The God, the blood, and the fuzzy: reflections on Cornerstones and two target articles

ABSTRACT

In response to Cornerstones of attachment research and the target articles, I reflect on three questions. First, what is “attachment”? Although a natural kind, I argue against an essentialist understanding (i.e. in terms of necessary/sufficient conditions for class membership). Instead, the attachment concept must be allowed to have fuzzy boundaries, partly because of how attachments transform in both phylogeny and ontogeny. Second, how to think about the normative (species-typical) features of the theory vis-à-vis dyadic/individual differences in attachment? Whereas the former are foundational, I argue that the latter largely reflect surface variation. Despite this, the lion’s share of attachment research has horned in on variation and its measurement, to some detriment to the theory’s potential and applications. Finally, what is encouraging and discouraging about recent developments? While applauding large-scale cooperative endeavors (e.g. individual participant meta-analyses, consensus statements) I caution the field not to lose sight of the value of smaller-scale, creative explorations of uncharted territories.

KEYWORDS:

• Attachment
• evolution
• essentialism
• philosophy
• God

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to Tommie Forslund, the guest editor, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful feedback on previous drafts of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. For pragmatic reasons, like in dialogue with certain audiences, it may still be necessary to pretend that whether or not something is an attachment is a simple question of kind rather than a complex one of degree. Or else children’s best interests could be jeopardized; for example, we could inadvertently sanction that children are re-directed to “attach” to a tablet or smartphone rather than to a real, familiar, individual human being such as a preschool teacher.