent behaviour.”

  John Bowlby

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• “Whoever may still be sceptical whether knowledge of animal behaviour can help our understanding of man can find no support from Freud.”

  John Bowlby

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• “In their ‘attempt to state explicitly and systematically that body of assumptions which constitutes psychoanalytic metapsychology’, Rapaport and Gill classify assumptions according to certain points of view. They identify five such viewpoints, each of which requires that whatever psychoanalytic explanation of a psychological phenomenon is offered must include propositions of a certain sort. The five viewpoints and the sort of proposition each demands are held to be the following: The Dynamic: This point of view demands propositions concerning the psychological forces involved in a phenomenon. The Economic: This demands propositions concerning the psychological energy involved in a phenomenon. The Structural: This demands propositions concerning the abiding psychological configurations (structures) involved in a phenomenon. The Genetic: This demands propositions concerning the psychological origin and development of a phenomenon. The Adaptive: This demands propositions concerning the relationship of a phenomenon to the environment.”

  John Bowlby

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• “Thus, continues Langer, the question is no longer one of ‘how a physical process can be transformed into something non-physical in a physical system, but how the phase of being felt is attained, and how the process may pass into unfelt phases again’.”

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• “Thus, appraisal is a complex process in which two main steps can be distinguished: (a) comparing input with standards that have developed within the organism during its lifetime; (b) selecting certain general forms of behaviour in preference to other forms in accordance with the results of comparisons previously made.”

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• “The fact that emotional feeling can be experienced during sleep is a reminder that not all processes having an emotional feeling phase originate in the environment.”

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• “Not only is progress of the overall activity monitored but progress of each bit of it is monitored as well.”

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• “Regular monitoring both of behavioural progress and of consequences is of course necessary if the organism is to learn.”

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• “the consequences of some behaviour are experienced as pleasurable or painful, the quicker and more persistent is the ensuing learning likely to be.”

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• “We must conclude therefore that the processes of interpreting and appraising sensory input must unquestionably be assigned a causal role in producing whatever behaviour emerges. Like the other causal factors already discussed they are necessary but not often sufficient.”

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• “In Tom, it can be said, there is a tendency to appraise certain situations in such a way that a behavioural system is activated that results in his attacking his little sister and biting her. Further, the conditions that lead to this appraisal and so activate the system are specifiable, at least roughly. They comprise, perhaps, a combination on the one hand of a situation of mother attending to little sister and not to Tom and, on the other, of certain organismic states of Tom, themselves brought about by specifiable conditions, such, for example, as a rebuff from father, or fatigue, or hunger. Whenever certain combinations of these conditions obtain, it is predicted, a certain appraisal will be made, a certain behavioural system will be activated, and Tom will bite.”

  John Bowlby

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• “Freud only rarely draws on the data of direct observation, one or two of the occasions when he does so are key ones. Instances are the cotton-reel incident on which he bases much of his argument in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (S.E., 18, pp. 14–16), and the agonising reappraisal of the theory of anxiety that he undertakes in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926).”

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• “Propositions of a genetic and adaptive sort are found throughout this book; and, in any theory of defence, there must be many of a structural kind. The points of view not adopted are the dynamic and the economic.”

  John Bowlby

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