Attachment

Published in 1969 and revised in 1982, this opening volume of Bowlby's trilogy sets out the theoretical foundations of attachment. It advances a single, closely argued claim: that the infant's bond to the mother is not a by-product of feeding or a secondary drive, as the psychoanalysis of the period held, but the output of a distinct behavioural system shaped by natural selection. Drawing on ethology, evolutionary biology, and control theory, Bowlby models attachment as a set of goal-corrected behaviours organised around proximity, activated and terminated by conditions the infant can monitor. For the clinician, the volume supplies the conceptual grammar beneath later work on separation, defence, and internal working models. It reframes the child's tie as a relationship worth studying in its own right, and gives a vocabulary for how early bonds form, hold, and come under strain. The account remains the reference point against which later attachment research defines itself.