Q – If you could recommend one book on attachment, which one would it be?
A – I’m asked this question all the time. If you had asked me, say, five years ago, I would have immediately answered, “Robert Karen’s 1998 book Becoming Attached—First Relationships And How They Shape Our Capacity to Love.” Karen’s book is still the best overview of Bowlby’s work that I know of. Karen also does a good job of putting Bowlby’s work into a historical “development of psychological thought” perspective. Someone just starting out in the world of Bowlby’s attachment theory would be well served grabbing a copy of Karen’s book. However, today, my recommendation might seem a bit odd. Allow me to explain.
Today, my recommendation would be George Lakoff’s 1996 book Moral Politics—How Liberals and Conservatives Think. Lakoff? … that political “framing the message” guy? Yup. Lakoff started out as a researcher and professor in the areas of cognitive science and linguistics. I was introduced to the “early Lakoff” through his 1980 book (which he co-wrote with Mark Johnson) Metaphors We Live By. Lakoff moved into the areas of social and political commentary starting in the mid- to late-1990s. The “latter Lakoff” argued that liberal thinkers of all stripes continually shoot themselves in the foot because they simply do not know how to frame a political message. In contrast, Lakoff maintains that most conservative thinkers are masters at framing a message and then selling that frame to the general public. Lakoff’s overarching message (whether early or latter) is along the lines of, “People don’t think about the world using facts; they think about the world using cognitive models or frames.” Lakoff gives us a “bottom line” of, “Liberals argue using facts and inevitably lose while conservatives argue using frames and ultimately win.”
Now, lights should be flashing in your head. Why so? Well, didn’t Bowlby argue that safe and secure early attachment relationships (if all goes well) lead to the development of open and flexible Inner Working (Cognitive) Models (and I’m adding the word “cognitive” here)? Yes he did. In essence, Bowlby is also arguing that we navigate the world using cognitive maps or models. So, there’s more of a connection between Bowlby’s and Lakoff’s work than might be apparent at first blush. And Lakoff does make this connection in Moral Politics.
In Moral Politics, Lakoff provides the reader with a three or four page primer on Bowlby’s attachment theory. In my opinion, it’s actually not a bad little primer. So, why does Lakoff have a primer on Bowlby’s theory in his book (a veritable attachment side road)? Correctly so, Lakoff argues that Bowlby’s theory could be looked at as a theory that frames and helps to explain the development of empathy in individuals. (Jeremy Rifkin uses Bowlby’s theory to help explain empathy development at the level of society in his 2009 book The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis, but that’s a story for another day.) Lakoff spends the lion’s share of his book trying to convince the reader that it is (the development of) empathy that defines liberals, liberal thinking, and the liberal party. (Recall that President Obama made empathy a central theme of his presidential campaign.) So, does that mean that conservatives lack empathy? Not exactly. Lakoff argues that although we all have a core sense for what empathy is, that core is extended using two different cognitive models. Lakoff suggests that liberals use a Nurturant Parent cultural cognitive model while conservatives use a Strict Father cultural cognitive model. A full treatment of these models is beyond this post, but here’s a quick snapshoot:
- Nurturant Parent Model – a “many-to-many” model where many minds come to empathetically know the mental models of many other minds. This model would be called a distributed model.
- Strict Father Model – a “many-to-one” model where many minds come to empathetically know the mental model of one overarching, comprehensive mental model, namely, the model that the Strict Father prescribes. This model would be called a centralized model.
To concretize these models for you a bit, think “Obama–Nurturant” and “Bush Jr.–Strict.” Consider this quote by Henry Giroux from his 2009 book Youth In a Suspect Society (with my additions in brackets):
In opposition to the [Strict] authoritarian politics that was given full expression during the former Bush [Jr.] administration and whose legacy provides a decisive challenge to President Barack Obama’s administration, it is crucial to remember that the category of youth does more than affirm that modernity’s social contract is rooted in a conception of the future in which adult commitment [to secure attachment relationships] is articulated as a vital public service; it also affirms those vocabularies, values, [frames], and social relations that are central to a politics capable of defending vital institutions as a public good and nurturing [my emphasis] democracy.
Now, lest you think that the Nurturant Model has no overarching or comprehensive nature to it, keep in mind that the central idea that empathy should be experienced and expressed in a distributed way is itself overarching. In the Nurturant Model, the overarching idea is that empathy is distributed; in the Strict Model, the overarching idea is that empathy is centralized. I mention this because, with respect to the Nurturant Model, it’s easy to get caught up in its practice of minds encountering other minds in a distributed way and, as a result, overlook the fact that this practice expresses an overarching worldview of distribution. On the Strict Father side, both the practice and the worldview that holds it are centered on centralization. As a matter of fact, the distributed nature of Nurturant practice is often used to cover over the presence of an overarching worldview lurking in the background. The Strict side is shot through with centralization whereas there are distributed and centralized components to the Nurturant side depending on the level of observation (i.e., worldview, ideology, methodology, or practice—pulling from work by Gerald Midgley here).
All this to say that when Bowlby talks about “open and flexible Inner Working (Cognitive) Models,” I would argue that he’s talking about those models that Lakoff associates with the Nurturant Parent cultural cognitive model. Bowlby argues that it is early secure attachment relationships that lead to the cognitive models associated with Nurturant parenting. Interestingly enough, Lakoff suggests that it is early insecure attachment that leads to the cognitive models associated with Strict parenting. So, one of the main reasons I recommend Lakoff’s Moral Politics as a starting point is because if you are of a Strict mind (and subscribe to a centralized form of empathy) then the worldview that Bowlby describes will be foreign to you and, in all likelihood, will be rejected or filtered out (which is how cognitive models operate, according to Lakoff’s early work). Starting with Moral Politics is a good way to assess whether your particular Inner Working (Cognitive) Model will allow Bowlby’s message to enter in, or be filtered out. Why read Bowlby’s work if it will be like “fingernails on a blackboard,” from a cognitive model perspective. As a footnote, at the end of Lakoff’s 2006 book Whose Freedom? The Battle Over America’s Most Important Idea, he does mention brain-imaging research that reveals that the brains of liberals are structurally different from the brains of conservatives. Maybe there is a material base for the mental models we hold near and dear to ourselves. One final note, if you’d like a look at what happens when disorganized attachment rules the day politically speaking, take a look at John Dean’s bone-chilling 2006 book Conservatives Without Conscience. Dean talks about a level of strictness that even staunch conservatives cannot countenance. Now that’s strict!
