Loss

The closing volume of Bowlby's trilogy turns attachment theory toward bereavement, setting out how the loss of an attachment figure is registered, resisted, and, in favourable conditions, worked through. Published in 1980, it treats mourning as a process moving through recognisable phases rather than a single reaction, and draws a working distinction between grief that runs its course and mourning that miscarries, either chronic and unremitting or absent and inhibited. Bowlby locates the difference in mental mechanism. Defensive exclusion, and the segregated systems of information it produces, keep the reality of the loss and the feelings attached to it out of processing, which is where pathological grief takes hold. He traces adult vulnerability back to patterns laid down by loss and separation in childhood. For the clinician the book supplies a developmental account of why some patients cannot grieve, and a vocabulary for reading what their symptoms defend against.