Author’s note: In response to the email I sent out to our mailing list announcing our new Bowlby Less Traveled bog, I received the following return email from Jeremy Holmes:
Dear Frederick—good news: the more I look at your website the better it seems; bad news: as a blog-duffer, I am taking you up on your “worst-case scenario” offer [which would be for me to add Jeremy’s post for him]. My contribution attached.
Best
Jeremy
It would be an understatement to say that Jeremy is an expert on the life and work of John Bowlby. He’s written articles and books on the subject including his 1993 book (written just after Bowlby’s death in 1990) John Bowlby and Attachment Theory (Makers of Modern Psychology), and his 2009 book Exploring In Security: Towards an Attachment-informed Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy. The following post is an excerpt from Exploring In Security (with my editorial additions in brackets).
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Consider the stage and screen hit Mamma Mia!, adapted from the 1968 film Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell. The success of the piece depends largely on its sing-along use of music from ABBA, the palindromic Swedish 1970s two-couple pop-group.
The setting is a Greek Island. Sophie, a teenage girl, brought up by a single parent, Donna running a hotel that has seen better times, is determined to get married. Donna’s fiancée, Sky, is a reluctant bridegroom and feels they’d be better off exploring the world (and perhaps each other) before deciding on marriage. Sophie has never known her father; her mother’s secret diary suggests three possible candidates. Unbeknownst to Donna, Sophie invites all of them to the wedding. But who is her “real” Dad? Sophie assumes that she will be able instantly to sense this when she meets them, but to her dismay she discovers the pre-DNA testing truism that no one can be absolutely sure of who their father is. Which of the three is to give her away? In her confusion she asks in turn. The wedding ceremony begins. The presiding Greek-orthodox priest naively invites “the father” to “give away” the bride to her husband—her new attachment figure. All three rise to assume the honour. At first Sophie graciously accepts their blessing, is happy to waive the DNA test and accept a paternal trinity, but then abruptly announces that she is not ready for marriage and that the wedding is off.
A crisis ensues. At this point one of the three putative fathers, divorced Sam, steps into the breach: “why waste a good wedding?” he says, and proposes to the love of his life, Donna, Sophie’s wayward fun-loving mother. She accepts. Sophie and Sky are delighted and relieved and announce that they will embark on an exploratory round-the-world trip. The movie ends happily with Greek feasting and ecstatic dancing.
The attachment reading is that leaving home works best if there is a secure base to return to. Once her mother has a man, Sophie can look after herself rather than play the role of the parentified child [my emphasis] looking after her mother. With a secure base in place and available when needed, she is free to explore the world. Successful termination of therapy similarly implies the achievement of internal feelings of security, matched by external “real” relationships, including at times a continuing relationship with a therapist.
The psychoanalytic implication is that only once an internalised good “combined parent” is instated is one free to explore one’s own emotional and sexual life. Renunciation of oedipal longings to possess the parent, with attendant feelings of sadness and envy overcome, is a necessary developmental step towards psychosexual maturity. Finding a good internal combined (“primal scene”) parent, accepting and transcending one’s envy and feelings of exclusion, and/or desire to control and possess the primary object, and embracing the independence and freedom to manoeuvre that implies, are the psychoanalytic conditions for termination.
Both perspectives see coming to terms with loss as central. Sophie can leave home and move onto new attachments (from Donna to Sky) secure in the knowledge that Donna, herself now firmly attached to Sam, will be there for her when needed. Donna is securely instated in Sophie’s inner world. Sophie no longer needs to push Donna’s neediness away, thereby evading her own vulnerability, nor cling adhesively to Sky in ways that inhibit her exploration. Her inner world is intact, threatened neither by her own aggression, nor needing a rigid external scaffold to support it. The listener, bathed in nostalgia, is reassured that despite life’s unavoidable ruptures—the passage of time, loss, separation (including the dissolution of ABBA as a group and of its members as couples)—through the reparative power of music, continuity is possible.
In the end, there are moments of existential choice as all four principal characters make leaps into the unknown of each other’s arms. The film—or any idealised reading of Attachment—cannot guarantee future happiness or insure against failure for its protagonists, any more than it can for its audience living vicariously in the dream-world of the drama. But, as in a therapy, it can help them garner the courage and inner security needed to risk exploring life’s infinite possibilities.
Extract from Holmes. J. (2009) Exploring In Security: Towards an Attachment-informed Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy. London: Routledge.
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