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As an historian of psychoanalysis, I had expected to be speaking with Richard Bowlby more about his father than about him. But as a clinician with current concerns about attachment theory and its place in a culture that at best is indifferent and at worst is actively hostile to recognizing the vital importance of attachment bonds, I was astonished to find how much in demand Bowlby is as a spokesperson for attachment around the world.
He receives between thirty and forty invitations a year to speak - that's once every ten days. Aside from engagements in Britain, he has spoken in San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, Banff, Tokyo, Seoul, Israel, Amsterdam, Budapest, and Helsinki. Even more astonishing, given the embattled context of British psychoanalysis and its troubled history with John Bowlby and attachment, is what Bowlby finds with many of his audiences: ‘People are desperate to tell me what they are doing with attachment theory.’
He speaks to audiences ranging from thirty to 1200 people He discusses the Strange Situation Test and the Adult Attachment Interview. But he tempers his presentation by using a less formal, less academic approach. ‘My job’, he says, ‘is to help audiences feel the theory’ To this end he seeks to help audiences discover who their primary attachment figure was. He asks his audience to think: ‘Who brought you up?’ In so doing he effectively helps people discover the basics of attachment when they realize that it was an older sister or a grandparent, not primarily their parents.
He, too, is astonished to find attachment theory now so firmly established in academic circles. ‘It is unbelievable the reputation my father's work has got.’ He estimates that 10% of published papers with ‘attachment’ in the title no longer cite his father's papers - attachment is moving in the direction of thorough integration into the culture in analogy to classical mechanics, where no one cites Newton in their treatment of motion. ‘It's a huge pleasure to me’, he say