Attachment is the emotional bond that is the basis of the love tie that connects the individual to the field of significant others. Why is attachment important? Because according to the quality of this bond, mental health can be secured or damaged. There is a great deal of grounded attachment research that shows how problems in the attachment tie are the basis of emotional distress and mental health issues. Yet attachment is radically underrepresented in our field.
We first examine why John Bowlby, the founder of attachment theory, was not taken seriously enough. We address the conflicting perspectives in psychotherapy and foreground the implications for understanding the mental world of the individual differently from Melanie Klein and her followers at the time. For Bowlby, the mental world of the individual is always linked to relationships with others and the environment. We draw out how this orientates us to a social and relationship basis for understanding mental and psycho-somatic ill-health, the new foundations for this way of thinking, and the implications it has for the way we work with our patients in the clinical setting
In this lecture, I will draw on example(s) to demonstrate how an attachment framework helps us understand trauma, and how this links to mental ill health, and will look at possible relationships between attachment and sexuality in the example(s).
The lecture will provide the following learning outcomes:
- Why attachment has been underrated
- How attachment theory understands the importance of our emotional ties with others, and how disturbance in these bonds relates to mental and psycho-somatic ill health
- Understanding some key research studies
- The different approaches that attachment understanding is based in
- The implications attachment has for explaining mental distress and the way we work in the consulting room
- Some insights into understanding trauma attachment and sexuality