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In 1952, John Bowlby read a now classic paper at a meeting of the British Psycho-Analytical Society. The paper, entitled "A Two-Year-Old
Goes to Hospital," reported and discussed the filming by James Robertson of a child's reaction to separation. The written observations and the film were part of a research project on separation being conducted at the Tavistock Clinic. Their studies could be considered a continuation and extension of Spitz's observation of hospitalized infants separated from their mothers. Bowlby subsequently published a number of reports dealing with the formation of the child's attachment to his mother and the effects of the disruption of the bond due to separation from or loss of the mother. The culmination of his work is contained in a trilogy entitled Attachment and Loss. Volume I dealt with attachment, Volume II with separation,1 and this third and final volume is about loss.
Early in his writings, Bowlby called attention to what he saw as similarities in the responses of children and those of adults to bereavement, and this led him to the conclusion that the underlying psychological processes in both cases are the same. It is this assumption that has brought him into sharp disagreement with those whom he calls "traditional analysts," e.g., Helene Deutsch, Anna Freud, Max Schur, M. Wolfenstein, and H. Nagera. Bowlby takes exception to the restrictive usage of the term "mourning" which he claims that his critics have based on Freud's statement limiting it to those processes related to detachment from a dead person. For Bowlby, "the term 'mourning', with suitable qualifying adjectives, is used to denote a fairly wide array of psychological processes set in train by the loss of a loved person irrespective of their outcome" (p. 17). Bowlby finds himself in agreement with E. and R. Furman and with G. Kliman when he claims that young chil