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In this book John Bowlby has combined a strong personal interest in Darwin with an insight from his own life's work. Charles Darwin, in his Autobiography (first complete edition only in 1958), wrote of his mother's death when he was 8 and of the odd fact that he could remember almost nothing about her, explaining this in part by his elder sisters' absolute silence about her because of their grief. On reading this, Bowlby, who was working at the time on the psychological effects of bereavement in childhood, realized that the loss of his mother and the circumstances surrounding her death might have been contributory causes of Darwin's well-known chronic ill health.
Over the last 30 years or so he has developed this idea in papers and discussion and the present book began as a definitive statement of it; but it soon became a biography in which the ill health and the episodes of depressive illness were set in the context of Darwin's 'eventful, troubled, and extraordinarily productive life'.
In his Preface Bowlby half apologizes for presenting 'a biography with a special slant and inevitable limitations', i.e. one omitting a full description of Darwin's scientific activities and an evaluation of his achievements. To psychoanalysts no apology is necessary. Both the ill health and the science find their proper place in this most readable account of the life and of the relationships, personal and professional. Psychoanalysts, like the general reader, will welcome the extra attention given 'to the subject's formative years, to his emotional life, to the pattern of emotional relationships he was born into, to the ups and downs of his scientific life, to the medical problems that dogged him, and to the anxieties and miseries that too often afflicted him'.
The book is beautifully produced and is a pleasure to use. The Prologue (pp. 1–14) and the Appendix (pp. 457–66) concentrate on accounts of Darwin's ill health and on the various medical explanations given for it in the la