A Contribution by John Bowlby

Abstract

In giving a brief account of salient events in my professional life I will start in 1937 when I was aged 30 and had just completed my formal training as a child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. Apart from a medical background and an interest in psychology, my choice of career had been determined by what I had seen and heard during the six months that I had spent in a school for disturbed children between my preclinical training at Cambridge, where I had also read natural sciences and psychology, and completing my medical qualification at University College Hospital. During my time at the school I had worked with children and adolescents whose difficulties I know now to be typical of much personality disorder, and had been exposed to hypotheses, derived from the ‘new psychology’ emanating from Vienna, regarding the role of childhood experience in their origin. Accordingly I had decided to train as a psychoanalyst. This I began before qualifying medically and continued whilst spending eighteen months at the Maudsley, learning the psychiatry of adults as one of Aubrey Lewis's early students. This proved a productive relationship, not least because on many questions we agreed to differ.