Attachment theory is one of the most successful psychological approaches in the 20th century. Developed by the British child psychiatrist John Bowlby (1907–1990), it provided a basis for reforms of residential care as well as for strengthening the idea of maternal and loving childcare after the Second World War. While Bowlby`s impact in the Anglo-Saxon world has been debated broadly (Shapira 2013, Vicedo 2013, Duschinsky 2020), analyses of the transnational knowledge transfer to the rest of Europe are lacking. Therefore, this panel compares the dissemination and reception of attachment theory and its influence on care policies in six countries from the 1950s until the 1970s: in West Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, and the Netherlands in Western Europe, in East Germany and Czechoslovakia in Eastern Europe.

Initially, attachment theory grew forward in Britain in the 1930s and 1940s, as a result of Bowlby’s child psychiatric clinical and research activities (Van der Horst & Van der Veer, 2010). In 1951, Bowlby published the WHO report Maternal Care and Mental Health on the needs of children who were orphaned or separated from their families and needed care in foster homes, or institutions (Bowlby 1951). Emphasizing the importance of warm maternal care in the first years of life, the monograph broke with traditional notions of infant care and became one of the landmark publications in child psychiatry and development psychology.

In the democratic and capitalist West, we find an early Bowlby boom in the 1950s. Bowlby was discovered in West Germany by educational scientists and practitioners as early as 1953 (Berth 2021a). Here, as well as in Switzerland, psychologists and pediatrics started their empirical work in infant homes from the mid-1950s onwards to test and confirm Bowlby's findings (Dührssen 1958; Meierhofer & Keller 1966). By the early 1960s, the term hospitalism was familiar to most experts in child psychology, pediatrics, and childcare in the Western European countries. This also marked the beginning of rapid institutional reforms in the 1960s: residential care for babies and toddlers was abolished within a few years in West-Germany and in Switzerland. In Sweden, Bowlby’s ideas were met with little enthusiasm and even resistance: his narrow focus on the all-importance of the mother-child relation were a mismatch with the much broader social view on homeless children by experts in social democratic Sweden (Van der Horst et al., 2020).

Beyond the Iron Curtain, one would not expect a high influence of early attachment theory. For the Stalinist socialist states with their strong orientation towards maternal employment, a strengthening of collective forms of education, especially in day care but also in residential homes, would seem plausible. However, for Czechoslovakia and East Germany we show an intensive and partly approving debate on Bowlby´s work (Berth 2021b, Henschel 2016a/b). In Czechoslovakia it even served as a main argument for comprehensive reforms in the sector of institutional care and family politics in the 1960s and 70s.

Our conclusion is that the history of attachment theory does not follow strict East-West logics but must be traced for different states separately. Perhaps there is more to the theory that allowed its transnational transfer to different political systems in Europe: the idea of a child needing protection and care, the idea of motherhood, the ideal of care and education. By discussing how attachment theory was received in the various European countries, we show similarities and differences in the views on mother-child relations, as well as nation-specific policies for child educational and psychiatric care. Thus, the panel contributes to the transnational history of childhood and the influence of psy-sciences on care politics.

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