Vitamins for the soul: John Bowlby's thesis of maternal deprivation, biomedical metaphors and the deficiency model of disease.

In 1951 John Bowlby, British psychoanalyst and child psychiatrist, published his now famous report, Maternal Care and Mental Health, commissioned by the World Health Organization. In this report, Bowlby coined the term 'maternal deprivation', which quickly permeated into Western psychiatry and psychology. The implications of Bowlby's writings, while widely criticized and contested, generated a considerable amount of research and brought about significant changes in perceptions of separation between children and their mothers.