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John Bowlby is generally regarded as the founder of attachment theory, with the help of Mary Ainsworth. Through her Uganda and Baltimore studies Ainsworth provided empirical evidence for attachment theory, and she contributed the notion of the secure base and exploratory behavior, the Strange Situation Procedure and its classification system, and the notion of maternal sensitivity. On closer scrutiny, many of these contributions appear to be heavily influenced by William Blatz and his security theory. Even though Blatz’s influence on Ainsworth has been generally acknowledged, this article, partly based on understudied correspondence from several personal archives, is the first to show which specific parts of attachment theory can be traced back directly to Blatz and his security theory. When Ainsworth started working with Bowlby in the 1950s, around the time he turned to evolutionary theory for an explanation of his findings, she integrated much of Blatzian security theory into Bowlby’s theory in the making and used her theoretical and practical experience to enrich attachment theory. Even though Blatz is hardly mentioned nowadays, several of his ideas live on in attachment theory.

 

When I think of the course of my career, I can see a common thread the whole way through the course that is Blatz, no matter how much I have re-translated his ideas and so on. That is where it started. (Ainsworth, in an interview with Roger Myers, 1969)

The British child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst John Bowlby (1907–1990) is generally regarded as the founder of attachment theory, which he gradually developed and comprehensively formulated in his trilogy (Bowlby, 1969, 1973, 1980). According to attachment theory, human infants need a consistent nurturing relationship with one or more sensitive caregivers to develop into healthy individuals. Parental unavailability or unresponsiveness may contribute to aberrant behavior or, depending on other risk...