Introduction
What do children need to develop into healthy individuals? Mother love was the response given by British psychiatrist and psychoanalyst John Bowlby (1907–1990). Relying upon studies on maternal separation and deprivation carried out by a number of child psychoanalysts, including René Spitz, Anna Freud, David Levy, and Margaret Ribble, Bowlby identified the mother as the “psychic organizer” of her child’s mind. He claimed that infants have an innate or instinctive need for mother love. In 1958 Bowlby introduced his ethological theory of attachment behavior as a synthesis of psychoanalysis and ethology. According to this theory, natural selection has designed a system to attach infants to their mothers, and a correct integration of this mother-infant dyad is necessary for a child’s adequate emotional development.
Supported by the work of psychologist Mary Ainsworth and her students, in the past half century, attachment theory has become one of the most prominent and...
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Online Resources
ATWS: The attachment theory website includes literature about attachment theory : http://www.richardatkins.co.uk/atws/page/5.html
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Vicedo, M. (2014). Attachment. In: Teo, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Critical Psychology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5583-7_22
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