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I very much regret that I did not know Dr John Bowlby well, but I did have the pleasure and privilege of having met him on a number of occasions, and of having corresponded with him between 1983 and 1990. As a young student, I always found that I could enjoy the writings of a theoretician more fully if I knew something about his or her personal history and background beforehand. I hope, therefore, that these memories will provide some pleasure not only to those who knew Bowlby personally, but that these reminiscences may also bring the man alive, at least a bit, to those who may be encountering attachment theory for the first time.
In 1983, while working as a postgraduate student at the University of Oxford, and as a Research Officer in the Oxfordshire Area Health Authority, I found myself rather frustrated by the lack of interest in psychoanalysis within the Oxford community. Isabel Menzies Lyth and Donald Meltzer, the two most noted Oxford psychoanalysts, both lived outside the city centre, and really had nothing at all to do with university life. Within the Department of Experimental Psychology, headed by Professor Lawrence Weiskrantz, a noted cognitive neuropsychologist, the lecturers made fun of Sigmund Freud, and regarded psychoanalysis as a rather antiquated dodo; and within the Department of Psychiatry, based at the Warneford Hospital, headed by Professor Michael Gelder, a behavioural and pharmacological psychiatrist, Freud had no place whatsoever. Only Anthony Storr, the maverick of the Department of Psychotherapy (a sub-section of the Department of Psychiatry), gave occasional talks from a more analytically orientated perspective. Although a few literary scholars such as Terry Eagleton, Toril Moi, Ann Wordsworth, and a few others, did use psychoanalysis in their writings, they did not work with psychoanalysis in a clinical context.