Forty-Four Juvenile Thieves Review

Introduction

Attachment theory was developed by psychoanalyst John Bowlby, whose studies observed the distress infants went through when separated from their primary caretaker. He believed that a the relationship between an infant and its mother or caretaker during the first few years of life was detrimental to the child's mental health and created the term maternal deprivation - suggesting the consequences could result in juvenile delinquency, depression or affectionless psychopathy.

In this essay I aim to explore this by reflecting on his research paper Forty-four Juvenile Thieves: Their character and Home-Life. I will discuss the research method used for this study, and explore what the implications of the findings mean for psychotherapy. I will also discuss what I feel the treatment approach should be for clients suffering from affectionless psychopathy.

Before concluding I will briefly examine the similarities between attachment theory and Transactional Analysis and how the attachment concept corresponds to the idea of script, and the four patterns of attachment can be likened to life positions. Furthermore, I will compare how the juvenile thieves with affectionless psychopathy would tie in with Transactional Analysis theory.

Context of psychotherapy and research

Before reflecting on my chosen research paper and its findings it is important to discuss the context of research and psychotherapy. "The reason why psychotherapy research has been held back in this country is that clinicians have felt insufficiently knowledgeable about experimental method and have left the work for psychologists" (Gelder, 1976, p.505). There have been some positive changes since then and there are now extensive publications written by psychotherapists researching their field. There is much more supervision offered and research methodology is introduced to trainee psychotherapists early on in their careers.

There are two methodologies that can be used in psychotherapy research. Quantitative research, which is a scientific method that investigates phenomena in a mathematical and statistical way, and qualitative research which is more focused on the understanding and meaning of human behaviour. The choice of which type of methodology to use in research has become controversial, with some believing "qualitative research designs have become increasingly and unnecessarily complex" (Evans, 2007, p.43) as they are competing with quantitative methods and this has caused researchers to become too focused on the method instead of the process. However, both are helpful tools for data collection and analysis and some researchers combine the methods together, which is called a mixed method. The advantage of mixed method research is that by combining statistical and experiential data, you are using positive benefits from each method, thus enabling a more accurate understanding of psychotherapy. John Bowlby uses both qualitative and quantitative methods in his paper, forty-four Juvenile Thieves.

What I think about psychotherapy and research

I think psychotherapy and research has come a long way in the past few decades. It is now a huge advantage that psychotherapists are researching aspects of the field they practice in. With consistent observations and strict research methods, therapists as researchers, can collaborate with their research participants to discover new meanings in a field of study. These observations enable the researcher to study behaviour as it occurs in a natural environment.

There are a number of issues to be wary of with regard to psychotherapy research. The most important is that poor research methods can lead to unreliable results. It is hard to establish the accuracy of quantitative research, as it is impossible to measure people's true unconscious feelings. Every individual is unique and therapists could have preconceptions on certain subjects, which would make their observations biased. In a field such as psychotherapy, research will always be a grey area, as people are reflecting on their own personal feelings and the perceptions of those feelings by psychotherapist/researchers could easily be misconceived and inaccurate.

Forty-four Juvenile Thieves: Their character and Home-Life

Aim

While Bowlby was working at the London Guidance Clinic in the 1930's, he became interested in juvenile delinquency. He noted that the most common age for appearing in court for theft was thirteen years old and referred to theft as a disease of childhood. There had been many studies on the causes of delinquency by this stage but he realised that most of the research only looked into the child's relationship to his caregiver. Not much research had been done into how the caregiver felt, both consciously and unconsciously, towards the child.

Between 1936 and 1939 Bowlby carried out a study on forty-four juvenile delinquents at the London Child Guidance Clinic. His aim was to investigate the effects of maternal deprivation to see whether the delinquents had suffered any such issues.

Procedure (Method)

On arrival each child was given intelligence tests and it was clearly noted how they reacted to the stress of the assessments. A social worker then took a psychiatric history of their life. The child was interviewed and then their mothers were interviewed separately, to establish whether the thieves had had prolonged separations. In many cases these interviews continued for months and a mother's attitude to the child only became apparent for some after weeks of discussion with a social worker. Bowlby was particularly interested in the condition called "affectionless psychopathy" where the child does not care of feel affection for others. A control group was then set up with forty-four non - delinquent youths, who were at the same clinic for emotional issues not relating to theft or crime. They were tested and interviewed along with their mothers following the same procedure as the delinquent group. Bowlby did this to distinguish the differing characteristics between the two groups and to find out if maternal deprivation had occurred to the same extent in the non - delinquent group. It was noted in the interviews that the thieves had various experiences which may have contributed to their delinquency, such as the shock of bereavement or spending some of their early years in foster homes or hospitals with little contact from their families.

Findings

Bowlby's findings concluded that of the fourteen thieves who showed affectionless psychopathy, twelve had experienced maternal deprivation