Please Find Attached by Laura Mucha: Don’t get too attached to your own ‘attachment

PLEASE FIND ATTACHED by Laura Mucha (Bloomsbury Signa £18.99, 384pp)

The father of attachment theory, John Bowlby, was packed off to boarding school at the age of ten in the 1910s, and later said he wouldn’t put a dog through a similar ordeal.

He grew up to become a psychoanalyst, but eventually he found himself getting frustrated with the prevailing attitudes in his profession, Laura Mucha writes in her illuminating new book about attachment theory.

Back then, childhood abuse wasn’t thought to have much impact on the adults that children became. When kids were sent to hospital, their parents were barred from visiting them; and it was assumed children only showed continuing interest in their parents because they were fed by them.

But Bowlby saw that his own children seemed to also seek him out for affection, and when he studied children who were evacuated during the Second World War, he became convinced that behaviours such as bed-wetting and sleeplessness were rooted in the fact that they’d been separated from their parents.

In order to thrive, he concluded, children must have access to a ‘safe haven’, a person who looks out for them, but who needn’t be their actual parent. He called this need the attachment system; and soon, other theorists were piling in on the idea, including Mary Ainsworth, who argued that people’s attachment modes could be divided into three categories – secure, insecure avoidant, and insecure ambivalent or resistant.

Interwoven through Mucha’s exploration of attachment theory are interviews with people who have different attachment styles, and whose life stories illuminate why. The most wholesome interviewee is Lily, whose parents brought her up in a cocoon of love and care. She was bullied, but it was swiftly dealt with, and she blossomed into a stable and thoughtful adult.

More troubled are the likes of Elija and Zsa Zsa, who demonstrate insecure attachment styles. Elija was born to a teenage mother and beaten ‘black and blue’ by his father. Zsa Zsa, meanwhile, experienced neglect. When she attempted suicide aged 13, her father was annoyed at being made to schlep all the way to the hospital.

Family Dynamics: It’s all about love

 Both Elija and Zsa Zsa learned from a young age that the people closest to them were not to be trusted, and it proved a devastating lesson that went on to shape the rest of their lives.

Attachment theory is having rather a moment: dubious online tests will tell you – like the Hogwarts sorting hat – what your attachment style is, and people seem increasingly fond of blithely explaining their own and others’ behaviour using attachment theory language (‘He’s ambivalent/resistant, so obviously he’s treating me like trash . . .’).

At points in the book, it’s hard to know what the theory actually boils down to, because Mucha spends so much of her time painstakingly setting out different proponents’ takes on it. But she usefully underlines an aspect of attachment theory that is often overlooked: that it isn’t deterministic. Even those born into appalling family dynamics, she writes, can go on to enjoy positive, healthy relationships.

While a large-scale American study in the 1980s in Minnesota showed that people who had been abused were more likely to abuse their children, it wasn’t inevitable.

Mothers who managed to break the cycle of abuse had been through at least one transformative experience: they’d been in therapy, they were in a good, stable romantic relationship, or they’d received emotional support from a non-abusive adult while growing up. Interventions, in short, can work, and though it can be hard to diverge from the path we are set upon early in life, with support it can be done.