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La Historia Desconocida de La Tería Del Apego - Schwartz
La Historia Desconocida de La Tería Del Apego - Schwartz
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T H E U N A C K N O W L E D G E D H I S TO RY O F J O H N
B O W L B Y ’ S AT TA C H M E N T T H E O RY
JOSEPH SCHWARTZ
I argue that attachment theory is a central part of the history of psycho-
analysis, although in a form not easily recognizable partly because of
Bowlby’s unique formulation of the centrality of relationships in terms of
attachment for understanding the dynamics of the human inner world and
partly because of certain defensive features of psychoanalysis that makes
changes in thinking difficult and results in the marginalization of dissident
voices. Bowlby’s unrecognized antecedents extend back to Bleuler in
Switzerland and include White, Sullivan and Thompson in the United
States and Fairbairn and Winnicott in the UK. A dangerous clinical
consequence of the lack of acknowledgement of Bowlby’s contribution to
psychoanalysis has been a widespread ignorance of the difference
between an attachment bond and a trauma bond. An attachment bond
provides safety and a trauma bond provides harm. Victims of abuse can
mistakenly be encouraged to remain in abusive relationships in the name
of attachment because trauma bonds can be strong even though they are
harmful. This is a dangerous misreading of attachment theory stemming
from the marginalization and ignorance of Bowlby’s work.
KEY WORDS: ATTACHMENT THEORY, BOWLBY, HISTORY, ABUSE,
TRAUMA BOND
PERSONAL INTRODUCTION
Before becoming a psychotherapist, I had a career as a physicist. As an undergraduate
and graduate student at Berkeley from 1955 to 1964, I was very lucky to be able to
observe physics being done at the very highest level of accomplishment. My boss,
Luis Alvarez, won the 1967 Nobel Prize in physics as the head of a group that made
unexpected discoveries of new elementary particles, leading directly to Gell-Mann’s
quark model of the particle spectrum. Alvarez’s group consisted of some 20 physi-
cists, 15 graduate students and over 200 technicians. This was big physics.
Particle physics in Alvarez’s group bore very little relationship to the romantic
stories of the so-called string and sealing wax physics of Rutherford’s McGill–
Manchester–Cambridge journey of accomplishment or to Faraday’s virtuoso magnet
and wire experiments of the early to mid-nineteenth century. Physics in Berkeley also
bore no relationship whatsoever to the tidy little fables of ‘scientific method’ told in
CLINICAL IMPLICATIONS
Bowlby framed attachment theory in terms of a human drive for attachment with the
basic underlying determinant of human psychology being the success or failure of
human interpersonal relationships (Schwartz, 2012). For Bowlby, as for Fairbairn,
aggression is a response to threat and not genetically pre-programmed, with a need to
be civilized.
In psychoanalysis in the 1920s, the repetition-compulsion was an expression of a
proposed death instinct (Freud, 1920). For Klein (1957) envy was innate: ‘I consider
that envy is an oral-sadistic and anal sadistic expression of destructive impulses,
operative from the beginning of life and that it has a constitutional basis’. Nowadays
genetics continues to offer a ready-made, culturally sanctioned way of circumventing
questions about the complexity of human behaviour, motivation, culture and history.
The current ubiquity of such explanations is given in an ‘A–Z’ in the Appendix.
I have argued elsewhere that very few people feel that they can challenge such an
entrenched framework, a framework that can, with reason, be called genetic funda-
mentalism (Schwartz, 1997). Bowlby had the confidence, of class and of evidence, to
do so. Bowlby, like Fairbairn, was a good scientist in the sense that I am stressing. He
asked: What is the case? (Schwartz, 2014).
The overall clinical approach is summarized by Slade (2006): ‘Attachment theory
informs but does not determine clinical work’. Within this flexible clinical framework,
in which attachment theory informs but does not determine clinical work, there are a
number of features in common with other orientations and a number of features that
perhaps distinguish attachment-based clinical work from other psychoanalytic orien-
tations. As in the history of attachment theory these connections and differences are
only observed from an uninformed distance.
Practices in common with other psychoanalytic orientations might be: the framing
of the therapist as more an experienced guide on a highly individual journey, rather
than a knowing expert; a reliance on countertransference as the royal road to uncon-
scious processes (Lomas, 1987; Racker, 1968); and an inclusive approach to treatment
as opposed the exclusivity informed by Freud’s elitism. As Freud (1923) wrote: ‘. . .
since [psychoanalysis] necessitates the devotion of long and intense attention to the
individual patient, it would be uneconomical to squander such expenditure upon
completely worthless persons who happen to be neurotic’ (p. 250).
The criminal case concerning the continued beatings and subsequent death of Baby
P in Britain in 2007 (see, among many accounts, ‘Death of Baby P’, Wikipedia)
highlighted a dangerous misunderstanding of Bowlby’s attachment theory. For
Bowlby the point of human attachment is safety. An attachment bond makes the infant
safe and is the basis of Winnicott’s facilitating environment. The trauma bond is not
safe. It is a desperate exercise in self-preservation. Brian Keenan’s powerful account
(1992 ) of his torture and four-year incarceration in Beirut, An Evil Cradling, vividly
shows the difference between his attachment bond to fellow prisoner John McCarthy
and his trauma bond to his captors. The trauma bond has an extensive literature,
particularly in relation to battered women (see, for example, Dutton & Painter, 1981).
It also has an extensive literature in hostage situations where it is known as capture
bonding or the Stockholm syndrome (Auerbach et al., 1994; Cantor & Price, 2007;
Herman, 1992; Şar, Middleton & Dorahy, 2014).
The confusion between the attachment bond and the trauma bond affects both
clinical work and social work. The social workers in the Baby P case and in other
similar fatalities tended to be working in a practice framework where any attachment
is seen to be better than none, which makes it difficult to remove a child who is being
abused by their parents. In clinical work with adults, there can be a tendency to collude
with a patient in their difficulties in leaving an abusive relationship because of the
misunderstanding of the difference between the often very powerful trauma bond that
binds the patient to the abuser and an attachment bond which would provide safety and
growth. For most attachment-based clinicians, myself included, a first step in treating
survivors of abuse is to assist the client in leaving the abusive relationship. If this
proves not to be possible, therapy is not possible and the relationship with the client,
I would say on ethical grounds, needs to be ended. Otherwise we become collusive in
enabling the abuse to continue.
The differences between attachment bonds and trauma bonds are summarized in
Table 1.
a pound of Freud’ (p. 638). In 1935, William Alanson White had to defend Freud’s
contribution to psychiatry to his sceptical colleagues (White, 1935): ‘The most impor-
tant thing stressed by Freud and his followers has been the deterministic attitude
towards psychological facts . . . No longer is it possible to rest content with calling a
given idea a delusion or describing the products of delirium as incoherent’ (p. 542). In
1997, Edward Shorter, a leading historian of psychiatry, wrote that psychoanalysis had
been not only an unfortunate deviation from medical treatment, but a Jewish deviation
to boot (Shorter, 1997).
As I have previously written (Schwartz, 1999), psychoanalysis as a knowledge
discipline is unique in Western culture. Whereas other knowledge disciplines (sci-
ences) are products of the great advances of the Industrial Revolution (Schwartz,
1992), psychoanalysis has been charged with the responsibility of cleaning up the
mess caused by the brutalities of the Industrial Revolution (Armstrong, 2000). But
there would seem to be internal reasons as well for the current re-marginalization of
psychoanalysis. Our sectarianism, our lack of discipline and a lack of a common front
regarding how to treat certain conditions has left us struggling for legitimacy, when we
should be being celebrated for everything the field has learned over the last century of
clinical work: transference–countertransference re-enactments, repression, splitting,
projection, introjection and above all perhaps, the use of Freud’s invention of the
analytic hour to hear the messages that come from the human inner world.
Fifteen years ago, Bob Hinshelwood (founder publisher and editor of the BJP) and
I had a spirited exchange of e-mails on theory in psychoanalysis. Hinshelwood was a
Kleinian. I was attachment based. He asked me why couldn’t there be a drive against
attachment (death drive) as well as a drive for attachment as posited by Bowlby? And
that was exactly the point of our exchange: what is the case? Is there a death drive or
not? I think I convinced him there was no evidence for an anti-attachment drive
although in principle there could be.
I and others have since argued that there is no death drive and that Freud was wrong
(Black, 2001; Schwartz, 2001). Similarly, the human being isn’t pleasure seeking in
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
I want to thank Robert Snell and Ann Scott for their thoughtful, critical readings of the
manuscript.
NOTES
1. The post-positivist literature considerably advances our understanding of what actually
happens in the labs and offices: Fleck (1979) dissects the step-by-step process by which the
Wasserman test for syphilis was invented; Latour and Woolgar (1986) discuss how scientific
facts get constructed; Shapin (1994) shows the social/historical processes involved in estab-
lishing truth; Pickering, Constructing Quarks (1984), and Galison, How Experiments End
(1987), show how theory and experiment come to be established in modern particle physics.
REFERENCES
Adshead, G. (2013) All words make a life sentence: Attachment and narratives in forensic
psychotherapy. Attachment: New Directions in Psychotherapy and Relational Psychoanaly-
sis 7: 1–19.
Adshead, G., Paz, I., King, C. & Tagg, A. (2010) Attachment and risk: A therapeutic risk
assessment group for parents who have hurt their children. Attachment: New Directions in
Psychotherapy and Relational Psychoanalysis 4: 203–15.
Alexander, F. & Selesnick, S.T. (1965) Freud–Bleuer correspondence. Archives of General
Psychiatry 12: 1–9.
Amos, J., Furber, G. & Segal, L. (2011) Understanding maltreating mothers: A synthesis of
relational trauma, attachment disorganization, structural dissociation of the personality and
experiential avoidance. Journal of Trauma & Dissociation 12: 495–509.
Arikan, G. & Karanci, N. (2012) Attachment and coping as facilitators of posttraumatic growth
in Turkish university students experiencing traumatic events. Journal of Trauma and Dis-
sociation 13: 209–25.
Armstrong, K. (2000) The Battle for God. New York: Ballantine.
Auerbach, S.M., Chiseler, D.J., Strentz, T., Schmidt, J.A. & Serio, C.D. (1994) Interpersonal
impacts and adjustment to the stress of simulated captivity: An empirical test of the Stock-
holm syndrome. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 13: 207–21.