Tony White

In the 1950s the WHO (no not the rock band!) commissioned a guy called John Bowlby to look into the area of human attachment. People were noticing particularly after WWII with a lot of orphaned children that many of these kids raised in orphanages were coming out as damaged individuals. They were being fed and housed but they were still being “screwed up” psychologically. So they wanted to know why.

He took on this research and produced many documents with the 2 most famous being a book titled “Attachment” and a subsequent one called “Separation” (surprisingly enough). He has since become one of the most influential thinkers in the psychological literature in the past 50 years. His works have had a tremendous influence in the area of human attachment and child rearing practices.



He and his compatriots did lots of experiments like putting a mother and a young child into a room full of toys and then simply observed the movements of the child. The mother would stay stationary in a chair and then what would the child do?. What the child did varied on how secure it was in its attachment with the mother. For instance a child with an insecure attachment may never leave mother’s side even to go and look at some interesting toys even if it was really bored. (This child is seen as having separation anxiety). Then there was others with insecure attachments who would simply move away from mother to play with the toys and never return to her for long periods of time. (This is common in the development of the antisocial personality).

Those kids with a secure attachment would at first stay near to mother and then slowly move out to the toys. The child would regularly look back to see where mother was and go and ‘touch home base’ every now and then. This child is developing what is known as object constancy. He is learning that mother (the object) is constant and does not disappear when he moves away from her. Thus he is secure in his attachments.


Baptism - another human attachment style?



However one of the key findings of Bowlby was that when a child develops an attachment then it will seek to maintain a geographical proximity to mother and this is one of the central features of human attachment. When two people attach they will have a very strong drive to be together and to maintain contact.

Of course this has a corollary. If two people have an attachment and they slowly drift apart and spend less and less time together then the attachment will diminish in intensity. It slowly fades away. The husband and wife who progressively live more and more separate lives can finally separate without the intense grief or bereavement because they have spent the last 10 years detaching anyway.

At the week long workshop I attended about a month ago attachment styles were discussed at length and there was a mention of the isolated attachment style. I found this an interesting concept because it is an oxymoron or a contradiction. If one is isolated then they are not attached, or if one is attached then they are not isolated, so how can you have an isolated attachment.


If you see one of your primary attachments disintegrating then you can do things quite out of character.



It was explained as that attachment style like when a husband and wife live apart for long periods of time. Such as when the man works away from home and they maintain an attachment as such. The other example is when two bloggers meet in the blogosphere and develop a ‘relationship’ or attachment, having never met each other and it is highly likely they will never meet. How can these two people have an attachment when one of the most basic ‘conditions’ of an attachment is that they maintain a geographical proximity to each other. An attachment is when there is a very strong urge to be in each others company face to face. Contact by phone or email can maintain the attachment to some degree but over time there will still be the inevitable deterioration of the initial attachment regardless.

With subsequent thought I think the term and concept of isolated attachment is a misnomer. It does not exist. People mistake it for something else.

One only needs to ‘surf’ the blogosphere for a short space of time to discover that there are many who state that their blogger friends are very important to them. They talk about having strong feelings for each other and how important they are to them. Obviously something is going on. But what is it? Is it such a thing as an isolated attachment?

I would answer - no - as there is no urge to be physically close to the other. What has happened is two people have had strong emotional reactions to each other and find the other appealing and thus want to communicate with them. That is not a human attachment in the usual sense of the word.


Can these two people be in the relational?



To call it an attachment changes the definition of the term and I would suggest that it is better to keep to the original definition and call blogger bonding something else. So it is not seen as an attachment style. Thus you can not have the concept of isolated attachment. How about simply using the term, “distance relationship”. It can be defined as two people having strong feeling reactions to the other, they find each other attractive or appealing but there is no attachment in the psychological sense of the word.

Graffiti