John Bowlby 25th Anniversary Event
Films of the John Bowlby 25th Anniversary Event
Attachment Theory How John Bowlby Revolutionised Our Understanding of Human Relationships
Where is the Revolution Now? What are the Future Directions?
19th – 20th September 2015
This conference brought together a group of leading international clinicians and researchers in dialogue to debate new developments in attachment theory and clinical practice. Exploring questions such as: How do such advances bring fresh ways of thinking about how we promote wellbeing in society and help and support individuals and families? These films from the conference provide a lively and engaging debate of issues of vital interest to all psychotherapists and others working in the helping professions.
John Bowlby revolutionised our understanding of human nature and the needs of children in particular for consistent, sensitive and attuned caregiving from a preferred attachment figure in order to develop emotional health and wellbeing. Attachment is linked to the human response to fear and is most clearly evident when there are threats of separation and abandonment. At these times we need a safe haven provided by an attachment figure from whom we seek safety, comfort and affect regulation. His groundbreaking theory and approach has been confirmed by decades of research and more recently by neuroscience. The need for parents to be securely attached is now widely accepted as the basis for effective child care in the next generation.
“Intimate attachments to other human beings are the hub around which a person’s life revolves, not only when he is an infant or a toddler or a school- child but throughout his adolescence and his years of maturity as well, and on into old age.” Bowlby (1980, p. 422)
The Conference was chaired by his son, Sir Richard Bowlby. Professor Brett Kahr introduces the historic context, and an exciting panel of leading international clinicians and researchers discuss and debate the latest developments.
Speakers included: Amanda Jones, Mary Target, Bob Marvin, Sandy Bloom, Mark Linington, Valerie Sinason, Allan Schore, Elizabeth Howell, Susie Orbach, Kate White, Christopher Clulow, Karl Heinz Brisch, Miriam Steele, Howard Steele, Oliver James, Simon Partridge, Judy Yellin and Lennox Thomas.
Details of the conference programme and the speakers’ biographies can be found: here
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Video One – Length 45 mins
Part 1. Welcome and Introduction – Length 30 mins
Featuring Sir Richard Bowlby, Mark Linington and Professor Brett Kahr.
The first video shows the conference welcome from Sir Richard Bowlby and Mark Linington from The Bowlby Centre followed by a wonderful historical introduction to the theme of the conference by Professor Brett Kahr. He situates John Bowlby’s work with children in the context of the previous century and demonstrates how revolutionary his ideas were, constituting a paradigm shift in the approach to troubled children. It is a “tour de force” by a brilliant lecturer. A riveting and startling beginning to a unique day of round table dialogues featured in the next six videos.
Arising from this stimulating historical introduction follows a look at attachment theory and its application across the lifecycle represented by each of the subsequent dialogues between internationally renowned clinicians and researchers which make up the seven films of this conference presented here.
Part 2. Parent and Infant Work – Length 15 Mins
Featuring Amanda Jones and Mary Target in dialogue. Chair: Robert Marvin
We start with childhood and the pioneering work being developed in the UK by Amanda Jones and Mary Target providing support for parents and their infants. They are in a conversation facilitated by Robert Marvin from Virginia, USA, who with colleagues has developed a wonderful intervention to support distressed parents called the Circle of Security Project. Their conversation focuses not only on the delicate work with parents and their children but on the support and supervision needs of the psychotherapists engaged in these emotionally challenging situations. They explore the difficulties parents encounter with their young babies when their own parents have been unsupportive, abusive or unattuned emotionally. These ghosts in the nursery (Selma Fraiberg) can undermine the development of secure attachment across the generations. Interventions such as those discussed provide very hopeful opportunities for those who have experienced trauma to be supported in the direction of change towards earned securityand so being able to provide a secure base for their young children.
Video Two – Length 50 mins
Attachment and Trauma
Featuring Mark Linington and Sandy Bloom in dialogue. Chair: Valerie Sinason
This film follows the moving dialogue between Mark Linington, a psychotherapist at The Bowlby Centre and Sandy Bloom, psychiatrist and founder of the Sanctuary Model, from Philadelphia, USA. Their conversation is facilitated by Valerie Sinason, founder of the Clinic for Dissociative Studies in London, UK.
Mark shares his work with one of his clients Sonia who has a history of multiple experiences of trauma. He demonstrates how an attachment informed way of working relationally provides an opportunity for therapeutic change. He uses very interesting diagrams to illustrate this painstaking and courageous journey. Sandy Bloom offers insights and elaborates on the discussion drawing upon her many years of clinical experience.
Video Three – Length 43 mins
Attachment and Neuroscience
Featuring Elizabeth Howell in dialogue with Valerie Sinason, with special contribution from Allan Schore
This thought provoking dialogue between Elizabeth Howell and Valerie Sinason includes a pre recorded interview with Allan Schore, the foremost attachment informed clinician in the USA who is researching the neurobiological links with the development of early attachment relationships and how an understanding of these dynamics informs our work with adults. Elizabeth Howell, an eminent scholar and clinician from New York, opens out the conversation adding her clarity and understanding of the neurobiology of dissociation with Valerie Sinason, founder of the Clinic for Dissociative Studies in London, UK. Together they offer an in depth account of the links between post traumatic stress and the complexity of different kinds of dissociative responses to overwhelming trauma.
Video Four – Length 44 mins
Attachment and The Body
Featuring a dialogue between Susie Orbach and Kate White. Chair: Mark Linington
This film records a engaging conversation between Susie Orbach and Kate White facilitated by Mark Linington from The Bowlby Centre. They tease out the complexity of the relationship between the development of an infant’s attachment bond and the central place of the body of both parent and child in this delicate unfolding process that can, in fraught circumstances, become derailed. Attachment patterns and their relationship to our experience of our bodies are explored.
Susie describes the development of an interview called the bodiography, using the BODI tool (Body Observational Diagnostic Interview), at the beginning of therapy.
Kate and Susie go on to discuss the key role of support to young parents who themselves may never have had a secure attachment relationship thus find it difficult to feel at home in their own bodies. The provision of maternal support, in particular in the prenatal period, through a project such as “Two for the Price of One: The impact of body image during pregnancy and after birth”, is described. This UK research is ongoing and is based on identifying women with a troubled relationship with their bodies during pregnancy and perinatally so as to offer support/intervention in prevention of intergenerational transmission of troubled bodies.
Finally, through an account of her clinical work, Kate discusses with Susie the way in which a sensitivity to these issues is vital in therapeutic relationships where the body of both therapist and client impact upon one another as the client risks finding her body through her relationship with the therapist’s own body.
Video Five – Length 39 mins/h3>
Children and Families
Featuring Karl Heinz Brisch and Miriam Steele in dialogue. Chair: Christopher Clulow
Christopher Clulow took the imaginative decision to invite the audience to set the agenda for the round table discussion between Karl Heinz Brisch from Munich, Germany and Miriam Steele, who is now based in New York City.
He asked people to identify questions and themes for the trio to discuss together after an emotionally resonant reading from DH Lawrence where the voice of a young child describes most poetically her experience of being in a family. The themes included the following: What is the role of grandparents and the experience of the three generation family in 2015? Who IS family? The complexity of families where there are many configurations for example the re configuring of family relationships post divorce with remarriages. Changes brought about through the acquisition of family through adoption and fostering, in vitro fertilisation. There was lively discussion about inclusion of children with learning disabilities, the use of the Baby Watching programme and another specialised intervention being pioneered in New York to support families where the socioeconomic stressors on young parents are being recognised in the political context of austerity and cuts to social spending.
Video Six – Length 46 mins
Research Developments & Future Directions
Howard Steele in conversation with Oliver James Chair: Jeremy Holmes
Jeremy Holmes chaired a discussion on future directions for attachment theory, with Oliver James and Howard Steele.
Oliver’s presentation focuses on the argument of nature (our genetic endowment) versus nurture in what determines our emotional wellbeing. He points to the lack of scientific evidence for genetic determinants; for him early maltreatment leads to distressed adults. He proposes that the future lies in creating an early environment in which care is “accessible and responsive” for under threes. He rejects “day care” as the solution and pleads for more resources for primary carers, whether men or women. He sees no sign of this in “selfish, capitalist Anglophone nations”.
Howard picked up on Bowlby’s championing of children’s need for “more or less continuing relationships…with an enduring sense of joy”. He recognised that this was an ideal that was difficult to achieve, but that we needed parents who could “calm down” even when angered, and provide a good model of self-regulation. The point of effective parenting and attachment-oriented therapy was to prevent the inter-generational transmission of dysregulated internal states of mind and the passing on of insecure internal working models of self and other.
The discussion drew attention to the work of Peter Marris and the political implication and exploitation of insecurity. There was also an emphasis on how extremes of poverty, class and power militated against security and the capacity for attachment. Indeed for Oliver this encouraged the Dark Triad of psychopathy, Machiavellianism and narcissism, so prevalent among Western leaders.
Sir Richard Bowlby concluded the conference by pointing to the dangers of digital technology in its capacity to “disconnect” from intimate relationship and attachment. The attachment world needs to give serious thought to the implications of an ever-growing digital era.
Video Seven – Length 37 mins
The Last Interview with John Bowlby by Virginia Hunter
Introduction by Simon Partridge, and Judy Yellin in dialogue with Lennox Thomas
Simon Partridge introduces the last video of John Bowlby made by Virginia Hunter in 1990, which reveals his warm humanity, wealth of experience, honesty and capacity for self-criticism. two extracts from the video are shown. In the first Bowlby emphasises the importance of “real life events” which had been ignored by orthodox psychoanalysis once Freud abandoned his seduction theory. And the second points up Bowlby’s own “appalling ignorance” about the widespread occurrence of physical and sexual abuse, its grave psycho-emotional consequences, and which he did so much to expose.
This is followed by conversation between Lennox Thomas and Judy Yellin, both attachment-oriented psychotherapists with a former background in social work. The theme is that of child protection, Thomas focuses on the future, while Yellin examines what’s happening now. A stimulating Q&A section follows which touches on the neglect of Bowlby’s work in analytic training; Bowlby’s influence in Scotland; congruence between Bowlby and Alice Miller, and the importance of mourning.
The video ends with a brief but revealing look at the accompanying exhibition about Bowlby’s life which was running concurrently at the Freud Museum. You can have a virtual tour now of this exhibition via this link.
Access the opening event of the conference at the Freud Museum
18th September 2015 “Closing the Circle; From Theory to Therapy”
Dr. Bob Marvin
Podcast of this presentation here
https://www.freud.org.uk/events/archive/2015/
Buy the DVD of the interview by Virginia Hunter, the last interview he gave which was in 1990 here.
Link to conference programme here.