A young lady named Maria was discouraged, criticized and even harassed when she began her medical studies. She was one of the first women to study psychiatry, not just in Italy, but in the world. But she didn’t let any of that get her down and she went on to develop effective new methods and treatments for children with learning difficulties, and a revolutionary new early education system. Maria Montessori wrote: “The amazingly rapid progress in the care and education of children in recent years may be attributed to an awakening of conscience. Not only is there an increasing concern for child health, but also a new awareness of the personality of the child as something of the highest importance.”
Karen Horney also wanted to become a doctor even though women in Germany at the time were not allowed to go to university. Against her parent’s wishes she enrolled in medical school and, like Montessori, became one of the first ever female psychiatrists. She came up with a simple yet intuitive and meaningful model, looking at the child’s basic needs (for satisfaction and security) and their basic responses (fear or hostility) and basic movements (away from or against the parent) when those needs aren’t met; which shaped their Interpersonal Styles.
Melanie Klein spent a lot of time working with children using play as a form of therapy. She developed her own branch of psychoanalysis which she called Object Relations or Internal Working Models. Klein placed the mother-infant relationship at the foundation and core of personality development. Her ideas influenced the work of brilliant psychologists like John Bowlby, Mary Ainsworth, and many others. Klein wrote: “What we learn about the child and the adult through psychoanalysis shows that all the sufferings of later life are for the most part repetitions of these earlier ones.”
John Bowlby discovered his passion for childhood developmental psychology. He took up a teaching post at a school for delinquent children, where he did intriguing research that made a link between early adverse childhood experiences and later delinquent behavior (stealing). One of his initial findings was that those kids that were considered “affectionless” had experienced complete and prolonged separation from their mothers before the age of five. In ‘Attachment Theory, Separation Anxiety and Mourning’ Bowlby wrote: “In very many species of mammal, the young seek their mother and remain in close proximity to her. In all the species of nonhuman primate, the young cling tightly to the mother.”
Mary Ainsworth was born in the U.S. and raised in Canada a generation after Montessori and Horney and so she was somewhat freer than they were to pursue her dreams. She began her studies in psychology at the age of sixteen. She focused her masters and PhD on the subject of ‘the family as a secure base for personality development.’ Through simple observations of children and their mothers, Ainsworth and her team provided not only empirical evidence of the early bond with the parent as a significant force in psychological and personality development, but also distinguished between four basic Attachment Styles.
Bowlby and Ainsworth made it clear that these attachment styles were not innate dispositions of the child, but rather, responses and adaptations to how their parents were treating them. Along comes Diana Baumrind flipping it around and talking about exactly this; the Parenting Styles that are behind it. She looked at it in terms of high/low Responsiveness (or care) and Demandingness (or discipline), which gives us four parenting styles: Authoritative (or supportive); Authoritarian; Permissive; and Uninvolved (or abusive), which map neatly onto Horney’s basic responses and movements, and Ainsworth’s Attachment styles, giving us a simple, coherent model for understanding personality development.