Attachment-Based Psychotherapy

Attachment-Based Psychotherapy

Attachment based psychotherapy originated from the work of John Bowlby, a British psychoanalyst. Bowlby recognised the crucial importance of attachment and the experience of loss in early childhood development. Insecure and disrupted attachments would lead to problems in later life. He used research from other scientific fields such as animal behaviour to back up his ideas.

His theories had a profound effect on how children were treated in institutions such as hospitals. Since his original work, attachment theory has come to occupy in important position between psychoanalysis, developmental psychology, neurobiology and the behavioural sciences. Nowadays, as a result of observing infants with their parents there are sophisticated assessments that measure and classify types of attachment, for example ‘secure’ or ‘ambivalent’.

The different types of attachment can be predictive of how well a child will develop emotionally.