5 November 2022
There’s a concept that keeps recurring in readings, papers, and case conferences. That term is attachment. Attachment, within psychology, is “An emotionally important relationship in which one individual seeks proximity to, and derives security from, the presence of another, particularly infants to parental figures” (Atkinson & Tomley, 2012, p. 340).
On a timeline of 20th-century psychological ideas, attachment appears around the middle (1958-1960) with John Bowlby proposing that the psychoanalysts (e.g., Freud & Co.) and behaviourists (e.g., Watson, Skinner & Co.) were mistaken about the nature of attachment. Bowlby’s own English, upper-middle class background, and his observations from WWII, favoured his insights about how children bond—or don’t. Bowlby saw the innate desire for bonding—recall Aristotle’s statement some 2,300 years earlier, that humans are social creatures—as a means of survival. Think about that. As we’ll learn, if you are rejected by your parents (usually your mother dominates early years), the way you relate to people i.e., your social character, is altered, impaired, and/or lessened. But that need doesn’t go away.
“The reason why this primary, secure attachment is so important, Bowlby says, is that it is essential for the development of an inner working model or framework that the child uses to understand himself, others, and the world. This inner working model guides a person’s thoughts, feeling, and expectations in all of his personal relationships, even into adulthood” (Atkinson & Tomley, 2012, p. 276).
In the U.S.A., at about Bowlby’s time, another psychologist, Harry Harlow, and his colleagues, working with infants and monkeys, found that the comfort offered by contact—with another—was more important than food in infancy. “Harlow’s experiments demonstrated that to build healthy cognitive and social development, infants need companionship and care” (Atkinson & Tomley, 2012, p. 261). Well duh!, some of you might be thinking. But here’s the thing: many, families don’t provide sufficient or consistent companionship or care.
Within this field, the next researcher of note was Mary Ainsworth who coined terms used almost everyday in psychotherapy: secure, avoidant, or anxious attachment. More precisely, when Ainsworth worked alongside Bowlby, she found that one of three conditions prevailed when a baby was separated from her mother.
That was in the 1950s and subsequent research has challenged, refined, and expanded the categories, which we’ll look at next week. And what does all this have to do with addiction or relationships you might ask. Let’s turn to someone who knows a bit about addiction.
“When, owing to internal demons arising from their own childhoods or to external stressors in their lives, parents are unable to regulate—that is, keep within a tolerable range—the emotional milieu of the infant, the child’s brain has to adapt: by tuning out, by emotional shutting down and by learning to find ways to self-soothe through rocking, thumb-sucking, eating, sleeping or constantly looking to external sources of comfort. This is the ever-agitated, ever-yawning emptiness that lies at the heart of addiction” (Maté, 2018, p. 230).
What Maté just described are the inner workings of attachment. Next week we’ll look at the forms attachment is now thought to take.
Dan Chalykoff is a supervised psychotherapist working toward an M.Ed. in Counselling Psychology and accreditation in Professional Addiction Studies. He writes these blogs to increase (and share) his evolving understandings of ideas. Since 2017, he has facilitated two voluntary weekly group meetings of SMART Recovery. Please email him (danchalykoff@hotmail.com) to be added to or removed from the Bcc’d emailing list.
References
Atkinson, S., Tomley, S. (Eds.). (2012). The psychology book: Big ideas simply explained. Dorling-Kindersley Limited.
Maté, G. (2018). In the realm of hungry ghosts: close encounters with addiction. Vintage Canada.
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