Attachment and Religion: The Need to Leave Our Secure Base: A Comment on the Discussion Between Granqvist, Rizzuto, and Wulff

In a highly interesting discussion on the role of attachment theory in the psychology of religion from a recent issue of this journal, Granqvist (2006b) argued that the “traditional” psychodynamic approach to religion is fraught with many problems and pitfalls and that, as an inevitable result, this approach should be abandoned. Instead, attachment theory was proposed as a viable alternative because it would meet the canons of science and at the same time retain much of the key insights of traditional psychodynamic perspectives. Granqvist's main concerns with traditional psychodynamic approaches were that they are not in keeping with recent biological and evolutionary science, that their key concepts are difficult to operationalize and thus open to falsification, and that psychoanalytic approaches have shown an overreliance on unsystematic and unreliable case study designs instead of using methods borrowed from the social and physical sciences.