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Mapping the Moral Domain is a collection of essays with a common theme: attachment and its relationship to moral development in women, providing a new framework for understanding adolescent development. By taking into account the effect of the adult's response to the adolescent's questions, Gilligan explores “the questions behind the questions,” thereby illuminating part of the battleground on which the adolescent struggles to figure out “Who am I?” and “What is true?” or “What is of value?” In studying ways adolescents speak about themselves, their conflicts, confusions, and uncertainties are articulated. Gilligan suggests that these concerns are of importance to delineating strategies in secondary education for the adolescent.
Gilligan builds on the premise that self and other are connected and interdependent. Here, she joins a long list of psychoanalysts including Kohut (1977, 1984), Loewald (1978), and Winnicott (1965) and developmental researchers for whom the person is born into, and shaped by, the dyad. Attachment, whether primary or secondary to other developmental assumptions, has long been recognized as the shaper of experience. Gilligan's emphasis, however, is that differences between self and other promote moral development. Failures in articulating these differences in the context of attachments result in problems of “detachment.”
A study of a group of high school girls serves to illustrate that attachment does not imply agreement and that differences are characteristic for the life of a relationship. Attachments do not threaten its continuity. At that time, connection with others depends on the ability to differentiate between true and false relationships or between authentic and inauthentic relationships. Authentic relationships promote strong feelings and clear principles. These adolescent girls asked whether they could be responsive to themselves without losing their connection with others: they wondered whether, simultaneously, they could respond to