The Course of Love

by Alain de Botton

Attachment theory, developed by the psychologist John Bowlby and colleagues in England in the 1950s, traces the tensions and conflicts of relationships back to our earliest experience of parental care. A third of the population of Western Europe and North America is estimated to have experienced some form of early parental disappointment (see C. B. Vassily, 2013), with the result that primitive defence mechanisms have been engaged – in order to ward off fears of intolerable anxiety – and capacities for trust and intimacy have been disrupted. In his great work ‘Separation Anxiety’ (1959), Bowlby argues that those who have been let down by the early family environment will generally develop two kinds of responses when they grow up and face difficulties or ambiguities in relationships: first, a tendency towards fearful, clinging and controlling behaviour – the pattern Bowlby calls ‘anxious attachment’ – and second, an inclination towards a defensive retreating manoeuvre, which he calls ‘avoidant attachment’. The anxious person is prone to check up on their partner constantly, to have explosions of jealousy and to spend a lot of their lives regretting that their relationships are not ‘closer’. The avoidant person for their part will speak of a need for ‘space’, they’ll enjoy their own company and will find requirements for sexual intimacy daunting at points. Up to 70 per cent of patients seeking couples’ therapy will exhibit either the anxious or the avoidant mode of behaviour...

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