Bowlby's Ghost: Political and Moral Reverberations of Attachment Theory

John Bowlby's work continues to influence contemporary social and behavioural scholarship into the twenty-first century. His development of attachment theory has created ethical dilemmas for both political conservatives and progressives, respectively, calling attention to the potentially exculpatory implications of early life events and the seemingly unavoidable responsibilities of motherhood. Like other ‘normative’ developmental theories, attachment theory implies or describes optimal outcomes in adulthood. Unlike more general biopsychosocial views, attachment theory focuses causality in a narrower range of care-giver-child transactions. This is not a grab bag of risk and resiliency factors, where innumerable permutations can produce wide variations in developmental status. There may be cultural variations in care-giver responsibilities (e.g., expressions of affection, timing of responsiveness), but there is an equifinality in attachment theory, which produces (or does not produce) securely attached persons. It is the identification of these essential and inescapable functions of attachment that cements Bowlby's place in the history of psychology and psychotherapy and forces us to confront our humanity and its contradictions.