An ethological approach to personality development

roc1989 APA Award Recipient Addresses
II I

An Ethological Approach to Personality Development
Mary D. Salter Ainsworth John Bowlby

University of Virginia Tavistock Clinic, London, England

This is a historical account of the partnership in which Bowlby and Ainsworth participated to develop attachment theory and research. Beginning with their separate approaches to understanding personality development before Ainsworth joined Bowlby " research team at the Tavistock s Clinic in London for 4 years, it describes the origins of the ethological approach that they adopted. After Ainsworth left London, her research in Uganda and in Baltimore lent empirical support to Bowlby's theoretical constructions. The article shows how their contributions to attachment theory and research interdigitated in a partnership that enduredfor 40 years across time and distance.
The distinguishing characteristic of the theory of attachment that we have jointly developed is that it is an ethological approach to personality development. We have had a long and happy partnership in pursuing this approach. In this article we wish to give a brief historical account of the initially separate but compatible approaches that eventually merged in the partnership, and how our contributions have intertwined in the course of developing an ethologically oriented theory of attachment and a body of research that has both stemmed from the theory and served to extend and elaborate it.

Before 1950
Even before beginning graduate training, each of us became keenly interested in personality development and the key role played in it by the early interaction between children and parents. In Bowlby's case this was kindled by volunteer work in a residential school for maladjusted children, which followed his undergraduate studies in medicine at Cambridge University. Two children especially impressed him. One was an isolated, affectionless adolescent who had never experienced a stable relationship with a