Breaking the back of love: attachment goes neuro-molecular

This chapter explores how attachment theory is increasingly going ‘under the skin’, looking for fundamental biological mechanisms to explain behaviours and consequences. Attachment scholars and researchers have sought new alignments with developments in evolutionary biology and developmental neuroscience. All these domains — despite inconsistent findings, thorny issues relating to extrapolations from animal work, and problems with replication — are purported to provide further support for attachment theory's veracity. In addition, they dangle the tantalising prospects of better targeting of interventions and more efficacious clinical approaches to fixing the effects of disrupted attachments, including some normative and sensitive matters such as the onset of puberty, and what are somewhat euphemistically called ‘reproductive strategies’, often meaning girls having babies too early. This ‘new generation’ of biological reasoning looks to the molecular level to explain health inequalities, with the prevention of adverse childhood experiences on the ‘to do’ list for public health policy makers. This has profound potential implications for child welfare practices.

Love is a wondrous state:1 origins and early debates

This chapter traces the origins of attachment theory and reviews its component parts, including the seminal empirical research on animals and humans. Attachment theory, popularised during the 1940s and 1950s, is a synthesis of object relations theory and ethological developmental psychology. It suggests a symbiotic dance of nature and nurture, achieved through the ministering of the mother. It shares with object relations theory an emphasis on the infant's relationship with the ‘primary object’, but these ideas are combined with those from cognitive psychology, cybernetics (control systems theory), ethology, and evolutionary biology. The theory is thus an elegant, but pragmatic mishmash, arising from attempts to make sense of empirical, clinical observations of real children experiencing distressing separations, together with aspirations to make the world a better place for everybody by understanding the medium of love. Attachment theory as used in child welfare is generally attributed to the work of John Bowlby, James Robertson, and Mary Ainsworth. The chapter then considers the controversies that attachment theory has faced, particularly in the latter half of the 20th century.

Practising attachment theory in child welfare

This chapter discusses how attachment theory is used, or not, in professional practice and decision making. Attachment theory is now a standard subject on social work qualifying programmes and many employers provide training for their social workers in attachment theory, ensuring that most practitioners are familiar with the theory. As the discourse of attachment theory has influenced medical opinion and doctors have the power and privilege to diagnose children, a range of ‘attachment disorders’ has been created and these disorders are used to categorise children. Afforded with greater power and status, such diagnoses by medical practitioners feed into the attachment theory knowledge base of social workers, influencing and framing how social workers think about the children and families they work with. The chapter then considers Matthew Gibson's recent study, which took place in the child and family social work service in an English local authority.

Shaping practice: prescribing assessment

This chapter reviews the use of attachment theory in practice guidance and child welfare policy, focusing on social work in England. In refashioning the role of social workers, the increasing social acceptance of attachment theory, and its concomitant discourse, influenced and guided the UK government's attempt to define and restructure what social work practice was. The attachment story in use offered explanations for how children become harmed by insensitive, unresponsive, and inconsistent parenting. Such ideas fed into the government's agenda for social work practice: namely to assess (needs) and refer (to services) or remove (to prevent harm). Social workers were, therefore, directed to assess parents' capacity to meet the needs of their children from the perspective of attachment theory. Ultimately, attachment theory has become institutionalised into the profession.

Exhibiting disorganised attachment: not even wrong?1

This chapter presents the controversial category ‘disorganised’ attachment as an exhibit to assess how research agendas get shaped and distorted by normative and habitual assumptions that drive the belief systems of the research community. This classification has come to prominence because of its alleged relationship with child abuse and abusive parenting. Yet, there is some considerable debate in the primary literature about what the classification really means. Indeed, for diagnostic purposes, the coding system for disorganised attachment is complicated, and the inter-coder reliability only marginal: not all observers can agree when they have seen a case of disorganised attachment behaviour. The important point here is that different accounts of the same phenomenon coexist; they are associated with different worldviews. This makes it important to understand the origins of theoretical ideas within the scientific community, and of the debates and controversies within that world.

Social work and the attachment story: a felicitous bond?

This chapter examines the symbiotic relationship between child welfare professional practice, social work in particular, and the ascent of attachment theory. The development of social work had provided fertile ground for the incubation of early ideas about attachment theory, particularly in child and family social work. It was not, however, accepted as a legitimate theory simply because John Bowlby had introduced it to the profession. Rather, while the foundations were there for attachment theory to be used in practice, it was a more complex process that eventually resulted in the theory being taught on social work courses and used routinely by practitioners. Crucial in that translation was the shift in emphasis from ‘normal’, non-clinical populations to children suffering maltreatment. As the institutional logics driving social work with children and families have shifted from the provision of help to the prediction of risk, attachment theory has been a flexible companion providing enticing vocabularies to support moral claims.

Coda: love reawakened?

This coda summarises the main arguments of this book. It calls for the ethical use of attachment theory. All theories are tools, and tools need to be used in the right way, addressing the thing they were designed to explain or improve. There are parts of attachment theory that were designed to understand love and relationships, and parts that were designed to change policy and practice to create a more humane system of public services. These aspects provide a good fit for child welfare practice and some of the ideas of attachment theory were developed within, and inspired by, child welfare practice. If attachment theory is to be used ethically in policy and practice, practitioners need to properly understand the theory, its origins and original intentions. The book has also outlined the need to place attachment theory into a wider context for practice. Professional ethics necessarily involve respecting familial relational networks, seeking to develop, strengthen, and deepen those relationships that provide connection and belonging. Without these central values, attachment theory can result in the opposite.