Introduction

After encountering several young thieves early in his clinical career, the psychiatrist John Bowlby sought some common thread in their backgrounds that might explain their behaviour (Bowlby, 1944). Bowlby mused that a parent's irritable and frustrating behaviour might lead not only to anger but also to an insatiable need for affection, or for things which might substitute for affection (Bowlby, 1944, p. 114); in turn, the child's hostility and greed might make the parent even more irritable and critical, establishing an interactional pattern reminiscent of Patterson's (1982) coercive cycle. Indeed, descriptions of many of the mothers of these young thieves suggested irritable, aggressive and critical parenting. However, on more careful inspection, the families of the thieving children did not appear to differ from those of other disturbed but nondelinquent children in terms of negative parenting or in the incidence of familial mental illness. One clear environmental factor did stand out in the histories of a subset of these thieves, characterized by Bowlby as ‘affectionless’ and detached, and that was the prolonged early separation of child and mother. This observation – of the apparently devastating effect of maternal deprivation on the social and moral development of children – set Bowlby on the course which was to result in his life work on attachment, separation and loss.

Attachment theory represented an alternative to both behavioural and psychoanalytic perspectives on human development, with the promise of providing new solutions to difficult questions about the genesis of social and antisocial behaviour.