Just a quick update to let you know that A Question of Attachment is in final draft. A few brave souls are giving the final draft a once over looking for obvious mistakes and guffaws. Here’s a listing of the chapters and subheadings:
Introduction—“To Thine Own Self Be Tickled”……………….. 5
Chapter Summaries…………………………………………………….. 8
More on Bodies in the Brain……………………………………….. 11
Bowlby’s Lost Theory…………………………………………………. 19
What Question?…………………………………………………………. 21
Housekeeping……………………………………………………………… 25
The Philanthropy Battles…………………………………………… 30
Where Goes the Foot, So Too the Worldview……………… 31
Of Mice and Mazes— From Sticks to Maps…………………… 37
When Shared Mental Models Go Terribly Wrong …………. 47
Transbio—Not a New Alternative Fuel………………………….. 55
Marshmallows—The Key to Success in Life…………………… 59
The False Belief Test…………………………………………………… 64
Executive Functions……………………………………………………… 69
Parentification & Role-Reversal……………………………………. 79
Systems Story……………………………………………………………….. 89
Shifting Landscape of Systems………………………………….. 93
Three-Layer Model of the Brain…………………………………… 107
Attachment & Philanthropy……………………………………….. 115
Three Behavioral Systems……………………………………………. 129
Attachment & Pornography……………………………………….. 143
Closing Thoughts……………………………………………………….. 159
So, yes, Question ended up being a bit longer than my original 100 page estimate, but still doable over a weekend. I cannot say for sure when the manuscript will be uploaded to Kindle Direct Publishing but I’m shooting for the end of the month or the first part of November.
Question is a bit of a hack, bringing together new information, BLT blog posts, and information from the various executive summaries I have written over the years. As I mentioned in earlier posts, I reread Bowlby’s trilogy in preparation for writing Question. Once again I was impressed with how many topics Bowlby brings to the table as well as how deftly he molds those topics into a coherent whole. Sadly, Bowlby’s attachment project has been objectified over the years: taking one or two parts and making that the whole of it. I just find this form of objectification to be rather ironic considering how much Bowlby used systems theory as a backdrop to his work.
So, I may not do a good job covering the various topics Bowlby looks at in his trilogy on attachment, however, I have succeeded if all I do is introduce the reader to topics that he or she would not otherwise encounter reading most recent treatments of Bowlby’s work. This may be a bold statement but the Bowlby of today is nothing like the actual Bowlby. This is too bad because as I suggest in Question, if there ever was a time we needed Bowlby’s attachment theory—all of it not just a bit here and a part there—it’s now. To make this point, here’s a short excerpt from Question:
As I was putting the finishing touches on this manuscript, I received an email from the President of the University of Texas at Dallas (my old alma mater) offering condolences to the several families affected by the recent mass shooting in Plano on September 10th, 2017. This was news to me so I Googled the incident. Apparently a woman was hosting a Cowboys watch party. Several of the people there were UTD alumnae (thus the President’s email). The host was newly divorced and the shooter was her ex. He just walked in and started firing. Police killed the shooter. Eight people in all died with two wounded. Was attachment involved? I would say that it was. Under the best of circumstances loss brought about through divorce takes a huge toll on the attachment behavioral system.
Is this a senseless act? Yes, you bet. But can we make sense of it? Yes, yes we can. The information we need is here. It’s in Bowlby’s trilogy on attachment. But as a good friend of mine often reminds me, “These days, you give someone a book, they eat the pages.”
