John Bowlby Quotes


 
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Best 48 Quotes by John Bowlby – Page 1 of 2

“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.”

“If a community values its children, it must cherish its mothers.”

“If we value our children, we must cherish their parents.”

“Life is best organized as a series of daring ventures from a secure base.”

“Since, pending more evidence, there is no reason to suppose that the so-called transitional objects play any special role in a child's development, cognitive or other, a more appropriate term for them would be simply 'substitute objects'.”

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

“The propensity to make strong emotional bonds to particular individuals is a basic component of human nature”

“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.”

“We do as we have been done by.”

“We're only as needy as our unmet needs.”

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

“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.”

A Secure Base Quotes

“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.”

A Secure Base

“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.”

A Secure Base

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

A Secure Base

“Just as animals of many species, including man, are disposed to respond with fear to sudden movement or a marked change in level of sound or light because to do so has a survival value, so are many species, including man, disposed to respond to separation from a potentially caregiving figure and for the same reasons.”

A Secure Base

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“How a parent-figure treated you as a child is not a reflection of who you are. Or even who they are. You do not need to be a reflection of their unprocessed trauma.”


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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.”

A Secure Base

“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.”

A Secure Base

Attachment Quotes

“A model of the psychical apparatus that pictures behaviour as a resultant of a hypothetical psychical energy that is seeking discharge was adopted by Freud almost at the beginning of his psychoanalytical work.”

Attachment

“Although from time to time details of the psychical energy model underwent change, Freud never considered abandoning it for any other kind of model. Nor have more than a handful of other analysts. What, then, are the reasons that have led me to do so?”

Attachment

“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.”

Attachment

“As soon as feeling is regarded as a phase of a physiological process instead of a product of it — namely a new entity metaphysically different from it — the paradox.”

Attachment

“First, it is important to remember that the origin of Freud’s model lay, not in his clinical work with patients, but in ideas he had learned previously from his teachers—the physiologist Brücke, the psychiatrist Meynert, and the physician Breuer.”

Attachment

“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.”

Attachment

“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.”

Attachment

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

Attachment

“Now there is nothing unscientific in utilising, for the interpretation of data, any model that seems promising; and there is therefore nothing unscientific either in Freud’s introduction of his model or in his own or others’ employment of it. Nevertheless, the question arises whether there may by now be an alternative better suited for the purpose in hand.”

Attachment

“One difficulty of exposition is that each sort of appraisal process can be conducted at any one of several levels.”

Attachment

“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.”

Attachment

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

Attachment

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“What all of us hesitate to admit is that we tend to be more helpful to people who are like us.”


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