What is attachment?

Whether of places or people, the business of attachment is messy, complicated and often amusing

Ethologist Konrad Lorenz and a few close friends out for a swim

I’ve just had an old journal of mine returned to me that fell out of my hands mysteriously for more than a decade. I wrote it in 1977, when I was nineteen years old. Much of it is so achingly embarrassing that I can’t bear to look at it. The last time I cast my eyes on it was when I was moving out of a home after a failed marriage. I concluded that I’d been lucky that nobody had read my words else I’d have been at risk of commitment to an asylum. Between the pretentious scribblings my life as a poet (1), what bleed most from the pages are loneliness and confusion. The two were related. The confusion was because I was still working out the complicated relationships between feelings of attachment, liking, lust, and the many forms of love. The loneliness was because I felt that I was missing some critical emotional ingredient to a happy life that somehow must lie in those feelings I was struggling to understand. A cynic or a reductionist might just say that I was stewing in a massive soup of hormones, and that was certainly a part of it. On those pages that I now dare to read, I see random musings about girls that I knew, some of them well and others hardly at all. Of the latter variety, there were some with whom I felt I was madly in love, though I barely knew them. I was convinced that one of them, the lovely Donna, must share my feelings. We played a game where we exchanged florid, Byron-esque missives with one another, left tucked underneath the cash register of the hotel gift shop where we both worked. They started as a weird joke between two intelligent and somewhat literary but very bored co-workers. At some point I convinced myself that our love was real. I jumped on a bus to take a 45-minute ride to see her and I bared my soul in person. She let me down gently, reminding me that the whole exchange of letters had been nothing but a joke and that she had better get going because she had a date that evening. I retreated and drank quite a lot of alcohol. A few days later I saw her arm-in-arm with an exceedingly beautiful young banquet waiter from the hotel.

At the same time as these kinds of assaults on my romantic sensibilities were taking place, I was struggling for independence. I was living in my parents’ basement feeling both hopelessly dependent on them and angrily resentful at their muddling interference in my life. There too I was struggling with ideas about love and attachment of a very different sort. But in all of this, both my dalliances with romantic feelings and my faltering efforts to wriggle free of the shroud of parental dominance, what I was really trying to figure out was how to be connected or, perhaps even more importantly, detached from other people.

Even though I hadn’t realized it at the time, the questions I was muddling through cut to the heart of everything that we humans have tried to understand for as long as we’ve been sentient. Looking back almost fifty years later, it almost seems as though this should have been obvious. At around the same time that I was mucking around in the weeds of romantic poetry and erotic fantasy, I was very keen on what we now call STEM (2) subjects. I remember having a plain, grey brick sitting on my desk on which I’d carefully inscribed some fundamental constants and equations from the physical sciences (3). I think somehow, I believed that when the world was sent topsy-turvy by the latest Donnybrook with my mother or a stumbling collision with a new stranger to fall in love with, I could look at the brick and be reassured that beneath it all there were some basic things I could rely on. Planck’s Constant and Avogadro’s Number were not going anywhere. Much of what I had learned in the physical sciences had to do with attraction, attachment and interaction, now that I come to think of it. I was bowled over by the majesty of Isaac Newton’s precise mathematical formulation of the clockwork of the universe and the laws of attraction and repulsion that governed everything physical. I was just barely beginning to come to terms with more recent arguments that those same gravitational forces that Newton described could be thought of more accurately as the underlying basis of the warp and weft of celestial geometry. Space, time, mass and how they all got that way were related to one another. All of it had to do with the bits of the universe and what they thought of one another. Prior to attendance at university physics courses, quantum mechanics was barely on my radar, but I had at least a passing acquaintance with Bell’s theorem and its radical descriptions of physical reality. I’m sure I didn’t think of it in such terms but the idea of quantum entanglement in which the states of particles that had never met were inextricably linked and co-determined could be thought of as yet another example of the supremacy of the idea that what mattered in the universe had to do with attraction, binding and attachment, albeit in this case of a truly weird, or perhaps “spooky” kind.

The primacy of concepts of attraction of one thing to another were not at all limited to physics either of course. Chemical bonds described some of the rules by which collections of atoms were assembled, and the workings of those bonds, how they formed and broke over time, was a cornerstone of the chemistry of life. In whole, living systems (aka animals), we talk about simple mechanisms of attraction, for example the so-called taxes that lure microscopic critters toward light or warmth, but also more complicated attractions, such as an infant for its mother. Konrad Lorenz’ classic observations of “imprinting” in which he argued that young animals formed attachments with their mothers was a key development in our understanding of infant attachment.

Closer to home, I became increasingly interested in psychology and it wasn’t very long before I learned about the horrifying experiments conducted by Harry Harlow in which he showed the importance of comfort in the development of secure attachments between rhesus monkey infants and their mothers (4), and then John Bowlby, who parlayed Harlow’s experiments along with a mass of other empirical and theoretical work into an erudite three-volume account of human attachment (5). Bowlby wrote extensively about varieties of attachment in human beings and their pathologies (6). Though his classic works on attachment were written more than 50 years ago, Bowlby’s ideas still dominate the field, which is a remarkable accomplishment for psychology, a science better known for re-discovering the same problems generation after generation, each fresh crop of scientists firm in their belief that they have discovered something new.

But I’m not here to deliver a potted history of attachment research, so much as to try to drill down to the kernel of what we mean by attachment and especially attachment to place. When I try to understand what people in a field are talking about, I find a good approach is to look very carefully at what they are actually measuring. How we operationalize some heady, abstract concept tells all and often reveals ambiguities and confusions in our assumptions. In animals, logically enough, we talk about “contact seeking.” If you are attached to something, you want to be close to it and you find ways to make it so. The wonderful photo of Lorenz with the geese who had imprinted on him that opens this essay shows contact-seeking par excellence. Research with human beings is less straightforward. Studies with infants rely heavily on observations of responses by babies when the attachment figure leaves the setting, though in fairness babies can have limited ability to follow a parent physically. Instead, we focus on our perceptions of babies’ emotional responses to strangers or to separation from caregivers. Studies with older children and with adults rely heavily on self-report, where we are asked questions about our feelings. Again, though we speak of the underlying basis of attachment as being contact-seeking—the effort to stay close to the object of attachment—we seldom measure this directly. There’s nothing at all wrong with this approach, though it’s good to remember that the questions we ask, and especially the way that we score responses to those questions will, literally by definition, reveal how we think about attachment. Somewhat curiously, I find that most self-report scales in this field have to do with attachment styles which, in accord with the early work of developmental psychologists, supposes that our early interactions with other humans, especially mums and dads, have an enduring impact on how (or even whether) we form attachments to other humans. Less common are measures that can tell me how attached you are (for instance), to your second cousin Edward. It almost seems as though the assumption is that attachment styles, having been formed early in life, predict the nature of all of our lifelong attachments. To some extent I suspect that this is true, though it makes me sad to think of it. We all like to feel that we are unique and uniquely unpredictable—that the future is wide open.

Scientific approaches to place attachment seem not much different. One of the first and now heavily-cited descriptions of place attachment (7) also referenced contact-seeking as a key attribute of attachment. Yet just as for human attachment, studies in which we have tried to measure contact-seeking directly for places are exceedingly rare. Here, also, we are much more likely to use a variety of self-report scales to try to quantify emotional attachments to places. Behavioural measures, like the ones that I’ve used in some of my past work with animals, in which we measure where animals go and make inferences from their patterns of movement about where they like to be are rarer. One major difference between measures of place attachment and those of person attachment is that place attachment scales specify particular places (our home town, our neighborhood, a natural area) and our relationships to them. I’m not yet sure whether there is such a thing as an attachment style for place attachment, though later on when we look at more pathologies of place attachment I suspect we will find such a thing.

As I muddle away at this essay, I’m increasingly conscious of the presence of the ghosts of the many editors and mentors who have tried to help me write clear prose over the decades of my life. At this point, they all seem to be whispering the same thing to me:

“Colin, you’re getting lost in the thickets now. Nobody much cares about the minutiae of these experimental measures. Get to the point. If you have one….”

Heeding the ghosts, I’ll summarize where we are so far by saying that 1. We mostly measure attachments by asking people about their feelings rather than measuring what they do and that 2. Though we sometimes lump place attachment together with personal attachment, this is only really true at a superficial level and that 3. Much of the work that’s been done doesn’t really help me to understand what a feeling of attachment makes me do.

Hoping to make things better, though fearing I might make them worse (8), I’ll now take a different tack by introspecting a little. Let’s take a few steps back in hopes of clarifying some things. I’m sitting in a very messy workspace right now, looking at the physical things and how they attach to one another. Coincidentally, I see a big bottle of carpenter’s glue that I’ve used to try to fix something to one of the walls of my house (don’t ask….). That glue makes a kind of fixed attachment between two things that is relatively immune to the travails of everyday life in a home with a very energetic and muscular toddler (again….don’t ask but I will tell you that the mighty Ava knows no bounds of the kind formed by carpenter’s glue). When they work well, these kinds of attachments can be useful, but they are boring things, at least at the macro level. Nothing changes. Nothing evolves. There is no dynamism. Now let’s step away from the boring, static, macro level and re-visit some of the kinds of attachments I described earlier in this essay. Chemical bonds are the things that hold atoms together into the compounds that form the substrate of our everyday lives. I’ve just been reading up on chemical bonds and have noticed that they are anything but boring. There are several different kinds of these bonds (9) but one thing that I note is that even the strongest of those bonds are dynamic things. In fact the particles that help to form the bonds (usually electrons) do so while engaging in peripatetic dances so unpredictable that we can’t ever say where they are, just where they might be.

If you’ll allow me now to make a huge leap from electrons to people and places, it occurs to me that the best kinds of relationships and attractions, whether to people or places, have these same kinds of peripatetic dances at their heart. When I think of the failed relationships in my life, romantic or otherwise, they’ve often been like things jammed together with carpenter’s glue. The equivalent of the glue in this case might have been a kind of determination to hold on to something long after one has forgotten why one ever wanted to do so. The dynamism, the unpredictable dance of elements was buried long ago. In contrast, when I think of the successful relationships in my life, they are replete with a joyful openness and unpredictability. It isn’t that I can never tell what’s going to happen next (10) but that I’m only aware of patterns and probabilities (this is how I would probably define character), while still open to surprises, which are most often delightful. While the wooden block attached to my wall with glue is really only capable of two states—either its firmly in place or it has been ripped asunder by powerful toddler fists—these more dynamic relationships are capable of many different states depending on the wont of the interacting bits. Between the lines here I’m talking about agency. Successful relationships, whether between people and other people or between people and places must have the character that affords agency. People have agency (or so we like to think anyway) but so do places. When that agency is kept alive, however that is done, the relationship is likely to be successful, rewarding, stimulating and filled with wonder.

I’m not sure how successful I’ve been in specifying the exact nature of attachment, certainly not to the extent that I could propose a precise measure of the kind of attachment that I’m talking about. I have some ideas about this, but the odd thing is that there are times when I’m not even sure that I want to devolve this magical thing into a system of equations (11). But if I did, I’m pretty sure that, as with so many things, a major key to any kind of positive interaction with the world or with other people will have to do with agency, choice and freedom. In future posts, we’ll get into some more of this.

What I’ve Been Eating

This is really embarrassing. Last time I posted I mentioned a trip to Milan. The adventure never happened because I was struck down by a nasty dose of H1N1 flu. I didn’t even think to take a photo of the recovery broth or white toast. I mean I could go out the kitchen right now and make a toast and photograph it but that would, I think, be cheating. Kristine has been asking me to make a cassoulet, so perhaps next time there will be an image of something delicious. I just hope I haven’t doomed the cassoulet by mentioning it in advance.

What I’ve Been Reading

This is also embarrassing. I’m working my way through the a massive anthology of personal essays, which I’m quite enjoying, but a visitor arrived on the weekend and slammed down a huge box set of books by Sarah Maas. Thinking it was historical fiction, I enthused that I spend most of my time reading non-fiction and had been craving a novel. Well….if you know, you know. This book and the others in the series are romantic fantasy, which is not my genre at all! So I’m reading about wolves and faeries now and I have nobody to blame but myself. Egad. But I’m sure something will be learned, or at least some fun will be had.

Superfluous notes

1. Albeit a poet who was happily living in his parents’ basement in the outer suburbs of Toronto. I think at that point in my life my mother was still bringing me breakfast in bed some mornings, if only to be sure I made it to class before noon.

2. Science Technology Engineering Math. Now in our more enlightened times we add Arts to make more STEAM.

3. I try not to get too woo-woo about the unfolding of my life, but when I think about the fact that this grey brick came from one of my father’s building projects and I merged it with my own academic pursuits, I can almost convince myself the universe has been giving me little pushes for a very long time.

4. Harlow raised baby monkeys without access to their mothers but allowing them contact with different types of spiky or fuzzy substitutes. It turns out the fuzz was important.

5. All three volumes still in print and also available as free downloads, though I’m not sure if they’re legal ones.

6. Another odd little personal note here is that Bowlby noted attachment pathologies in children evacuated from London during the Blitz in WWII. Though she was probably too old to have suffered in this particular way, my mother was one such child and her experiences have had an impact on my own place attachments. I’ll tell you more in a later post.

7. Scannell and Gifford (2010)

8. The Germans, of course, have a word for this: Verschlimmbesserung. I used this word recently at a conference, unwittingly standing beside a beautiful young woman from Berlin who corrected my clumsy pronunciation with all of the demeanour of a kind but firm primary school teacher. For a moment, I was in love with her. As I’ve been saying, attachment can arise in an instant sometimes.

9. My favourite discovery in the chemical bond literature was of London Dispersion Forces. I think this is a new term since I last studied chemistry and it reminded me of a few foggy Saturday nights spent exploring some excellent pubs in that fine city.

10. Though, this said, I have been in relationships where I absolutely had no idea what would happen next. Fun, exhausting and usually mercifully short.

11. This might seem a funny thing for a scientist to say but I confess I am a funny scientist.