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John Bowlby's legacy to psychology, childcare, social work and child psychiatry is an enormous one. Attachment theory, which at its heart has the simple premise that the ‘attachment system’ that draws a child and its caretakers together is primary and disruptions to this system have lasting consequences, now seems self-evident, even if its claim to have solid evolutionary foundations remains contentious. In relation to psychoanalysis, it articulates with object relations thinking and relational theory generally and has been developed to connect with mentalization theory and even with neuropsychoanalysis (Fonagy & Target, 2007). Yet, as is well known, Bowlby's intervention was largely rejected by psychoanalysts when it was first made explicitly in the 1950s, because of its renunciation of the fundamental Freudian positions on the primacy of sexuality and of the drives, and its diminution of the significance of the unconscious. His presentation in 1957 to the British Psychoanalytical Society of his paper ‘The Nature of the Child's Tie to His Mother’ (Bowlby, 1958) achieved the unusual result of uniting the Freudians and Kleinians, albeit in hostility. Arturo Ezquerro (p. 81) quotes Bowlby as reflecting that ‘I had shown [the paper] to a friend beforehand and without my knowing, it had been passed to members of the Kleinian group. A number of them spoke in the discussion, criticising first one aspect than another.’ Anna Freud ‘banned’ the paper, although it is to the credit of both protagonists that they managed to retain cordial relations afterwards; Ezquerro comments (p. 82) that ‘they shared concerns about the wellbeing of children as well as approaches to treatment.’
Bowlby was in fact firmly rooted in psychoanalysis as well as in child psychiatry. Analysed by Joan Riviere and supervised by Ella Sharpe and later by Melanie Klein, he had a solid Kleinian grounding but followed Sharpe into the Independent (Middle) group of British analysts. He worked with Aubrey Lewis