In Defense of the Bridge to Attachment Theory: Response to Commentaries

We would like to start this response to the four commentaries y thanking these five eminent scholars for engaging so productively with the ideas we put forward in what was a somewhat speculative piece. At the risk of sounding unappreciative of the predominantly friendly tone of the commentaries, we will give most space in our response to the points of disagreement, gratefully accepting without comment much support and common ground.

Philip Robbins and Jeffrey Zacks express some serious disagreements with our descriptions of both attachment theory and cognitive neuroscience, and state their disagreement rather boldly for a psychoanalytic journal in saying that at certain points we are wrong. We welcome the intellectual robustness of this style and the rigor that underpins it. Of course we feel that, in places, they are wrong, or at least misdirected.

The first substantive point of their commentary, also made by Theodore Shapiro, is that Bowlby's model is unrelated to classical cognitive science, and is rooted instead in control theory, evolutionary biology, and ethology. Those connections are matters of historical fact. As attachment theorists we would hardly wish to dispute them, and have in fact extensively described them elsewhere; in this context, however, they are irrelevant. Our concern here is with the reliance of attachment theory on pure cognitivist theory building. One of us (PF) was assisting Bowlby in the late 1970s at University College London (UCL) as he was developing the model elaborated in the last volume of his trilogy. Bowlby was very taken with the emergent information-processing approach, as were all psychologists at UCL (notable pioneers include Timothy Shallice, Philip Johnson-Laird, and Peter Wason), and he took pains to ally his claims with data emerging from laboratories such as Norman Dixon's at UCL and Kraag and others' at Lund (Sweden) on preconscious information processing.