I Have Attachment Issues
Bowlby suggests that “instinctive” behavioral systems underlie much of the emotional life of man and have developed because they were conducive to survival. The system with which he has been almost exclusively concerned is the array of behaviors and experiences constituting the child’s “attachment” to the mother.
Bowlby proposed that attachment can be understood within an evolutionary context in that the caregiver provides safety and security for the infant. Attachment is adaptive as it enhances the infant’s chance of survival.
But is that the whole story? Are there ways in which inadequate attachment in infancy can promote survival in adulthood? Is it possible that inadequate attachment in infancy can preserve psychological well-being in the face of a later-experienced abusive, traumatic and dysfunctional family environment and also provide important coping skills that will allow an individual to survive (and even flourish) in extreme circumstances in adulthood? Cf. Kim, S. “Outsider Advantage: Social Rejection Fueling Creative Thought” (persons with an independent self-concept [i.e., dismissively-avoidant persons] experience heightened creativity in the face of social rejection).
http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1622&context=articles
Attachment theorists seem to disparage individualists (persons with an independent self-concept, such as those, for example, who thrive on social rejection, see Kim) who turn inward in times of stress and rely on themselves as the ultimate source of identity and security, rather than looking to an attachment figure (such as a social group) for support.
Bowlby maintained that “dismissing individuals (i.e., individualists), chronically lacking support from attachment figures, habitually deny or dismiss environmental threats. They may therefore have a higher threshold for experiencing negative emotions or perceiving attachment needs, exhibiting what Bowlby called ‘compulsive self-reliance’.” Apparently, in the view of Bowlby, compulsive self-reliance is a bad thing.
The Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal as a young man in Buczacz, Poland, led a group of Boy Scouts, only one of whom survived the war. Was Wiesenthal an individualist? Here he is pictured below, the only person not wearing a uniform, a marker of group homogenization. In the photo Wiesenthal retained his personal autonomy. Was personal autonomy — individualism, or self-reliance — an important reason why he survived the death camps? One wonders.
From his own observations when he was a prisoner in Dachau and Buchenwald,
the psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim concluded that the prisoners who gave up and died were those who had abandoned any attempt at personal autonomy; who acquiesced in their captors’ aim of dehumanizing and exercising total control over them. Storr, A. Solitude: A Return to the Self.
Reliance on individualized intellectual strengths can be a bulwark against an oppressive environment — offering an avenue of survival in a situation where human attachment figures are of no avail. At the end of the Second World War when the Nazis were rounding up the Jews of Budapest, the mother of the conductor Antal Dorati found herself herded into a small room with dozens of others, where they were kept for many days with no food and no facilities of any kind. Most of the others went out of their minds (i.e., the securely attached who found themselves without an attachment figure), but she kept sane by methodically going through the four parts of the Beethoven quartets, which she knew individually by heart.
https://dailstrug.wordpress.com/2017/11/15/my-problems-with-attachment-theory/
Bowlby proposed that attachment can be understood within an evolutionary context in that the caregiver provides safety and security for the infant. Attachment is adaptive as it enhances the infant’s chance of survival.
But is that the whole story? Are there ways in which inadequate attachment in infancy can promote survival in adulthood? Is it possible that inadequate attachment in infancy can preserve psychological well-being in the face of a later-experienced abusive, traumatic and dysfunctional family environment and also provide important coping skills that will allow an individual to survive (and even flourish) in extreme circumstances in adulthood? Cf. Kim, S. “Outsider Advantage: Social Rejection Fueling Creative Thought” (persons with an independent self-concept [i.e., dismissively-avoidant persons] experience heightened creativity in the face of social rejection).
http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1622&context=articles
Attachment theorists seem to disparage individualists (persons with an independent self-concept, such as those, for example, who thrive on social rejection, see Kim) who turn inward in times of stress and rely on themselves as the ultimate source of identity and security, rather than looking to an attachment figure (such as a social group) for support.
Bowlby maintained that “dismissing individuals (i.e., individualists), chronically lacking support from attachment figures, habitually deny or dismiss environmental threats. They may therefore have a higher threshold for experiencing negative emotions or perceiving attachment needs, exhibiting what Bowlby called ‘compulsive self-reliance’.” Apparently, in the view of Bowlby, compulsive self-reliance is a bad thing.
The Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal as a young man in Buczacz, Poland, led a group of Boy Scouts, only one of whom survived the war. Was Wiesenthal an individualist? Here he is pictured below, the only person not wearing a uniform, a marker of group homogenization. In the photo Wiesenthal retained his personal autonomy. Was personal autonomy — individualism, or self-reliance — an important reason why he survived the death camps? One wonders.
From his own observations when he was a prisoner in Dachau and Buchenwald,
the psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim concluded that the prisoners who gave up and died were those who had abandoned any attempt at personal autonomy; who acquiesced in their captors’ aim of dehumanizing and exercising total control over them. Storr, A. Solitude: A Return to the Self.
Reliance on individualized intellectual strengths can be a bulwark against an oppressive environment — offering an avenue of survival in a situation where human attachment figures are of no avail. At the end of the Second World War when the Nazis were rounding up the Jews of Budapest, the mother of the conductor Antal Dorati found herself herded into a small room with dozens of others, where they were kept for many days with no food and no facilities of any kind. Most of the others went out of their minds (i.e., the securely attached who found themselves without an attachment figure), but she kept sane by methodically going through the four parts of the Beethoven quartets, which she knew individually by heart.
https://dailstrug.wordpress.com/2017/11/15/my-problems-with-attachment-theory/
