Attachment Security and the Social World by Antigonos Sochos[Dr.soc]

At t achmentSecur i t yand t heSoci al Wor l d Ant i gonosSochos

Attachment Security and the Social World

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Attachment Security and the Social World Antigonos Sochos University of Bedfordshire, UK

© Antigonos Sochos 2014 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2014 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries ISBN: 978–1–137–39868–0 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgements

vi

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Introduction to Attachment Research

1

2

Attachment and Social Groups

26

3

Attachment and Systems of Meaning

44

4

Beyond Dyadic Relationships: The Collective Manifestation of Attachment

68

5

Collective Attachment and the Response to 9/11

95

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Collective Attachment and the Western Tradition of Coercion and Violence

124

Epilogue

163

Notes

168

References

170

Index

189

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Preface and Acknowledgements In the past 20 years I have been working in the field of attachment theory, studying the quality of bonding between individuals – what its role is and what it is affected by in human development, social interaction, psychological distress, and psychological therapy. Early on I understood that important concepts and findings of attachment research would be relevant to the understanding of social phenomena beyond dyadic relationships and individual regulation. Recent major international events have made it clearer to me that a systematic attempt to approach collective phenomena from an attachment perspective is needed. The new emerging antagonism between the West and Islam, the recklessness with which the USA, the UK, and other Western governments have responded to the 9/11 attacks, and the entrapment of Western and other societies in deeply irrational economic arrangements as evidenced by the recent global economic crisis further reinforced my belief that problematic collective bonds lie at the heart of such phenomena. Among social theorists there is a long tradition of applying psychoanalytically inspired concepts in the integration of two intrinsically linked but often artificially segregated study domains – the individual and the social. Nonetheless, the relevance of attachment theory to such an integration has not been systematically explored yet. This book is a first attempt in that direction. I would like to thank my colleagues and research students in the Department of Psychology, University of Bedfordshire, for their support and encouragement during the writing of this book. I would particularly like to thank the head of department, Dr Ian Robertson, and the head of the Research Centre for Applied Psychology, Professor Gail Kinman, for systematically facilitating the development of research and scholarship in the department. Finally I wish to thank Varinia Heidel for all her support.

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1 Introduction to Attachment Research

This chapter will present a brief summary of the basic concepts and empirical findings of attachment research, as they have emerged in the past decades. This chapter is designed to refresh the memory of the reader with a background in psychology but no expertise in attachment theory and also to introduce other social scientists to the field. It is hoped that this will enable non-specialists to follow the arguments that unfold in the subsequent chapters. The idea that the human mind is structured around internalised interactions between self and non-self has been proposed by a number of theorists. First, despite their differences in conceptualisation, a variety of psychoanalytic approaches share the understanding that the human psyche develops on the basis of interactions, initially, between parent and child and later between the adult and intimate others. Some authors have been interested in the manner in which parent-child interactions can structure the id, ego, and superego (Loewald, 1971; Winnicott, 1971; Sandler and Sandler, 1978; Kernberg, 1966), while others view them as developing on the basis of the child’s need for a relationship (Fairbairn, 1952; Bowlby, 1982). On the other hand, the idea that the contents of the mind are defined by actions, rather than consisting of perceived external objects, has also been popular among cognitive theorists since the early days of the cognitive approach (Werner, 1948; Piaget, 1973). Moreover, as research in social cognition indicates, interest in the cognitive structures organising interpersonal interactions has also grown. Baldwin (1992, 1995) understands those structures, or relational schemas, as being composed of three elements – a schema organising information about the self, a schema organising information about another, and a schema guiding

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the relationship between the two. Also researchers have argued for the importance of schemas of self and other in the processing of social information (Kihlstrom et al., 1988; Cantor and Zirkel, 1990) and for the role of scripts (Schank and Abelson, 1977; Abelson, 1981) in understanding and conducting social interaction. A number of authors have attempted to integrate object relations theories with social cognition research in order to investigate the relational nature of the mind. Horowitz (1988a, 1988b) conceives of the self and other configurations as being related to various states of mind, or recurring patterns of experience consisting of conscious and unconscious, verbal and non-verbal, cognitive-affective and behavioural elements. Westen (1991, 1994) emphasises that such an integration may inform the understanding and treatment of clinical phenomena, like depression, anxiety, poor social functioning, and personality disorder, while Westen and Gabbard (1999) suggest that the assimilation cognitive research developments in psychoanalytic thought would inform personality theory, particularly the nature of motivation and the mechanisms involved in understanding a person. Finally, the integration of concepts of object relations with cognitive ideas has been also attempted by attachment research. Influenced by ethology, cognitive psychology and systems theory, as well as by psychoanalytic ideas, Bowlby maintained that the fundamental dispositions of the human psyche have their roots in a number of behavioural systems, the aim of which is to guarantee survival (Bowlby, 1973, 1980, 1982). Those systems are the attachment, the fear/wariness, the exploratory, the affiliative, the caregiving, and the sexual. While Bowlby and a number of researchers after him focused mainly on the child’s attachment to the mother, interest in the approach has grown over the years also inspiring the more systematic study of adult attachment.

Attachment in children According to attachment theory, like the young of most other species (Harlow, 1974), the human young are born with an innate, philogenetically determined tendency to seek physical proximity to their caregivers. Such a propensity links the child primarily with one preferred adult, and secondarily with a limited number of others, as the best strategy to protect himself/herself from the various dangers he/she might be exposed to. In the presence of such dangers, or in the absence of the caregiver beyond of what the child perceives as safe distance, the attachment system is activated, all other activity ceases, and closeness to the caregiver is sought.


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The child can calm down again, deactivate his/her attachment system, and resume his/her endeavours only when proximity with the caregiver is restored and safety is perceived once more. However, as Bowlby’s theory continued, children’s attempts to increase proximity to the attachment figure are not always responded to by the latter in a way that restores the feeling of safety. When the failure from the part of the caregiver to re-establish physical and psychological closeness is systematic, the child can never fully acquire a sense of security. While the caregiver is experienced as untrustworthy in providing safety and the self as unable to elicit that safety, this unfavourable interaction becomes a mental structure indicating insecurity of attachment. As the role of that structure is to guide expectations, perceptions, and behaviour in all similar subsequent exchanges, an insecurely attached child would tend to expect unsupportive responses from others and would doubt particular abilities in the self. On the other hand, when the response of the parent is appropriate and systematic positive and realistic representations of self and other are constructed in the child’s mind, indicating attachment security, or the expectation that important others will be responsive at a time of need and that the self will be worthy of their attention. According to Bowlby, exploratory and affiliative activity are also part of the human evolutionary heritage. When human beings do not feel threatened, they tend to explore their environments so that their understanding becomes more comprehensive and their mastery more efficient. They also engage in mainly non-intimate, or affiliative, interactions with other members of the community, in order to strengthen their ties, expand their understanding of the social and physical worlds, and define their place in the group. Moreover, when the attachment system is activated, engagement with activity and non-intimate individuals either ceases, or is seriously compromised, and it can only resume as appropriate when the individual feels safe again. Influenced by Bowlby’s original formulations, a number of researchers have attempted to empirically assess and conceptually refine the main premises of attachment theory. Ainsworth et al. (1978) provided the first empirical breakthrough by devising the Strange Situation (SS) – an experimental procedure assessing children’s security based on a series of brief separations from and reunion with their mothers. At first, in addition to the secure, two types of insecure attachment were identified, the avoidant and the ambivalent/resistant, while a third one, the disorganised/disorientated, later emerged out of initially unclassifiable cases (Main and Solomon, 1990). While secure children became somewhat but not excessively worried during the brief separations from their

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mothers, confidently approached her and quickly calmed down when she returned, insecure children reacted differently. Avoidant children pretended they did not notice the mother’s absence while actually they did and seemed to ignore her return; ambivalent children were extremely upset during separation, approached the mother aggressively in reunion, resisting to be picked up and failing to calm down; disorganised children seemed to exhibit “odd” behaviours both during separation and reunion – they would cry very loudly, try to approach the parent and then freeze, or raise hand to mouth upon seeing her. A series of empirical studies showed a strong relationship between the SS attachment patterns, aspects of parent-infant communication, and children’s psycho-social functioning, providing support for the validity of the procedure (Belsky and Cassidy, 1994). These studies suggest that a secure attachment pattern in the child is linked with responsive and supportive caregiving, an avoidant pattern with under-responsive caregiving, an ambivalent pattern with inconsistent responsiveness, and a disorganised pattern with child abuse, neglect, or other frightening parental behaviour. While in non-clinical middle class samples in US and UK about 60% of children have been classified as secure, 15% as avoidant, 10% as ambivalent, and 15% as disorganised, in the face of empirical findings suggesting the presence of different pattern distributions in different cultures (Grossman et al., 1981; Sagi et al. 1995; Van Ijzendoorn and Sagi, 1999), the validity of SS has been questioned. Is the meaning of parentinfant separations and reunions different in different cultures, therefore rendering the SS susceptible to cultural biases, or is it that different cultures favour the development of different attachment patterns as part of their particular adaptive strategy in their particular circumstances? Moreover, different pattern distributions in different socio-economic groups within the same culture have further stimulated the debate about the importance of the socio-economic and cultural context in conceptualising and assessing attachment (Van Ijzendoorn and Sagi, 1999). Most attachment theorists argue that SS is a valid procedure that identifies cross-and inter-cultural variations in the distribution of attachment patterns. According to Bowlby, the attachment system has an adaptive evolutionary value: the infant is biologically programmed to maintain proximity to the parent and the parent is biologically programmed to respond to such signals as that would maximise the child’s chances of survival. Secure children, that is children of well-responsive parents, have the best chance of survival as they would adequately and accurately alert the caregiver in the face of danger, while releasing him/


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her and the self after the danger is gone. This claim, however, has been moderated by researchers who maintain that evolutionary theory cannot prove the responsiveness-competence hypothesis, but rather provides the most satisfactory of all existing explanatory frameworks (Hinde and Stevenson-Hinde, 1990). These authors discriminate between biological, cultural, and psychological adaptation and suggest that each realm has its own selection criteria that may well differ, or even be in conflict with, those of another. Advocating the evolutionary character of the attachment system, Main (1990) argues that secure child responses have been the product of the primary human adaptive strategy, defined by sensitivity to the activators and deactivators of the system. According to Main, all insecure patterns should be viewed as secondary strategies, second-best choices imposed by circumstances. Such sub-optimal ways of dealing with attachment demands can only partially override the authentic, primary state of the attachment system and can be adopted even by entire socio-cultural groups living under particularly demanding conditions. Nonetheless, a number of authors have argued that cross-cultural research on the validity of attachment theory should go beyond accounting for the SS distributions. Grossmann and colleagues (1999) regard such a focus as reflecting a narrow definition of attachment and opposed it to a more appropriate, wider concept that should examine the general quality of communication in attachment relationships and inform future research. Also supporting a more comprehensive crosscultural orientation in attachment research, Van Injzerdoon and Sagi (1999) suggest that its focus should be shifted to testing the same theoryderived predictions in different cultures. The confirmation or refutation of such hypotheses, the authors suggest, would be the most appropriate strategy for establishing the ecological validity of the attachment theory and its proposed methodologies. More recent work has followed that general framework (Erdman and Ng, 2010). In addition, researchers have taken attachment theory beyond an ethological-behavioural orientation suggesting how the theory could account for the complexity of parent-child communication and interpersonal relating in general. As the child grows and his/her cognitive capacities become more sophisticated, the focus on physical proximity that dominates care in the early months is gradually replaced by emotional closeness and the linguistic representations of such care. The human young is gradually introduced to a system of cultural signs that connect the progressively more complex experience of the older child, adolescent, and eventually adult with the most archaic and

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biologically situated human needs (Bretherton, 1993). It is at that level, the level of representation, that the needs for attachment would be mainly expressed, responded to, and understood throughout development. Fonagy and colleagues (Fonagy et al., 1991; Fonagy and Target, 1997) maintain that attachment security is very closely related to the child’s ability to accurately represent mental states in self and others and that such an ability is determined by how well his/her psychological needs have been “read” by the parent, how accurately they have been represented in the parent’s mind. A number of studies provide strong evidence for a link between an insecure parent-child relationship and both internalising and externalising child behavioural problems. According to the available evidence, mother-child and father-child attachments have a comparable impact on internalising problems although studies involving fathers are relatively few (Brumariu and Kerns, 2010). Moreover, research suggests that it is children’s disorganised attachment rather than the other two insecure patterns (anxious, avoidant) to be linked with aggression while family adversity, parental hostility, and parental depression are major additional risk factors (Lyons-Ruth, 1996). Research on psychotherapeutic interventions also notes the usefulness of an attachment-focused approach and emphasises the importance of a trusting therapeutic alliance, empathy, and sensitive responsiveness to emotional signals in therapeutic interventions for children (Lieberman and Zeanah, 1999).

Attachment in adults In agreement with Bowlby’s assertion that interpersonal attachment is a life-long phenomenon, a number of researchers have taken attachment theory beyond the boundaries of child development and into the domain of adult relationships. Weiss (1991) identifies three attachment characteristics that are present in all developmental phases across the lifespan and three that are specific to attachment in the adult years. Following Bowlby’s formulations, Weiss suggests that regardless of his/her child or adult status, when an individual is in distress and the attachment system is activated, that individual will seek proximity to the attachment figure, feel comfort and security when that proximity is attained, and protest when it is not. While proximity seeking, felt security, and protest characterise attachment thought the life span, Weiss continues, three other elements discriminate between childhood and adulthood attachments. First, attachments in childhood are formed mainly between children and adults, that is between individuals in different phases of development,


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while in adulthood they are usually formed between peers. Second, unlike attachment in adulthood, disruptions of the attachment system in childhood greatly affect other behavioural systems, such as the exploratory and the affiliative, and, third, unlike attachments of childhood, a main attachment of adulthood, the couple relationship, also involves a sexual relationship. Commenting further on its peer to peer nature, West and Sheldon (1994) emphasise the reciprocal nature of adult attachment. These authors suggest that adults in attachment relationships are expected to play two roles: that of the attached, which seems to resemble the role of the child, and that of the attachment figure, which seems to resemble that of the parent. Healthy adult attachment requires that both partners alternate between the two roles, depending on the demands of a particular situation. Crowell and Treboux (2001) have noted an additional characteristic of attachment between adults – the fact that for both partners, their attachment relationship is not prototypical. In other words, contrary to the parent-child attachment, that is the first one for the child, both partners in any adult to adult bond have a history of attachment experiences which are expected to inform their relationship. Particular significance has been assigned by attachment researchers to the couple relationship. Bowlby ascribes particular importance to that relationship, as it is a major source of adult support and intimacy and involves three behavioural systems – attachment, caregiving, and sexual. Based on empirical studies with married couples, Weiss (1976) claims that marriages and committed love relationships, and in special circumstances very close companionships or kin ties, should be discriminated by what we usually call friendships, on the basis of the different function they serve. Although the author does not deny that friendships or other close adult relationships may have attachment components, he points out that what sets apart an attachment relationship is its primary function. The primary function of attachment relationships is to provide security, as opposed to the primary function of a friendship, which is to promote social integration. A functional definition of adult attachment– that is, based on the identification of its specific aim – rather than a structural one – that is, based on the identification of its specific elements – has also been supported by West and Sheldon (1994, 1989). On the basis of empirical data obtained from a sample of undergraduates, these authors identified ten variables which, in addition to the obvious “sexual intimacy”, discriminated between love relationships and best friendships. These findings appeared consistent with the distinction between the attachment and

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the affiliative systems proposed by Bowlby and Weiss. On the other hand, authors have argued that attachment needs are fulfilled by a number of close relationships – couples friendships, kin – which are not discriminated qualitatively in terms of the different functions they serve, but rather quantitatively, in terms of the degree to which they fulfil those functions (Heard and Lake, 1986; Rutter, 1995). Nonetheless, it seems that attachment in the pair-bond acquires a somewhat different flavour, perhaps due to its co-existence with sexuality. It seems that in couple relationships, emotion is “allowed” by cultural prescriptions to be communicated by extended physical contact between the partners, a privilege not given to other relationships with attachment components. At least in Western societies, types of nonsexual physical contact such as prolonged and systematic holding or stroking are usual interactions between pair-bond partners, but they are not prescribed for close friendships or kin ties. In the latter, bodily contact can be somewhat increased only in circumstances of great distress and for a limited time of duration. Perhaps, such restrictions in bodily contact accompany restrictions in sexual contact, as an originally non-sexual, attachment-based bodily communication may eventually activate the sexual system. As touch, the most archaic of the attachment system’s de-activators, is routinely possible in couple relationships to an extent that seems comparable only to the parent-child bond, the deeper layers of the attachment representation seem to be set in motion and the relationship becomes heavily invested. The couple relationship is also linked with child-rearing, implicating further the caregiving system and increasing the supportive significance of the bond. Cultural considerations are however crucial as emotional intimacy in couples does not have the same significance in all cultures that it has in twenty-first century Western society. In agreement with psychoanalytic theory, attachment researchers argue that the quality of the parent-child relationship tends to influence the quality of attachment with partners in a number of important ways. Recent empirical research has provided evidence for this “prototype hypothesis” (Owens et al., 1995; Crowell and Treboux, 2001). However, these authors indicate that although early experiences with caregivers are crucial, other aspects of an individual’s relational history should also be taken into account for a current relationship to be understood comprehensively. Factors such as the quality of the ongoing relationship and experiences with past ones also contribute significantly to the construction of attachment representations with respect to a particular bond.


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In a manner analogous to attachment in childhood, the quality of couple attachment has also been regarded as very significant for mental health in a number of studies. Brown and colleagues (1978, 1986) have found that the absence of a supportive spouse, or partner, contributes importantly to the onset of psychological disturbance, even if other supportive relationships are available, while a number of additional studies have emphasised the association between the quality of couple relationships and mental health (Gotlib and Hooley, 1988; Hammen, 1996; Rosenfarb et al., 2001). It appears that, due to its special nature, the couple relationship becomes a terrain in which the deeper layers of the human psyche are uncovered and any frustrated security needs experienced in childhood will revive. When the individual is fortunate, the couple relationship would provide a space in which childhood disappointments will be contained, their meaning reframed, and their power to negatively influence the present reduced. When the individual is not so fortunate, his/her couple relationship(s) will further confirm the bad past experiences, obstruct the development of an alternative perspective, make the individual feel more unsupported and lonely, and increase the probability of psychological disorder. Although it does require systematic physical proximity and contact between the partners, as well as the exchange of support in matters related to physical survival, attachment in couples, as well as other close adult relationships, goes far beyond that. As physical survival in humans, depends primarily on the individual’s ability to become part of a social group, the survival and development of a competent social as well as private self becomes the most visible target of attachment. Although this applies both to child and adult attachment, the function of attachment in adults involves less a provision physical needs and more a provision towards meeting towards forming, maintaining, and developing a socially and psychologically skilled mind. Essentially, the facilitating role of the adult attachment partner would be towards the construction and re-construction of meaning.

The assessment of attachment in adults As a conceptual formulation of adult attachment had to be accompanied by the thorough empirical assessment of the phenomenon, a number of relevant research instruments have been developed over the years. Although research in children, particularly the classification developed by Ainsworth, has been the main source of inspiration in assessing attachment in adults, a variety of research strategies have been adopted,

10 Attachment Security and the Social World

resting on different conceptual and methodological assumptions. The array of measures assessing the quality of the attachment representations in adults reflects in reference to three factors. First, methods have been discriminated on the basis of the level of generality of the attachment representations assessed. As will be discussed in the next section, attachment representations seem to be organised according to a hierarchy of schemas, with those regarding specific relationships at the lower level and those regarding classes of relationships at the higher level. As a result, the measures developed have addressed relationships with parents (George et al., 1985; Bartholomew and Horowitz, 1991), relationships with peers (Scharfe and Bartholomew, 1995), current couple relationships (Crowel and Owens, 1996), or general relational attitudes (Hazan and Shaver, 1987). Moreover, the assessment methods could be discriminated based on the level of consciousness which they address. In particular, some measures have intended to assess the unconscious aspects of the attachment representation (George et al., 1985; Crowel and Owens, 1996), while others have focused on the conscious (Hazan and Shaver, 1987; Bartholomew and Horowitz, 1991; Fraley et al., 2000). Finally, methods of assessing adult attachment could be divided on the basis of conceptualising attachment patterns as categories, dimensions, or prototypes. Since according to Bowlby’s original formulations the different attachment patterns involved qualitatively different representations, the most influential attempts to discriminate empirically between them also understood them as different categories (Ainsworth et al., 1978; George et al., 1985). However, in recent years, researchers have approached attachment differences in terms of dimensions, arguing that this prevents the waste of information that comes with categorical divisions, gains in flexibility, and presents reliability and simplicity. As Griffin and Bartholomew (1994) argue, although the categorical approach provides the opportunity for theoretical integration and a more economical communication of statistical results, assuming that categories are qualitatively different and that people in different categories are basically interchangeable present a number of disadvantages. They sacrifice potentially valuable withingroup variance and run the risk of being affected by stereotype biases and oversimplification of classification and analysis. However, these authors continue, despite its advantages, the assumption that people differ only quantitatively on independent, noninteractive dimensions has also disadvantages that may render the approach counter-productive. In particular, the qualities that might emerge from combining dimensions are lost, as this strategy is variable-


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rather than person-centred, and idiographic research can be inhibited. As an alternative, the prototype approach is proposed, combining both elements of categorical and dimensional assessment. According to these researchers, this approach assesses the degree to which individuals exhibit different constellations of attachment characteristics, in different domains of interpersonal relationships, and at different points in time. Finally, it must be noted that assessment methods of adult attachment have been developed by two main types of researchers: one consisting of psychodynamically oriented developmentalists and clinicians and a second involving social psychologists. Among the methods addressing an adult’s attachment representation with respect to his/her attachment in childhood, the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) (George et al., 1985) has been the most influential. This is a semi-structured interview focusing on the parent-child relationship, while the interview material is classified primarily on the basis of discourse organisation, rather than content. According to this methodology, evidence for the quality of attachment representations is sought in the manner in which attachment-related discourse adheres to or departs from certain criteria of coherence, cohesiveness, and plausibility (Main et al., 1985). The four classifications of attachment security developed in this work correspond conceptually to the four SS classifications suggested by Ainsworth and Main. The autonomous adult in AAI was thought to correspond to the secure child in SS, the dismissing to the avoidant, the preoccupied to the resistant/ambivalent, and the unresolved to the disorganised/disorientated. In a meta-analysis of 33 studies using a total of 2,000 interviews, Van Injzendoorn and Bakermans-Kranenburg (1996) found that 22–27% of non-clinical middle-class individuals (mothers, fathers, and adolescents) had been classified as dismissing, 55–62% as autonomous and 16–20% as preoccupied, without noting any differences between the samples. When the four-category system was used, the distribution was 15–16% dismissing, 55–57% autonomous, 9–11% preoccupied, and 17–19% unresolved. According to a meta-analysis of studies involving SS classifications, the latter distribution was similar to the distribution of the four SS categories (Van Ijzendoorn, 1992). However, when the three-category classifications were used, significant differences were observed: the AAI preoccupied mothers outnumbered the ambivalent mother-infant dyads in the SS, while the AAI autonomous mothers were fewer than the secure SS dyads. This discrepancy was explained by the authors as the effect of a possible “ceiling to the maximum” phenomenon, between maternal and children’s attachment.

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Moreover, studies have provided evidence for the validity of the AAI. Much of such evidence has referred to its predictive validity (Main and Goldwyn, 1984; Main et al., 1985; Fonagy et al., 1991; Zeanah et al., 1993), according to which the mother’s attachment classification in the AAI has consistently predicted her child’s classification in the SS, as the latter has been administered at various points during the child’s development. Also a number of studies have provided information supporting the method’s discriminant validity, as it has been found to be independent of autobiographical memory, social desirability biases, general intelligence, age, socio-economic status, educational level, and style of discourse regarding employment experience (Crowell et al., 1996). However, BakermansKranenburg and Van Ijzendoorn (1993) warned that the findings regarding a complex construct like autobiographical memory should be considered provisional, as the validity of the measures used in this study required further investigation. Regarding the theoretical and methodological specificity of the AAI, De-Haas et al. (1994) found no correlation between this interview and either attachment self-report questionnaires or measures of child temperament, although they did observe correlations between some AAI scales and questionnaires assessing memories of parental behaviour. Finally, the test-retest reliability of the method has also been evidenced in a number of studies (Bakermans-Kranenburg and Van Ijzendoorn, 1993; Benoit and Parker, 1994). Despite the ample evidence for the validity of the AAI, some researchers remain unconvinced. Eagle (1997) expresses his doubts regarding the construct validity of the instrument, arguing that there is no independent and ecologically valid evidence to suggest that coherence of discourse and self-reflective capacity are indicative of security of attachment. He suggests that such competencies may indicate the quality of remembering and the ability to come to terms with the past. He also claims that such capacities, irrespective of attachment status, enable the parent to raise a secure child. Referring to the socio-psychological literature on autobiographical narratives, Fox (1995) argues that both the content and the organisation of participants’ discourse responding to the AAI may be influenced by a variety of factors other than attachment status. According to Fox, the respondents’ current psychological state, implicit beliefs and theories about the stability and change of human attributes, and the conditions around which such stability and change occurs, should all be seriously considered as possible threats to the construct validity of the AAI. Aiming to assess attachment representations with respect to the couple relationship in a manner similar to the AAI, Crowel and Owens


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(1996) adapted the latter accordingly, creating the Current Relationship Interview (CRI). After the interview was administered in a sample of 45 young, predominantly white, middle-class American couples, the interview attained high inter-rater reliability and some support for its discriminant validity. Moreover, when participants’ classifications in the AAI and the CRI were compared, some concordance was found (64%, kappa = .29 for the secure/insecure division, 61%, kappa = .34 for the three-group and 56%, kappa = .30 for four-group classifications) while the overall percentages of secure classifications found in the two interviews were similar. Although no concordance was found between the two partners’ AAI classifications, such concordance was found between the partners’ CRI classifications (78%, kappa = .56,) and between the subjects’ CRI and their partners’ AAI classifications (69%, kappa = .37 for females and 64%, kappa = .30 for males), regarding the secure/insecure dichotomy. The empirical evidence of this study seemed to indicate that the representational ingredient captured by CRI was related, but distinct from what was measured in the AAI, suggesting that, although inter connected, the working models of attachment may be relationship specific. According to the above study, people with a secure attachment representation regarding their parents are more likely to also have a secure attachment representation regarding the partners. Although the findings clearly suggested an association between the construct measured by the AAI and the construct measured by the CRI, the representations of a substantial minority of participants presented different qualities with respect to the two types of relationship. The above study presented further evidence for the existence of relationship-specific attachment representations, as only the partners’ CRI, but not their AAI classifications appeared congruent. Regardless of whether it was co-constructed during the particular relationship, as the authors suggested, or it was the product of influences from their previous couple relationship history, the representations captured by CRI seemed to differ from the representations captured by AAI in one important respect: it seemed to provide a basis of similarity between the partners, while the latter did not. In addition to methodologies assessing the unconscious elements of attachment representations developed primarily by psychodinamically informed developmentalists, a number of social psychologists have also developed questionnaires and interviews to capture the content of language referring to close relationships. Translating the three original SS categories into three concise paragraphs delivered in the form of a

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self-report questionnaire, Hazan and Shaver (1986) found that attachment patterns among adults were distributed in a manner very similar to the SS categories. Adding a fourth self-description labelled fearful which broadly corresponded to the disorganised SS pattern, Bartholomew and Horowitz (1991) argue that the different attachment styles are defined by different combinations of self and other working models. While the secure style is defined by positive models of self and other, the dismissing (or avoidant) is defined by a positive model of self and a negative model of other, the preoccupied (or ambivalent) by a negative model of self and a positive model of other, and the fearful by two negative models. Moreover, Fraley and colleagues (2000) suggested that attachment is organised along two dimensions, anxiety and avoidance, and that the different attachment styles are defined by different constellations involving those dimensions. Secure individuals are low in both anxiety and avoidance, the dismissing are low in anxiety and high in avoidance, the preoccupied are high in anxiety and low in avoidance, and the fearful are high in both. Studies utilising the above models have generated similar findings suggesting that the securely attached differ from the insecure in many areas of psycho-social functioning including social motives, social cognition, relationship formation and maintenance, occupational functioning, and mental health (Mikulincer & Shaver, 2013).

Working models and the representation of attachment According to attachment research, the experience of attachment relationships, starting with the very early ones with the caregivers, is stored in memory and mostly non-consciously informs interpersonal relationships and self regulation. According to Bowlby, parent-child attachment interactions, being repeated over time, are inscribed in the child’s mind and form a particular type of mental structure: the working models of attachment. Bowlby (1982) preferred the term working model and contrasted it to that of a mental map, as the latter is understood as a static guide, not compatible with the dynamic character of the attachment representations. Bowlby emphasised that the processes by which the human mind extracts interpersonal information from an interaction, stores it in memory, and uses it to construct new experience are ongoing and evolving throughout the life span. Moreover, the working model has been viewed as a mechanism by which interpersonal knowledge internally stored in the form of schemas


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interacts with aspects of the external world, either consolidating or revising that knowledge. Schemas have been identified by cognitive psychologists as being the most generic mental structures (Bartlett, 1932; Piaget, 1951). When schemas refer to individuals they are called person schemas, while when they are used to inform interaction between self and others, as well as attitudes towards one’s self, they are called relationship schemas (Horowitz, 1991). According to Horowitz, such mental structures are hierarchically organised, consisting of superordinate and subordinate schemas that refer to behaviours, personality characteristics, roles, and cognitive and affective states. In agreement with Piaget’s (1951) theory of assimilation, Bowlby maintained that, by early adulthood, working models become solidified, opposing change and tending to impose themselves on reality, rather than to accommodate to it. Such a top-down, rather than bottom-up, processing of new information is characteristic of schemas in general (Singer and Salovey, 1991) and most likely presents certain adaptive advantages. A mental apparatus that continuously would have to revise its information structures would be a disadvantage towards the survival of the species. For a mental mechanism to have adaptive value, at least in humans and many other animals, novel experience has to be translated quickly into a familiar language, be integrated into existing structures of meaning, and function as a basis for action. The same principle seems to apply in the processing of interpersonal information, including that relating to intimate bonds. Some kind of stability in mental structures is needed so that the psychological states of the self and the other can be predicted and proper action taken. The limitation of this deductive working of the mind is that once dysfunctional perceptions, beliefs, expectations, and behavioural patterns are established, they are difficult to remove. However, in addition to their conservative character, working models also have an innovative side of comparable adaptive value. A mind that never challenges the validity of what is already known would have little chance for survival in a complex world. As a result, according to Bowlby, the representational structures of attachment may be sometimes revised, although such a revision is expected to be infrequent and slow. Particularly hard is the revision of insecure attachment models, as they are rooted in early basic experience of life and death. As the dependence of the young child on the caregiver for mere survival is absolute, insecure working models of attachment are deeply ingrained in the psychological apparatus of the developing individual and therefore very difficult to amend. The inability of the insecure models to accommodate to new information creates a vicious circle of re-

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confirming negative experiences, which solidify further these inflexible structures. In addition, the maladaptive nature of the insecure models has been attributed to their multiple and self-contradictory character. According to Main (1991), insecurity of attachment is inaugurated in the mind when the genuine experience of the child is incongruent with the linguistic formulation of that experience that is provided by the caregiver. When the child is confronted with a discrepancy between what s/he feels (e.g. caregiver is insensitive) and what the caregiver tells him/her to feel (e.g. caregiver is caring), the child would tend to form multiple and contradictory models of the other and the self (e.g. the caregiver is both insensitive ad caring at the same time). When, on the other hand, parental formulation is consistent with the child’s experience, a singular, coherent, and secure attachment representation is formed, even if the experience involved psychological pain. As the debate between psychologists, philosophers, and cognitive scientists regarding the exact form of mental representation continues, we cannot at present be sure whether the content of working models can be entirely deducible to propositions, as other types of representation have also been suggested (Main, 1991). Whatever their form, the information contained in the working models refers to four elements: the world, the attachment figure, the self, and the relations between them (Bowlby, 1973). According to Collins and Read (1994), each of these elements must be examined within four interconnected attachment-related parameters: memories, beliefs, attitudes, and expectations about self and others; goals and needs, plans and strategies. Bowlby views the formation of the working models in the mind of a growing individual as being the product of his/her history of interactions with the caregiver and all subsequent intimate others. During these interactions the child learns how to interpret stimuli coming from the physical and social environment, as well as impulses, feelings, or thoughts coming from within. As s/he also learns to recognise chronological or causal sequences and regularities in the occurrence of external and internal events and to engage in action that appears most appropriate for achieving the selected aims, the developing individual constructs a representational apparatus that would enable him/her to make successful predictions about the future. Influenced by the work of Craik (1943), Bowlby understands working models as small-scale replicas of reality, in which attachment-related interactions are rehearsed every time the attachment system is activated and relevant information is processed.


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However, West and Sheldon (1994), have advocated a new conceptualisation of the working model, based on the theory of recategorical memory, as presented by Edelman (1987). According to that theory, the brain is not seen as a place where memories are stored, but rather as a mechanism that establishes potentials for rediscovering previous categories in current circumstances. Such a conceptualisation of memory, West and Sheldon maintain, has implications for our understanding of the attachment working models. If Edelman’s theory is correct, then the mind would not contain discrete models, as envisaged by Bowlby, but rather retain the traces of their effects – that is, traces of affect. According to Edelman, affects are not simply part of the internal working model, they are the very mechanism by which past categories are retrieved to organise current experience and inform the construction of an ongoing model. As West and Sheldon indicate, such an understanding has certain advantages: it explains more adequately the capacity of secure models to accommodate new information and make the appropriate revisions when needed, as well as clarifies the mechanism by which attachment is transferred from parents to peers. An additional aspect of Bowlby’s theory of working models has also been called for revision. Authors have argued that Bowlby’s understanding of the working models as two-level representational structures based on episodic, or autobiographical, and semantic, or general, memory should be reconsidered and have proposed an alternative understanding of working models as multi-level hierarchies of schemata (Bretherton and Munholland, 2008). According to that view, the lowest level of the hierarchy would consist of a variety of interactional schemata close to specific need-fulfilling experience (e.g. the attachment figure takes care of the self when the self is ill) and on that basis higher levels of generality would be gradually constructed, all the way up to the most all-encompassing representations (e.g. attachment figure is a loving person). In agreement with this, Collins and Read (1994) propose that working models are organised as default hierarchies, containing attachment representations of all the different kinds of relationships that include an attachment component, for example relationships with parents, siblings, peers, and love partners. Since at the lower levels of the hierarchy more specific models operate, the model of the relationship with a specific partner would be at the bottom, the model of couple relationships would be above, the model of peer relationships on level three, and a more general attachment representation between self and other at the highest and most general point. In a parallel line, the model of the


relationship with a particular friend would be on the bottom, the model of friendships would be above, and the model of peer relationships above that, and, again, the most general attachment representation at the top. According to attachment theorists, such a general attachment representation would be heavily influenced by models derived from interactions with parents. Collins and Read list a number of essential qualities possessed by working models. Working models and their networks acquire a certain degree of complexity, as indexed by size – the number of elements included – and density – the degree of relatedness among these elements. Also, each working model has certain strength, specificity, and compatibility, properties that determine the degree to which the particular model applies to a specific situation. Strength would be a function of the amount of experience upon which a model has been constructed and of the frequency of its previous applications. Models that are densely connected and central to the network are expected to be strong, as for example models of the parent-child relationship. Moreover, the specificity of a model refers to the degree to which this model can discriminate between relationships and accordingly inform the individual’s response in a particular situation. If no specific model is available for novel circumstances, then a more general one will be sought at the level immediately above, or at the one above that. For example, an individual’s experience in interacting with a particular partner would be informed by his/her working model of the relationship with that partner, while in the first date, when no such model existed, organisation of experience was left to the more general model of couple partners, peers, and so on. Finally, a model’s compatibility with important features of a situation refers to variables such as characteristics of the interaction partner, type of the relationship, and goals that have been set. For example, the model of the relationship with the opposite-sex rather than the same-sex parent is expected to operate more often in heterosexual couple interactions, models of relationship with parents rather than with peers are more likely to be utilised when caring for one’s children, and models of a rival sibling relationship rather models of opposite-sex parent are more likely to be used when in competition with peers. As during the construction of a specific model, information from a more general one is used, and as elements included in the former either confirm or contradict elements in the latter, more general and more specific representations continuously interact. General models attempt to create specific ones on the basis of their own demands, while much less often, they would use the information provided by the latter to carry out revisions in themselves.


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It seems that the parallel lines of attachment representations described by Collins and Read are in fact connected to each other while also being linked to the general representation at the top. For example, the working model with mother would inform a general model of self and other and also the specific relationship with father. Similarly, the model of the relationship with father would feed back to the general model of self and other, as well as to the model of the relationship with mother. Both those specific mother and father models along with the more general model of “other” would inform the relationship with a sibling born later and other intimate individuals. When certain similarities of interaction occur with both parents, then the two models acquire the same general quality, which would more uniformly influence the sibling relationship and other subsequent ones. When models of different qualities are constructed with each parent, two different qualities are “loaded” onto the general model of self and other, not necessarily with equal influencing power.

Attachment and psychopathology According to Bowlby, insecurity of attachment, or the deeply ingrained in the mind expectation that important others will be unavailable in times of need, constitutes a risk for psychopathology, in both children and in adults. A number of studies have shown that securely attached children can cope with stress much better and recover from a period of disorder much faster than insecure ones (Pianta et al., 1990; Sroufe et al., 1990). Moreover, as insecurely attached children tend to engage in interpersonal relationships that confirm their negative self and other representations, they are likely to enter interpersonal pathways leading to psychopathology later, in adolescence, or in adulthood. Indeed, the vast majority of psychiatric patients have an insecure attachment representation (Patrick et al., 1994; Fonagy et al., 1996; Dozier et al., 2008) with most disorders (affective, anxiety, eating, substance abuse, borderline, and antisocial personality) being more often associated with the unresolved pattern when the four-category classification is used, and with the preoccupied pattern when only the three categories are considered. On the other hand, schizoaffective, schizophrenic, and bipolar disorders have been linked predominantly with the dismissive pattern. Moreover, Blatt and colleagues (Blatt, 1995a; Luyten and Blatt, 2013) have proposed a taxonomy of psychopathology based on the sufferers’ relational characteristics. According to Blatt, psychopathology develops around the defensive exaggeration and defensive suppression

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of the two fundamental human dispositions: the desire to relate to others and the desire to demarcate the self. Making such a distinction, Blatt has divided psychological disorders into anaclytic and introjective, depending on whether the self tends to cling symbiotically onto others (anaclytic), or avoids intimacy in order to protect a fragile sense of independence (introjective). On the other hand, the quality of attachment representations has not only been linked to the development of psychopathology but also to the therapeutic process and outcome. Being delivered primarily via a particular type of interpersonal relationship, the therapeutic relationship, most psychological therapies aim at the establishment of empathy and trust between the patient and the therapist. According to Bowlby, it is only when the patient is able to establish a sense of security in his/ her relationship to the therapist, that s/he would be able to revise his/ her insecure attachment representation (Bowlby, 1988). In other words, effective psychotherapy functions as a secure base for the patient to explore his/her own psychological world and to evaluate the quality of his/her interpersonal relationships, current and past. As the therapist facilitates the patient’s development of insight into the interpersonal world and the regulation of the self, the therapeutic relationship seems to establish the patient’s ability to reflect on experience, a capacity closely linked to secure attachment (Fonagy et al., 1995; Fonagy and Target, 1997). A number of clinicians have argued that the quality of attachment representations has a significant effect on treatment. Dismissing adults are often resistant to treatment, as they disown their vulnerability and need to be supported, avoid the expression of emotion, and reject the therapists’ attempts to offer help (Dozier, 1990; Dozier et al., 1995). On the other hand, the preoccupied patients tend to exaggerate their helpseeking behaviours and put excessive demands on the therapists, without, however, being able to make use of that help when it is offered (Cassidy, 1994; Slade, 1999). According to Fonagy et al. (1996) dismissing adults are more likely to improve in psychotherapy than preoccupied individuals, while Horowitz et al. (1993) report that the former don’t do well in brief psychotherapy. On the other hand, according to Blatt et al. (1998), preoccupied, or anaclytic, patients seem to do better in psychodynamic psychotherapy, as it involves more face-to-face interaction between patient and therapist, while dismissive, or introjective clients tend to do better in psychoanalysis and cognitive therapy as such therapies put more emphasis on the restructuring of mental representations.


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In addition, studies have offered evidence that increased attachment security is associated with better therapeutic outcome (Fonagy et al, 1996; Mosheim, 2000; Cyranowski et al., 2002). Finally, Dozier et al. (1994) have provided evidence that the quality of the psychotherapeutic intervention and, therefore, outcome is also influenced by the therapist’s attachment security. This finding is consistent with the basic premises of attachment theory, according to which the security of an attachment relationship is dependent on the security of the attachment figure’s representation.

Relatedness and autonomy in attachment theory The desire to relate to others and the need to develop a separate identity have been regarded as fundamental human dispositions by a number of psychological theorists. Within the psychoanalytic tradition, Freud (1957, 1961a) regarded the need for love as an essential human characteristic, originating in the mother-child relationship and being a principal motivational force throughout life. Moreover, he saw psychological disorder as involving the incapacity either to love, or be loved, and itself originating, in great part, in disturbed forms of parental love and care. Conversely, he also viewed a human relationship, the therapeutic relationship of transference, as the main vehicle for the alleviation of psychological difficulties and the restoration of psychological health. On the other hand, he proposed that the other essential need of the human being is to define the self and create through his/her work. Again, he saw the inability for such achievements as a crucial indication of psychological dysfunction (Freud, 1957, 1959). Similarly, subsequent psychoanalytic theorists recognised these two qualities in the human psyche, often giving, however, a different emphasis. On the one hand, the object relations theorists (Balint, 1952; Fairburn, 1953; Guntrip, 1971) regarded the need for relatedness as the primary driving force of the human psyche and viewed the quality of the mother-child relationship as the cornerstone of the individual’s capacity to engage in intimate relationships. They also viewed different forms of pathology to be associated with particular disturbances in relating and saw the development of the individual’s ability to define the self as being determined by the quality of the primary bond and its representation in the mind. In contrast, other psychoanalytic theorists emphasised the child’s propensity to differentiate from the original fusion with the mother and regarded the quality of such individuation process as a close

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associate of the individual’s capacity for mature relationships and an index of psychopathology (A. Freud, 1965; Mahler, 1974; Blos, 1979). Integrating psychoanalytic and cognitive developmental ideas, Blatt (1992, 1995a, 1996, 2003) has emphasised the equal importance of these two fundamental human tendencies, the dialectical development of which organise psychic life. Blatt has proposed that disruptions in the normal process of development often results in the defensive exaggeration of one of these two tendencies and the formation of two types of psychological dysfunction: the anaclitic type, characterised by a preoccupation with relatedness, and the introjective type, characterised by a preoccupation with self-definition. According to this researcher, most psychological disorders demonstrate one of these two types of asymmetrical development. Bowlby and the attachment theorists attribute these two fundamental human dispositions to the operation of a number of biologically rooted behavioural systems, most notably the attachment, the affiliative, and the exploration systems. While the principal aim of the first two is generally the same, engagement in human relationships, the level of intimacy involved in those types of relationships differs. While, the objective of the attachment system is engagement in a limited number of bonds of high intimacy, the main function of which is to provide security, the aim of the affiliative is the attainment of mainly non-intimate social relationships, the function of which is the better integration of the individual in the wider social network. In particular with respect to attachment relationships, two components of relatedness can be identified: one involving the attainment of psychological and physical proximity, so that a safety distance from the secure base is maintained, and one involving the active request for support, when a difficulty or threat appears. On the other hand, the main aim of the exploratory system is the development of the individual’s competence and the mastery of the physical and social worlds. Although the disposition for relatedness and exploration are rooted in different behavioural systems, their development unfolds in parallel. For curiosity to expand and autonomy to emerge, the growing individual should attain a sense of security regarding the availability of his/her attachment figure. Similarly, a real sense of attachment security cannot be brought about if the autonomy of the developing child, and later the adult, is obstructed by the attachment figure. In other words, for attachment security to be achieved, a balanced relationship between the individual’s need for connectedness and that for autonomy should be established.


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Attachment and the two positions of dependence The idea that the mind consists of representations of self and non-self in some form of relationship is inherent in the theories advocating the relational nature of the human psyche (Fast, 1992). According to object relations theories, as human development unfolds through interactions between parent and child, the representations of self and other also refers to dependent and depended-on positions. Attachment research also subscribes to this, as the representation of the complementary attachment of childhood refers to the interaction of two intimate partners: the child, who by nature is driven by his/her need to depend on an adult and the adult, who is driven, at least partly, by his/her need to take care of the child. Yet, the growing child represents in his/her mind both poles of this assymetrical relationship gradually assuming also appropriate caregiving roles. With the development of reciprocal attachment in adulthood, the individual will be called to occupy fully both roles. For example, in couple attachment, both partners are expected to have an equal capacity of assuming the two positions of dependence interchangeably, according to the particular circumstances and needs. As a result, the attachment representation in adult relationships seems to consist of four specific schemas of self and other. Moreover, since the fundamental dimensions of relatedness and autonomy organise the attachment relationship as well, issues referring to both dichotomies (autonomy/relatedness, dependent/depended-on) would need to be addressed by each partner. Birtchnell (1993, 1999) has proposed a similar model of interpersonal relating, consisting of two bi-polar axes: proximity, which is defined by closeness and distance, and power, which is defined by upperness and lowerness. It seems, therefore, that psychic life is organised around representations of self and other as intimate and as autonomous, on two positions of dependence. Although these opposite, but intrinsically connected roles, have their origins in the parent-child relationship, their mental representation is used to guide interpersonal interaction throughout development. Moreover, the quality of the early relationships and, therefore, the quality of the early representations of self and other in the dependent and depended-on positions in relation to connectedness and autonomy needs is expected to inform the manner in which the self assumes these roles throughout life, and to seek confirmation, rather than disconfirmation.


Attachment and levels of awareness Although the power of psychological elements that remain outside awareness has been acknowledged since the very early thinking about the mind, Freud (1955, 1961a) was the first to render those elements as the object of scientific inquiry. Such a research orientation concentrated on the unconscious, contrary to the focus of early psychological interest in consciousness (James, 1901; Wundt, 1907). In addition to the psychodynamic approach, contemporary cognitive psychology has also provided empirical evidence for the importance of non-conscious mental processes although without sharing the motivational assumptions of the former (Kihlstrom, 1987; Underwood, 1996). In agreement with research on the importance of non-conscious processes, Bowlby and the attachment theorists proposed that working models operate largely outside awareness, containing mental elements difficult to verbalise, such as affects, wishes, and automatic behaviour patterns. Nonetheless, Bowlby and other attachment theorists support a motivational approach regarding attachment-related mental content that is excluded from awareness and argue that parts of the working models remain unconscious because they refer to painful attachment experience. As a result, much of the effort to assess the attachment representation empirically has focused on identifying markers of those unconscious elements, such as narrative coherence in the AAI and the other methods it has inspired. However, the study of the conscious elements of the attachment representations has not been neglected and various research instruments, including questionnaires and interviews, have been developed to assess discourse content rather than organisation. (Hazan and Shaver, 1987; Bartholomew and Horowitz, 1991; Shaver et al., 1996). Nonetheless, focusing on the content of self-reported accounts presents a number of inherent limitations. According to George and West (2001), due to their susceptibility to defensive distortions and to social desirability bias and their strong behavioural orientation, self-report measures can only very indirectly and awkwardly assess complex constructs such as the working models of attachment. In addition to social psychologists, Blatt and colleagues (1992, 1995b) have also paid attention to the content of experience when assessing the quality of the self and other representation, approaching the issue from a psychoanalytic perspective. According to these researchers, descriptions of self and important others, as contained in carefully designed semi-structured interviews, can provide the basis for discriminating


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between anaclitic and introjective psychopathology and for identifying particular modes of relational disturbance. This chapter presented a brief introduction of the main concepts and empirical findings of attachment research so that the non-expert reader will be able to follow the more specific arguments that will unfold in the remainder of the book. In the next two chapters I will discuss empirical studies investigating the role of attachment in social phenomena beyond interpersonal relationships and individual regulation. In Chapters 4, 5, and 6, I will attempt to link attachment research with other domains of social science.

2 Attachment and Social Groups

Bowlby (1982) was the first attachment theorist to note that social groups as well as individuals can become objects of attachment. Bowlby suggests that attachment to social groups starts developing in adolescence and marks a shift in attachment orientation of the young individual from the primary attachment figures to the wider social world. Indeed, given the critical role of social groups in the evolution of the human species, it would be difficult for Bowlby to overlook the importance of groups in establishing a sense of protection and security in human beings. Co-operation between individuals enabled early humans to hunt effectively, protect their settlements against animal or human predators, and, in later years, sustain efficient agricultural and industrial economies. At a basic evolutionary level the social group protects the human animal from danger and provides an anchor of security from which group members are enabled to investigate and master the physical and social worlds. However, it was quite a few years after Bowlby’s main work had been published that the human attachment to social groups was investigated empirically by Smith and colleagues (1999). In their seminal paper these authors presented empirical evidence supporting the idea that it is not only individuals who become objects of the human need for attachment but social groups as well. The authors suggested that human beings may be emotionally tied to their social groups in ways similar to which they relate emotionally to intimate others and that groups too can function as sources of emotional security. This work presented empirical evidence suggesting that the attachment of individuals to the group seems to be underlain by the same two fundamental dimensions that according to attachment researchers underlie bonding between individuals: anxiety and avoidance (Fraley et al., 2000). 26


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Based on empirical instruments used to assess interpersonal attachment, the authors created a questionnaire to measure the attachment of individuals to groups and asked university students to complete it in relation to their favourite small group – that is, any fraternity/sorority, club, or sports team they belonged to and particularly favoured. According to the findings, students who were anxiously attached to their group tended to worry that their groups would not accept them or want them as members for ever, feel that their groups did not value them as much as they themselves valued the groups, and were unsure if they could always depend on their groups to be there when they needed them. The findings also showed that, on the other hand, individuals with high scores on the avoidance towards the group scale tended to feel uncomfortable depending on the group or having their group depending on them and were reluctant to feel completely at one with the group. Moreover, individuals who were anxiously attached to their groups tended to exhibit negative and extreme affect more often, while those who were avoidantly attached tended to be more dissatisfied with and dis-identified from their groups and made plans to leave their groups more often. The idea that attachment to groups is underpinned by anxiety and avoidance was further explored by Rom and Mikulincer (2003), who investigated if and how those two dimensions may be linked to group cohesion. According to their findings, the cohesion of small task groups tended to be lower the more their members appeared to be either anxiously or avoidantly attached to them. These authors also found that high group cohesion functioned as a buffer against the effects of interpersonal attachment anxiety on group attachment anxiety, as it reduced the degree of attachment anxiety towards the group in individuals who were anxious in their interpersonal relationships. Those two important studies provided the first empirical evidence suggesting that there is such as a thing as attachment to groups and that attachment to groups relates to interpersonal attachment. Those studies indicated that not only measures of group and interpersonal attachment were correlated in theoretically meaningful ways, but also that the two phenomena were underpinned by the same fundamental dimensions. Their findings suggest a common thread between the two types of bond. On the other hand, the studies also suggested that the two sets of dimensions seemed to refer to different attachment domains. The correlations between the corresponding dimensions were only moderate (e.g. between interpersonal attachment anxiety and attachment to group anxiety), suggesting that the variables measured were related but not

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identical. Second, in the Rom and Mikulincer study, performance evaluations regarding practical small group tasks were predicted independently from the four attachment dimensions (interpersonal anxiety, interpersonal avoidance, individual–group anxiety, individual–group avoidance), and the evaluations of participants’ contribution to bonding interactions were predicted independently by interpersonal avoidance and individual–group avoidance. In addition to establishing the direct relationships between the two sets of attachment dimensions, Rom and Mikulincer provided some interesting information about how the relationship between the two constructs, attachment to persons and attachment to groups, is influenced by a third group-related variable – group cohesion. This finding suggests that group characteristics can moderate the relational predispositions group members bring into the group, predispositions attributed to the member’s personal history. These are particularly important findings as they potentially identify an attachment domain that is different from the interpersonal and imply that individuals may form different attachment representations and exhibit different attachment behaviour in relation to the two domains.

Interpersonal attachment style and within-group relating In further attempts to understand the nature of the relationship between interpersonal and person-to-group attachment, studies have also explored the impact of interpersonal attachment style on the individual’s behaviour as a member of a group. Interpersonal attachment style would be expected to influence how individuals relate to other group members and the extent to which they can collaborate successfully with them, be efficient in their individual roles, provide support to others and contribute to the cohesiveness of the group. Based on the attachment literature, anxiously-attached individuals would be expected to seek the approval of others, be sensitive to rejection, and be less efficient in individual and instrumental tasks. On the other hand, avoidantly attached group members would be expected to be competent in individual tasks but dislike close collaboration and do less well in tasks that require emotional and interpersonal skills. Indeed, Rom and Mikulincer (2003) found some notable differences between the behaviour of anxiously and avoidantly attached group members. Group members scoring relatively high in interpersonal attachment anxiety tended to find interactions with other group members more threatening, evaluate themselves more negatively when


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they recalled such interactions, and endorse group goals relating to love and security. On the other hand, members relatively high in attachment avoidance appeared less challenged by group tasks, reported weaker positive emotions, endorsed more strongly group goals emphasising interpersonal distance and self-reliance, and evaluated other group members more negatively. Relatively anxious and avoidant individuals reported more often the elicitation of negative emotions by the group and recalled more negative memories of the group, compared with group members scoring low in the two attachment dimensions (that is, securely attached members). Individuals from the two insecure types were evaluated negatively on their contribution in practical group tasks (instrumental functioning) both by themselves and an independent observer; they were also evaluated more negatively in group bonding interactions, such as providing support to others or encouraging the sharing of experience (socio-emotional functioning). Complementing their above findings on the importance of group cohesion Rom and Mikulincer also report that group cohesion improved the group behaviour of insecurely attached individuals. More specifically, when anxiously attached individuals operated in relatively highly cohesive groups, their instrumental performance in group tasks was evaluated more positively both by themselves and by an independent observer, while none rated any higher their socio-emotional performance. On the other hand, high group cohesion appeared to improve the instrumental performance of avoidant individuals only according to the independent observer’s evaluation, but not according to their self-evaluation. Increased group cohesion did not change the socio-emotional functioning of avoidant individuals in group bonding tasks, according to either evaluation. Being consistent with previous evidence for the avoidant individuals’ defensively negative attitude towards relatedness as well as their instrumental competence, these findings suggested that while increased relatedness within the group actually improved their group functioning, avoidant individuals were unable to acknowledge it. These findings seem to indicate that a group variable suggesting a greater degree of group relatedness had a positive impact on both types of insecurely attached group members, regardless of their capacity to become aware of it. Such a positive impact may imply that at some level a more cohesive group may function as a stronger source of support and therefore, in particular ways, as a more secure attachment object. Moreover, a study conducted by Erez and colleagues (2009) involving undergraduate students in small task groups provided further empirical


evidence for the strong need of anxiously-attached individuals to be accepted and valued by their social groups. Individuals relatively high in interpersonal attachment anxiety substantially increased their feelings of commitment towards their groups as well as the amount of effort they put towards the group tasks when a bogus positive evaluation supposedly by other group members was presented to them. On the other hand, when the bogus evaluation was negative, anxiously attached individuals reported weaker feelings of commitment to the group, increased their effort towards group tasks, and donated more money to the group. Individuals low in attachment anxiety did not change their attitude in the presence of any kind of bogus evaluation. In another study involving undergraduate students, Crisp and colleagues (2009) investigated if interpersonal attachment style played a role in how individuals related to their groups in the presence of a threat. As the principal aim of the attachment system is protection from danger, exploring how individuals behave towards their groups in the presence of such a danger would provide important information on how the social group serves as a safe haven when the attachment system is activated, one of the primary functions of an attachment figure. When they presented participants with a bogus threat to their current love relationship, these authors found that individuals with an anxious interpersonal attachment style tended to disidentify from both an intimate (close friends) and a non-intimate (gender) social group, although their identification had been quite strong previously, in the absence of the threat. On the contrary, individuals low in anxiety continued to identify with their social groups when under a supposed relationship threat in exactly the same way they did before the threat was introduced, without compromising intimacy with their partners. These interesting findings suggest that attachment insecurity in interpersonal relationships may compromise individuals’ relationships with their social groups. However, in this study attachment to the group was not measured directly, so we can only speculate that in the presence of a threat anxious participants withdrew from an attachment object. Future studies need to include measures of attachment to the group and investigate how individuals utilise their groups in various types of threat so we understand better how social groups can function as “safe havens”.

Interpersonal attachment style and relating with the out-group In an interesting study, Mikulincer and Shaver (2001) investigated the link between attachment security and attitudes towards the out-group.


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The authors accepted the hypothesis that at a basic evolutionary level out-groups can be perceived as threats and therefore their presence in particular contexts may activate the attachment system. At an elementary level, out-groups may act as competitors for the same natural and other material resources, while their different systems of belief and value may be perceived as challenging or even threatening to our own. These authors wished to investigate if the perception of attachment security had any buffering effects on the level of threat experienced by individuals in the presence of a member of an out-group and ran a series of lab experiments. In these experiments the researcher subliminally primed1 different groups of secular Israeli Jewish students using three types of prime words: words indicating a secure attachment base (e.g. closeness, love, support), positive words with no direct link to attachment (e.g. luck, honesty), and neutral words without any positive, negative, or attachment connotation (e.g. office, boat, table). The authors found that participants who had not received the secure-base priming evaluated a hypothetical out-group member (e.g. a Palestinian Israeli, an ultra-orthodox Jew, a Russian immigrant) more negatively than they evaluated a hypothetical individual belonging to their in-group. They also wanted to interact with that individual much less. On the other hand, such discrepancies in the evaluation of the outgroup were not observed among participants who received the securebase prime. Those participants evaluated the out-group member more positively and wanted to interact with them more compared with the participants in the non-security prime conditions. Interestingly, securebase priming had no effect on participants’ attitudes towards hypothetical members of their in-group. These very interesting and important findings seem to be consistent with the idea that the out-group can be perceived as a source of danger and activate the attachment system, potentially eliciting a negative response as a response to the perception of such a threat. The findings also suggest that when individuals are able to experience a sense of security, their negative reaction to the out-group is prevented as their experience of fear is either reduced or completely removed. According to the above study, the participants’ appraisal of an out-group member as a threat fully mediated the effect of securebase priming on how the out-group member was evaluated. In other words, the subliminal experience of a secure-base as it was induced by the priming technique made individuals adopt a more positive attitude towards the out-group because it made the out-group member appear less like a threat.


When the authors explored the possibility that attachment style played a moderating role influencing the effects of secure-base perception on attitudes towards the out-group, they did not find any: secure-base priming appeared to have an effect irrespective of individual differences in attachment style. However, anxiously-attached individuals overall adopted a more negative attitude towards the out-group compared with that towards the in-group, irrespective of the type of priming they had received. Such a difference in attitude was not observed among the participants who had high scores on the avoidance scale. Moreover, the findings of this study suggest that a secure-base experience protects the individual from adopting a negative attitude towards the out-group not only in relation to a realistic or symbolic threat to the individual’s group identity but also in relation to the individual’s personal identity. When the experimenters presented participants with fake negative feedback on their performance the previous effects of secure-base priming on attitudes towards the out-group were confirmed. In the presence of a secure-base experience, a threat to self-esteem not only prevented individuals from choosing to interact with a member of the in-group over a member of the out-group, but actually increased participants’ willingness to engage with the out-group compared with the willingness of participants receiving non-secure base priming.

Methodological limitations of current research Although an interest in exploring the role of attachment in group processes has definitely been registered in the relevant literature in recent years following the seminal paper by Smith and colleagues (1999), there has only been a handful of research papers that present empirical findings on the topic. However, the contribution of those studies has been significant as they have consolidated the foundations of an emerging field: the study of attachment phenomena in the context of social groups. Those studies have provided further empirical support to the idea that individuals form emotional ties with their social groups and that such ties need to be understood as a specific manifestation of the human attachment system. More specifically, those studies seem to bring forward three main propositions. The first is that the emotional bond human beings develop with their social groups is underpinned by the same fundamental dimensions underlying interpersonal attachment: anxiety and avoidance. The second major premise is that individual differences in forming emotional bonds with groups appear to correspond to individual differences in


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conducting relationships with intimate individuals. Finally, the third premise is that differences in how individuals engage with their intimate adult relationships are also linked with how individuals behave towards members of an out-group. Nonetheless, despite their great importance, the above studies present methodological characteristics that set specific limitations in their contribution. Those characteristics refer to four methodological domains: the attachment domain assessed, the type of social group studied, the type of research design employed, and the type of participants recruited.

Attachment domain First, for the most part, the studies discussed above were concerned with the association between attachment style in interpersonal relationships and individual behaviour in the group context and only very rarely they actually tested a hypothesis involving the attachment of the individual to the group. It seems that in these very first moments of the new field, the empirical assessment of the social group as an attachment object has been relatively neglected. Following the traditional focus of attachment research on dyadic bonds, most of the above studies only measured the interpersonal attachment style of group members and then researched its relevance in various aspects of group behaviour. Attachment to groups needs to be separately assessed in future studies, to permit the collection of empirical evidence on the role of the group as an attachment object. Moreover, in addition to measuring the attachment dimensions including social groups as the attachment object, it may be useful for experimental studies to distinguish between more specific security primes and include security primes specifically referring to social groups. For example, in the very interesting paper by Mikulincer and Shaver (2001) the priming technique induced by the experimenters did not specify the type of relationship the security prime referred to. Although the experience of safety elicited by a general security prime is expected to activate the most generic human need for attachment security, including security derived from individuals as well as that derived from groups, primes specific to the different attachment domains may result in different effects. Future studies may perhaps include such different primes to test specific hypotheses. For example, it would be very useful to know if, compared with a mother-child security prime, a group-related security prime has any different effects on the negativity individuals present towards the out-group. Similarly, it would also be interesting to know if the links between group cohesion and interpersonal attachment

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security reported by Rom and Mikulincer (2003) would be any different if different types of security prime are used. Such future studies may generate interesting insights about the potentially security-bearing function of group symbols, such as flags, costumes, and anthems.

Type of social group The second methodological limitation of the above studies refers to the type of social group that has been researched.2 It is interesting that in almost all the above studies, the group of reference has been the small group, mainly the experimental task group (other small groups like student fraternities/sororities or groups of close friends have also been used). The only study that in some way researched large social groups was the one by Mikulincer and Shaver (2001), including ethnicity groups, while the study by Crisp and colleagues (2009) included gender.3 Although small groups, particularly high entitativity small groups like the family or a group of close friends, are very important to human beings, equally important are large groups, such as organisations or political parties, as well as larger social formations such as religions or nations. In fact, as numerous social researchers have argued (Gastil, 2009), small groups are intrinsically linked and continuously interacting with their macro-social environments so that neither of the two can be properly understood without a systematic reference to the other. The world-views upon which life in these larger social systems is organised is intrinsically linked with the world-views that permeate the smaller and usually more intimate groups, so understanding how attachment phenomena are manifested in the large groups would also help us understand attachment phenomena within and between small groups. Although direct physical contact and personal communication with the majority of individual group members is impossible in large groups, research evidence and everyday experience suggests that such groups can be the objects of intense emotions and strong ties. Crucial aspects of our social identity are acquired through our membership of large groups and in most present human societies small groups are intensely linked with wider social formations. For all these reasons, therefore, it is important that large social groups become the object of study in this new emerging domain of attachment research.

Type of research design The third limitation of those pioneering studies is that most of them employed experimental designs in which important attachment-related


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emotional states and actions were experimentally induced (e.g. interpersonal threat, evaluation of others). This brings out a question that is typical in discussions of laboratory-based research in psychology – the question of ecological validity. Numerous authors have questioned the extent to which psycho-social phenomena replicated and measured in the laboratory during an experimental procedure can be regarded as fundamentally similar to such phenomena as occur in real life (Harré and Secord, 1972). My personal stance on the matter is that the truth is somewhere in the middle: certain aspects of the psychological and social worlds can be relatively accurately re-created and meaningfully assessed in the laboratory, while others cannot. One may consider, for example, the use of hypothetical scenarios in order to induce a relational threat in the study by Crisp and colleagues (2009) or the use of a priming technique in the experiments conducted by Mikulincer and Shaver (2001). Although it is clear that some sense of relationship danger may be elicited in individuals in the presence of hypothetical scenarios and that some secure-base experience can be induced in the participants who undergo a priming procedure, it is questionable if the mere imagination or a few-second exposure to a small number of attachment-related words can generate a sense of relationship threat or a sense of emotional security comparable to that experienced in real life, in the context of real intimate relationships. Similarly, one may pause and reflect on the way Mikulincer and Shaver operationalised and assessed their dependent variable stance towards the out-group in their experimental studies. Participants were presented with a sketch of a hypothetical typical member of the out-group (e.g. a hypothetical Arab Israeli, or a hypothetical ultra-orthodox Jew) and they were asked to express their views about that individual based on these vignettes (the were asked to provide an evaluation of that hypothetical individual and indicate the extent to which they wished to interact with them). On the one hand, the approach made sense, some of the relevant feelings must have been elicited to some extent, and all experiments were well designed and executed suggesting that aspects of the participants’ view of the out-group must have been captured. However, it seems rather difficult to argue that a few ticks on a piece of paper in response to hypothetical descriptions could sufficiently reflect all the complexity of emotion, thought, and behaviour human beings address towards real members of antagonistic ethnic or religious communities in real social and historical contexts. Another characteristic of the experimental approach to the study of attachment and groups has been the use of experimental task groups. A considerable number of studies described in the above literature use


artificial, low entitativity task groups created specifically for the purposes of the experiment. Although research with such groups can provide important information on group phenomena occurring at a very fundamental level, such information also has clear limitations. Individuals in those groups usually share very little of their world-views, beliefs, and values, and as a result social interaction is bare of deeply seated social meanings that tie together natural groups. As a result, crucial cultural aspects of intra- and inter-group interaction cannot be appropriately captured by that experimental process and therefore critical aspects of the role of attachment in-group phenomena cannot be properly studied. While recognising the value of experimental task groups, I need to emphasise that the study of attachment and social groups should go far beyond such groups and focus on how attachment processes are inextricably linked with cultural processes in the real socio-cultural and historical contexts.

Participants The final issue to be noted in the overall critical evaluation of the literature on attachment and groups is that all studies reviewed utilised university student samples. Although certain aspects of the attachment phenomenon as well as of living in groups are common to all humans and university students are not expected to differ in those respects, as I indicated above, both attachment and group processes are intertwined with complex and multifaceted cultural processes involving a variety of social actors. Society members come from a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds, are of different age and educational level, and hold different types of jobs. For example, age may play an important role in how individuals engage with groups. Compared with older adults, young students usually depend more on parental practical but also emotional support and less on larger social groups, like professional organisations or ethnic groups, for making a living and holding a social position. Utilising almost exclusively young, middle-class, and well-educated individuals deprives the study of attachment phenomena in social groups of the crucial diversity and multiplicity of social experience that exists across the various sectors of society and therefore restricts the scope of our understanding.

The social group as an attachment object In addition to methodological limitations that were discussed in the previous section, the studies on attachment and groups also present one


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noteworthy conceptual ambiguity: it remains unclear what it is exactly that human beings attach to when they form an attachment with a social group. Drawing on the relevant literature, I will attempt to address this question in the remainder of the section. Close relationships with other group members The fact that individuals form close ties with other members of the groups they belong to is well established in everyday human experience. It is reasonable therefore to assume that social groups become attachment objects in their entirety as individuals form close interpersonal relationships either with all or most of the other group members. Although this tends to be true with small high entitativity groups (e.g. families), it is not true in the case of larger and less close-knit groups, such as larger organisations or nations. In such groups individuals tend to relate closely only to a limited number of fellow group members, often a tiny minority, while they never even meet the vast majority of the group. Yet human beings develop very strong bonds with very large groups, such as national or religious groups. Although close interpersonal relationships are indeed formed in groups and such relationships do tend to provide an important source of safety and security to individuals, attachment to the group seems to extend beyond interpersonal bonds and refer to the group as a whole. Group leaders as attachment figures A number of authors have suggested that individuals develop their commitment to a group through a bond they originally develop with the group leader – the best representative of the group. Revising the Freudian idea about the role of the leader as a paternal figure, Bowlby (1982) suggested that human beings look into group leaders as a source of protection and security. According to Bowlby, group members tend to look for strong and capable individuals that can provide effective assistance at times of difficulty and support the mastery of the world at times of comfort. The adolescents’ attachment shift to groups outside the family, Bowlby argues, tends to be mediated initially by their attachment to a group leader. Importantly, Bowlby (1982: 207) uses the words “initially”, “probable”, and “for many”, implicitly suggesting that the link between leader and group is a facilitating, but not a necessary, element of the individual’s attachment to the social group. In line with Bowlby’s initial conceptualisation, attachment research has generated empirical evidence suggesting that the manner in which group members relate to their group leaders is greatly influenced by the type of relationship members had with their caregivers in childhood. Mayseless

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and Popper (2007) and Popper and Mayseless (2003) suggest that relationships with leaders clearly implicate an attachment dynamic, particularly when individuals feel that social institutions that had been there to offer protection failed. It is in such instances, the authors claim, that individuals feel unsafe and exposed to danger, when they most intensely feel the need for strong, charismatic leaders to which they turn to, to restore their feelings of safety. The authors propose that leaders fulfil both safeheaven and secure-base functions for the members of a social group and that individual and cultural differences may determine the quality of the attachment bond between leaders and ordinary members. These authors discuss two mechanisms through which the quality of parent-child attachment may influence individuals’ relationships with their group leaders – compensation and correspondence. According to the former, individuals who are driven most strongly by the need for an attachment connection with their leaders are the ones that were the most deprived of such a connection in childhood. On the other hand, according to the correspondence hypothesis, once that relationship with the leader has been established it would tend to have a similar quality to the original attachments of childhood. For example, if an individual established an anxious attachment with the caregiver in childhood, the individual’s relationship with the group leader would be defined my anger, demandingness, lack of trust, and a constant perception of being rejected and unrecognised by the leader. If, on the other hand, an individual’s childhood attachment was characterised by avoidance, the individual would remain emotionally distant from the group leader, develop an attitude of self-sufficiency, and rarely ask for support. The idea that attachment to the leader is substantially informed by childhood attachment experiences has been also proposed by other researchers (Keller, 2003) and is consistent with a fundamental concept of attachment theory, the concept of the working mental model. In addition to individual differences in historically created attachment representations, Mayseless and Popper (2007) suggest that culture also plays a significant role in the type of relationship group members establish with leaders. According to these authors, as collectivist cultures are characterised by high levels of uncertainty avoidance and provide ordinary members with little opportunity to challenge authority, group members are more likely to be driven by anxiety and the need to choose all-powerful charismatic leaders to protect themselves from that anxiety. On the other hand, as individualistic cultures are characterised by lower levels of uncertainty avoidance and stronger democratic processes that allow free speech and authority challenge, they are less likely to support


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a safety-promising charismatic leader. This interplay between attachment and cultural dynamics is a notion of great importance, which I will explore in greater detail in the following chapters. In an experimental study involving undergraduate students, Gillath and Hart (2010) investigated the effects of experimentally induced thoughts of attachment security on political leader preference. The experimenters instructed one third of the participants to think for a few minutes and describe in detail their relationship with the person they had the strongest emotional connection with at that particular moment of their lives (usually their romantic partners). That was the security prime. The experimenters also instructed the second third of participants to think of a close friend (that was the friend prime) and asked the remaining participants to think of an individual participants knew personally, but not very well (that was the acquaintance prime). After priming was concluded, all participants were instructed to read the mission statements of three hypothetical political leaders, each exemplifying one of three leader types identified in the relevant literature: charismatic, relationship-orientated, and task-orientated (Ehrhart and Klein, 2001). Charismatic leaders are those who emphasise an overarching value system and collective identity, challenge the status quo, and develop a strong emotional connection with their followers. Relationship-orientated leaders emphasise communication, trust, and recognition in their interactions with the subordinates, while goal-orientated leaders focus on the accomplishment of specific tasks by their subordinates and provide the necessary technical support towards such an accomplishment. According to the study’s findings, participants who had been primed with their attachment figure expressed lower preference for the charismatic leader compared with those primed by friends or acquaintances. Data analysis also showed that the security prime (or any other prime) had no effect on the ratings of the two other types of leader. The findings of this study are of particular importance as they provide empirical support for the idea that attachment security may be an important motivating force driving individuals to support and vote for all-powerful charismatic leaders. Exploring the idea that leaders are subjectively constructed on the basis of security needs rather than just objectively perceived by their followers, Hansbrough (2012) conducted a correlational study involving university students. According to the findings of the study, individuals who were relatively anxiously attached in their interpersonal relationships tended to perceive in political leaders characteristics of transformational leadership that were not actually there. Transformational leaders


are those who seek a deeper, emotional connection with the followers: they aim to transform their motivation, aspirations, and moral imperatives by focusing on emotional communication with them and by becoming their role models (Bass, 1985). Popper et al. (2000) report that securely attached leaders are more likely to be perceived by both their instructors and their followers as possessing the characteristics of transformational leadership. Interestingly, Hansbrough’s findings did not suggest a similar misperception in relation to transactional leadership – a leadership style characterised by a more instrumental approach focusing on the efficient completion of tasks, the provision of clear guidelines, and the effective use of reward and punishment as the main mechanisms of follower motivation. Interestingly, individuals with an avoidant attachment style did not falsely perceive either transformational or transactional leadership characteristics. Hansbrough’s study links attachment theory with implicit leadership theories (Shondrick and Lord, 2010), which suggest that the endorsement of leaders is guided to a considerable extent by non-conscious leadership schemas and cognitive processes that are susceptible to perceptual distortions and other cognitive errors. The above findings suggest that such distortions may often be driven by the human need for security and protection. Attachment style has also been linked with another leadership typology, distinguishing between personalised and socialised leaders. Howell (1988) has differentiated between self-centred dictatorial leaders who use their position of power primarily to promote their own selfinterests and those leaders who focus their attention on the needs of their followers. He called the former personalised and the latter socialised leaders. In a study participating about 400 cadet squad commanders of the Israeli Defence Forces, Popper (2002) found that individuals with personalised leadership characteristics tend also to have an avoidant attachment style. Studies have also looked at the relationship between attachment security and leaders’ qualities. Johnston (2000) found that compared with secure managers, insecure managers were more likely to adopt a centralised management structure and less likely to delegate responsibility to subordinates. In two studies involving young recruits in the Israeli military, the researchers assessed the participants’ attachment style at the beginning and at the end of the training programme and they asked recruits to evaluate each other in terms of the qualities necessary to be made an officer. According to the findings, recruits who had been assessed by their peers as secure at the beginning of the training


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were more likely to be nominated as officers at the end of the training compared with those who had been assessed as anxiously attached (Mikulincer and Florian, 1995). Researching a mixed sample of Israeli managers including highranking military officers and senior employees of both the public and private sectors, Davidovitz and colleagues (2007) found that individuals’ attachment anxiety and avoidance were linked to a range of leadership variables. In particular, in this important study the authors found that relatively anxiously-attached managers tended to adopt a personalised leadership style, to be motivated by self-enhancement, self-reliance, and the exercise of control, and to express more doubts on their ability to deal with task-focused, instrumental roles. On the other hand, avoidantly attached managers were less likely to adopt a socialised management style, more likely to adopt self-reliance motives, and more likely to express doubts about their efficiency in emotion-focused roles. In addition, findings suggested that the higher an officer’s self-reported avoidance, the less his soldiers but also his superior officer would view him as an accepting, available, and responsive figure. Davidovitz et al. (2007) also investigated whether group leaders’ selfreported qualities were consistent with how group members perceived them. Collecting data from military officers and the soldiers under their command, the researchers, on the one hand, re-confirmed the above relationships between officer attachment style and self-reported leadership qualities but, on the other, derived evidence supporting the fundamentally interactive nature of leader perception. The authors report that how the officers were perceived was not only affected by their own relational characteristics but also by those of the soldiers themselves. According to their findings, relatively anxious and avoidant soldiers perceived lower security-providing capacity in their commanding officers, regardless of their officers’ self-report. Also, avoidantly attached soldiers were more likely to perceive their officers as having a personalised leadership style and less likely to perceive them as having a socialised style. Moreover, the findings revealed a consistency between how soldiers perceived the leadership efficiency of their officers and how officers perceived their own efficiency. In particular, avoidantly attached officers tended to be perceived by their soldiers as less competent in dealing with emotion-focused demands, while anxiously-attached officers tended to be perceived by their soldiers as less competent in dealing with task-focused demands. On the other hand, avoidantly attached soldiers tended to rate their officers as less competent both in relation to emotion and task-focused demands, regardless of the officers’ characteristics.

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The study also found a relationship between the officers’ attachment style and his soldiers’ perception of their own functioning. According to the findings, soldiers under the command of a relatively anxiouslyattached officer tended to perceive their own instrumental functioning as relatively low and their socio-emotional functioning as relatively high, while soldiers under the command of an avoidant officer tended to perceive their own socio-emotional functioning. Moreover, the effect of officers’ attachment anxiety on soldiers’ appraisals of their own efficiency in dealing with practical tasks was partially mediated by the officers’ instrumental efficiency as perceived by the soldiers. In other words, anxiously-attached officers may have contributed to their soldiers’ self-perceived inability to deal with practical tasks partly because of their own inability in effectively doing so. In their third study of the series, these authors looked at the impact that a group leader’s attachment characteristics had on the followers’ mental health. The authors found that soldiers whose mental health deteriorated during the months of combat training tended not only to be relatively avoidant themselves but also to have relatively avoidant commanding officers. Moreover according to the findings, soldiers’ attachment insecurity, both anxiety and avoidance, moderated the effects of their officers’ avoidance on their mental health. In other words, the mental health of the most insecurely attached soldiers was affected the most by their officers’ insecurity. Finally, these authors found that the effect of officers’ avoidance on changes in soldiers’ mental health was fully mediated by the soldiers’ appraisals of their officers as security providers; in other words, soldiers’ mental health was affected by their officers’ avoidant attachment because they could not experience their avoidant officers as a security provider. Davidovitz et al. (2007) also report findings suggesting that both officer and soldier attachment insecurity were related to how soldiers perceived their military unit as a whole. In particular, findings suggested that soldiers tended to perceive their military units as less cohesive when they units were led by a relatively avoidant officer and when they scored relatively higher on either the anxiety or avoidance dimension themselves regardless of the attachment style of their commanding officer. The findings also suggested that the effect exerted by officers’ avoidance on the soldiers’ evaluations of unit cohesion were partially mediated by the soldiers’ appraisals of the officers socialised leadership orientation and their capacity to deal with emotion-focused problems. In other words, avoidant officers contributed to their solders’ perception of their military units as incohesive partly because those officers were


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perceived as unable to communicate and deal effectively with relational and emotional issues. Similar mediation effects were also observed regarding the impact of officers’ avoidance on the soldiers’ perceived socio-emotional competence. Soldiers perceived themselves as unable to deal with relational and emotional issues within the unit partly because their avoidant officers did not provide much leadership in that respect. The above studies clearly suggest that the attachment system is strongly implicated in the relationship that group members establish with their group leaders. These studies indicate that the leader functions as a fundamental source of security among the group members and that in many instances group members develop strong personal relationships with their leaders. However, as it was mentioned above, such interpersonal ties can only be established in small groups, where group members interact directly with each other and with the group leader. In larger groups direct interaction with the leader is the privilege of the very few, and often the vast majority of group members never even meet the group leader in person. Nonetheless, lack of direct personal interaction does not prevent large group members experiencing a “deep connection” with the leader, even to feel that they “love” or are being “loved” by him/her, sometimes to be prepared to give their very lives for him/her. Although in such cases many of the characteristics of an attachment relationship are present (strong emotion, a sense of protection and security derived by a powerful other, a sense of duty to reciprocate support, a sense of despair when the relationship is lost) it is clear that what group members become attached to is not a real person. Since group members have no direct real life experience of the leader as a person, the question arising is what is it that individuals in large groups form their attachment to when they feel emotionally connected with the group leader. I suggest that the leader (to a considerable extent even the leader of a small group despite the direct personal relationship) derives his/her security-bearing properties by the fact that s/he stands as a symbol of the group. This however takes us back to the initial question – what is exactly the property of the group that needs to be symbolised so that individuals can become attached to it?

3 Attachment and Systems of Meaning

In the previous chapter I referred to important studies in the attachment literature suggesting that social groups function as attachment objects. Although the literature provides substantial empirical evidence as well as sound theoretical argument that this may be the case, what is less clear is how exactly the social group should be understood as an attachment object. In other words, an important question emerges: what do human beings become attached to when they become attached to a social group? In the previous chapter I argued that despite clear evidence that individuals may develop close interpersonal relationships with other group members as well as with the group leader and that may be part of the motivation of individuals in joining social groups, human beings essentially relate to social groups as wholes. Put differently, the emotional ties individuals establish with social groups go beyond the ties that they may establish with particular group members, including the group leaders. This is most obvious in the case of large social groups such as nations or religions, where strong feelings towards the group exist despite the absence of interpersonal relationships with the vast majority of the group members. However, this general principle applies to small groups as well. In this book I will suggest that what human beings attach themselves to when they emotionally relate to a social group is the ideological1 and institutional systems that dominate in the group and make life possible. I suggest that it is the set of beliefs, values, practices, and social institutions that define life in a group that human beings emotionally engage with when they establish close relationships with a group, as it is only through those systems of meaning that life in a group, and therefore human life, can be possible. Of course human engagement with such systems of meaning can only occur through human relationships, beginning with the emotional bonds children form with caregivers and other family members. A number 44


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of theorists have suggested conceptual frameworks that make sense of how human interaction relates to the construction of ideas and world-views (Mead, 1967; Berger and Luckmann, 1979). The current proposal refers to very specific aspects of human engagement with systems of belief and values and their practical applications – the engagement that is motivated by the human needs for protection and security. In addition to considering leaders and social groups as objects of the attachment system, Bowlby (1982) was the first attachment theorist to propose that social institutions could also have a similar function. This idea was also revisited more recently by Mayseless and Popper (2007). Nonetheless, these authors appear to refer to social groups and social institutions interchangeably, a fact that perhaps both feeds into and helps resolve the conceptual ambiguity in defining the social group as an attachment object. On the one hand, social groups and social institutions are not the same. Social institutions are frameworks of belief, value, and practice based on which social interaction occurs and social groups function. On the other hand, social groups cannot exist without institutions. Human groups are formed on the basis of ideological and institutional frameworks and without them social life is impossible. Although therefore social institutions are conceptually distinct from social groups, the two always go together. Supportive interactions with other group members (intimates, acquaintances, or complete strangers) and the sense of protection and security that such interactions bring can only occur under particular systems of belief and value and within particular social institutions. In other words, an individual bears a particular protection and security value as a fellow group member only because s/he operates within a particular ideological and institutional framework and performs a social role according to the prescriptions of such a framework. In agreement with the ideas presented above, recent attachment research has provided further empirical evidence suggesting the implication of the attachment system in the construction of systems of meaning. In this chapter I will present the main findings suggesting that the attachment system is involved in individuals’ engagement with such systems, including religion, political ideology, and other ideological domains.

Attachment and religion An ideological domain of great importance that has been explored by researchers from an attachment perspective has been that of religion. Authors have suggested that God functions as an all-powerful attachment

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figure providing protection where ordinary bonds with other mortal humans are perceived as unable to do so. Attachment theorists suggest that the relationship human beings form with God is an attachmentlike relationship as it fulfils the main attachment criteria proposed by Ainsworth (1989): it provides a safe haven in times of difficulty, functions as a secure base to which one regularly returns to re-establish a sense of connection and receive guidance, requires a minimum degree of emotional and physical proximity for a person to feel secure, and results in separation distress when threatened by distance. God as safe heaven Indeed as common knowledge suggests, people often turn to God for protection at times of suffering and distress, for example during wars, natural disasters, or personal crises. Such protection takes the form of emotional strengthening by feeling proximate to an invincible force, a force that is unbeatable by all the calamities threatening human life. Establishing a close relationship with such a force usually opens the door to the experience of a superior world order permeated by higher codes of morality and justice against which all mortals will ultimately be judged. That reality is the only one that matters and in that reality the pains of the earthly world become insignificant. That world resembles what Bowlby and the attachment theorists describe as safe heaven, or the sense that in the presence of the loved ones no harm can come to the self. Empirical evidence collected in both correlational and experimental studies supports the idea that the imaginary relationship with God and other religious figures functions as a safe heaven in a way that resembles human attachment relationships. In a prospective study involving a US sample, Brown et al. (2004) followed up in three waves individuals who had recently experienced the death of their partners – at six months after the loss, at 18 months, and at 48 months. According to the findings of the study, widowers reported an increase in religious and spiritual beliefs as well as church attendance after their loss. In addition, the importance of religious beliefs reached its highest point at the six-month follow-up and returned close to its original levels by the 18-month follow-up. However, church attendance remained higher throughout the study period and only dropped to baseline levels four years after the loss of spouse. Furthermore, when they compared those individuals who had increased their religiosity levels after the loss with those who hadn’t, the authors found that those who had increased their religious/spirituals beliefs reported lower overall grief at 18 and 48 months, but no


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difference was observed among those who had only increased church attendance. Finally, the authors reported that although the bereaved who increased their religious beliefs presented with lower grief no effect of such increased beliefs was found on depression, anxiety, or subjective well-being at any of the measurement points throughout the study. Those findings seem to suggest that for religion to function as safe haven, at least in the limited context of grief, it needed to be invested in with emotion (as indicated by the change in beliefs) not simply by adopting particular forms of socialisation (as indicated by simply going to church to meet others). Conducting an experimental study with a sample of American university students declaring an interest in religion, Burris and colleagues (1994) placed half of their participants under a high salience condition and the other half under a low salience condition. The former group were asked to write about a past experience in which they felt lonely, rejected, or neglected and were encouraged to re-experience those emotions, while the latter were asked to write a paragraph about their most favourite foods. While before the experiment the two groups did not differ in intrinsic religiosity – that is, the sense of devoted religious commitment relating to images of God as loving, benevolent, and supportive – those put in the high salience condition substantially increased their intrinsic religiosity scores after the experiment. Also, according to the findings, the greater score increases were observed in those who had reported unresolved experiences of loneliness. Interestingly, being under the condition of high salience did not have any effect on the other two aspects of religiosity measured in that study – extrinsic religiosity, or the social and practical benefits obtained by being part of a religious community, and the existential quest for the ultimate truth which may or may not involve believing in a God. This particular attachment importance of intrinsic religiosity may have been evidenced in the study by Brown et al. (2004) discussed above, in which widowed individuals managed to reduce their grief only through an increase in their religious beliefs (intrinsic religiosity) but not an increase in church attendance (extrinsic religiosity). Another experimental study, this time involving a sample of Israeli Jewish students who believed in some supernatural entity, provided further evidence that God may be used as safe haven when under distress (Granqvist et al., 2012). Participants were put under different conditions of subliminal screen priming: they were presented with three types of words indicating extreme-distress (death), mild distress (failure), and neutrality in relation to distress (hat). The speed of presentation was

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20 milliseconds. Participants were then asked to recognise God-related words, non-God-related words, and control non-words; the speed of recognition was also measured. According to the findings, participants recognised God-related words faster than they recognised neutral or non-words, under the mild- and extreme-distress prime conditions, but not under the neutral priming condition. These findings provide further experimental evidence supporting the idea that God functions as a safe haven at times of stress. God as secure base Everyday experience with religion also tells us that individuals maintain a strong relationship with God not only at times of stress but also when no immediate danger is present. Attachment researchers argue that such a relationship with God is in some ways similar to the way children and adults “utilise” their attachment figures in times of calm: they treat them as a base to which they occasionally retreat in order to re-establish a sense of connection and receive useful feedback so that they continue in safety their engagement with the wider world. Visiting the church, the mosque, the synagogue, or any other place of worship, receiving communion and guidance from the religious leaders and participating in religious rituals, studying the religious texts, and being actively involved in a religious community when one is not suffering any particular hardship can be viewed as examples of maintaining a link with a source of wisdom so that affirmation of one’s views is attained, guidance is provided, and one can engage anew with the realities of the human world. Attachment theorists argue that such regular contact with places, people, and rituals that represent God can be seen as a regular return to a secure base of attachment. In a correlational study involving a predominantly Christian USA student sample, Kirkpatrick et al. (1999) found that holding certain beliefs about God and feeling that one has a personal relationship with him was related to the experience of reduced loneliness among women (but not among men). This association between the relative lack of loneliness and having a relationship with God was still present when the authors took into account the impact of other sources of social support such as family or friends. The findings therefore suggest that a relationship with God has an independent protective effect against the experience of loneliness that most likely relates to its function as an attachment relationship. According to the relevant literature (Weiss, 1991) attachment relationships can be set apart from other sources of social support as their unique primary function is to provide security, a very intimate sense of emotional connection and personal validation.


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An experimental study conducted by Granqvist et al. (2012) provided further empirical evidence that God can function as a secure base. The authors exposed participants to two priming conditions, one using the prime word “God” and the second using the neutral word “ton”. They also asked them to identify four types of words: words relating to the provision of a secure base (e.g. loving, responsive, accepting), emotionally negative words relating to control or punishment (e.g. harsh, strict, controlling), emotionally neutral words (e.g. notebook), and nonsense words (non-words). According to the findings, when participants were exposed to the God priming condition, they identified words indicating a secure base faster than participants exposed to neutral priming, but no difference in the identification of emotionally negative, neutral, or nonsensical words was observed between the two priming conditions. God and proximity seeking The third defining characteristic of attachment relationships, the maintenance of proximity to the attachment figure, is also evidenced in everyday language and usual religious practices in various cultures. Phrases like “I am close to God” or “he has moved away from God” implicitly refer to the idea that believing in God is maintaining proximity with him. Although, at least in the main contemporary religions, the essence of that proximity is spiritual, as is the essence of God, that spiritual proximity is thought to be facilitated by physical proximity to material religious symbols and such physical proximity is generally expected from the believers. Although prayer is regarded as an essentially internal mental process suggesting that one is spiritually available and capable to connect with God and in many religions the believer can pray almost anywhere, prayer within the place of worship (church, mosque, etc.) has a particular significance. Such prayer and other religious rituals that occur at the place of worship are a major requirement for a proper believer. Nonetheless, unless extreme circumstances make this physically impossible, a close spiritual relationship with God also requires regular contact with his material representations on earth – the church or the mosque, the priest or imam, the religious paraphernalia, certain arrangements of people and objects in space that underpin religious rituals. No believer would be regarded a good Christian or a good Muslim if they did not regularly visit their place of worship, interact with the priest or imam, and take part in the religious rituals. The intimate relationship with God, therefore, involves the development of a spiritual closeness that rests on physical proximity, similarly


to the way in which interpersonal attachment involves an emotional bond built through physical contact and interaction between people. No parent can emotionally bond with their child and no adult can bond with a love partner without some type of physical contact (touching, hearing, seeing, etc.). In one way or another, the physical senses are also necessary in developing a relationship with God. God and separation distress While common religious experience provides evidence that maintaining proximity to God is central in establishing a bond with him, such experience also suggests that when such a proximity is substantially decreased, believers experience emotional distress. In that case, believers also wish to re-establish contact with God as the only route of restoring peace in themselves. Researchers have argued that such a state of emotional distress is comparable to a child’s upset when s/he accidentally finds him/herself outside the zone of parental accessibility or the distress experienced by committed lovers forced to separate for a considerable period of time (Granqvist et al., 2010). Religious scripts are awash with examples of the terrible torment experienced by individuals who had distanced themselves from God, who had “lost” God, and the radical transformations occurring in their lives when they managed to find him. In the Bible a number of well-known parables illustrate this central theme. The parables of the lost sheep, the lost or prodigal son, and the lost coin seem to unfold around a metaphor in which spiritual closeness to God is represented as physical proximity to him and spiritual isolation and despair as physical distancing. A similar metaphor appears to be also central in Christian discourse two thousand years later, not in agricultural communities in Palestine but in the postindustrial metropoles of the North-West. In an anonymous note entitled “Lost touch with God, and I need Him more than ever”, a member of an online self-help forum of depersonalisation sufferers writes: It’s been worrying me a lot lately that I feel like God has abandoned me because I went looking for another religion, and since then I have had more depersonalisation and more anxiety than ever. I decided to leave Christianity because I didn’t agree with what some people did within it ... I did however have a relationship with the God that I had prayed to since childhood, and he answered my most desperate prayers and that made me feel safe. Because I didn’t agree with everything else about the religion, I left God with it in search of a spiritual path that better fit me. I did find it, but I didn’t find God again, and


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that left me feeling very alone. So after much anxiety and depression, I am having trouble getting that connection with God back again. I just prayed, and I will continue to do so but I’d like to hear if anyone else has experienced this, and if they got past the stage I am at right now to a place where they feel happier and connected to God again. (Depersonalisation Community, 2012) As if he were responding to the above message, in one of his public broadcasts Dr Charles Stanley (2011), an American Baptist senior pastor, advises: Do you sense a distance between yourself and God? If it is a recent feeling, you may be able to trace it back to the source such as attitude, an idea, or the lack of time spent with God. But if this distance feels like a chasm it is important to examine what God is ... you may feel like you’ve lost him but remember, He has not lost you. Empirical attachment research has not yet focused explicitly on proximity maintenance and separation distress in relation to God as an attachment figure. However, a study conducted by Birgegard and Granqvist (2004) partly supported the importance of these two attachment characteristics in religious experience. According to the findings of the study, exposure to subliminal priming suggested abandonment from God led to different reactions in individuals with different histories of childhood attachment: those with a history of secure attachment responded to the mild anxiety induced by the prime by increasing their closeness to God, while those with a history of insecurity responded by increasing their distance. Attachment insecurity and religious experience In the sections above I have discussed a main idea proposed in the attachment literature, more specifically the idea that the relationship with God and other supernatural entities present the basic characteristics of an attachment relationship: safe haven, secure base, proximity seeking, and separation distress. In addition to this suggestion, attachment researchers have made a second interesting claim, proposing that quality of attachment in interpersonal relationships may be linked to a person’s religiosity (Granqvist et al., 2012). In particular, these authors suggest that the quality of parent-child attachment not only has an impact on the quality of subsequent interpersonal relationships and the competence of the self, but it can also

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affect an individual’s stand towards religion. Using a similar rationale to that followed by researchers on attachment and group leadership, authors attempting to explain the link between the primary marker of attachment quality, attachment security, and the adoption of religious beliefs have put forward two main hypotheses: the compensation and the correspondence hypothesis. On the one hand, researchers suggest that human beings turn to religion out of insecurity, creating a relationship with an imaginary supreme being so that they finally feel the unconditional love, acceptance, and protection they never experienced with their own caregivers in childhood. According to attachment theory, insensitive caregivers fail to respond appropriately to the child’s needs, leaving a sense of vulnerability in the child, vulnerability that the child and adult to be would try to get rid of throughout life. The idea that God and religion can offer compensation for human insecurity goes back to Sigmund Freud (1961). Empirical studies investigating the role of attachment in religious phenomena seem to support this hypothesis. The strongest evidence perhaps comes from studies on sudden religious conversion. Recruiting a predominantly female US sample through a newspaper ad and using retrospective accounts of participants’ relationships with their parents, Kirkpatrick and Shaver (1990) found a link between insecurity in the mother–child bond and the urgency with which individuals had gone through a religious conversion. In particular, the authors reported that avoidant participants were more likely to experience a sudden religious conversion compared with either secure or anxious individuals. Interestingly, such a link between urgency of conversion and insecurity was not found in relation to the father-child bond. Similar findings highlighting the relationship between an unexpected and speedy religious conversion and a childhood history of insecure attachment have also been reported by other authors. In a meta-analytic review including 11 studies and 1450 participants, Granqvist and Kirkpatrick (2004) found that individuals who provided accounts of an insecure relationship with either their mother or father were more likely to have experienced a sudden religious conversion compared with individuals who were classified as secure in their parental attachments. Similarly, the findings reviewed by the authors suggested that sudden religious converts were more likely to report an insecure attachment with their fathers, not only when they were compared with non-converts but also when they were compared with individuals who had experienced a more gradual religious change. Interestingly, no such observation was made in relation to security with the mother.


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Granqvist and Kirkpatrick (2004) made a distinction between religious conviction as an expression of emotional and relational needs, a conviction they called emotionally based religiosity, and religious conviction as an inter-generationally transmitted cultural code, conviction they called socialisation-based religiosity. The authors found that compared with non-sudden converts, sudden converts reported higher levels of emotionally based religiosity but lower levels of socialisation-based religiosity. Moreover, according to authors’ meta-analysis, studies on attachment and religion have also identified a particular context associated with sudden conversion. More specifically, the findings showed that sudden converts tended to begin their conversion process following some personal crisis, such as the loss of an important relationship, the experience of failure, or the loss of direction in life. On the other hand, such occurrences were not as common in the lives of individuals who adopted a religious faith more gradually. Empirical findings therefore seem to suggest that individuals who suddenly convert to a religious dogma, on the one hand, tend to have a childhood history of unsupportive caregiving and, on the other hand, tend to convert after they experience a current personal crisis that leaves them feeling vulnerable, hopeless, and lonely. It seems that these individuals encounter a substantial life challenge, having in their disposal limited personal and interpersonal competencies and being unable to recruit efficiently supportive social relationships. Numerous studies have shown that insecurely attached individuals tend to have deficits in their interpersonal skills, as they draw on dysfunctional patterns of parent-child exchange while conducting current relationships (Haggerty et al., 2009). In the face of lack of support as their attachment system becomes activated by present misfortunes, these individuals feel that they may find a good attachment figure in God. This time, a time of crisis, they are not prepared to accept yet another emotional disappointment and will try to allow no room for their new intimate bond to go wrong. The new attachment figure will not be crucially flawed like the ones in the past – this time their attachment figure will be faultless, omnipotent, all good, and omnipresent, willing to provide love and acceptance without conditions. Further evidence providing support for a link between attachment insecurity and religiosity is provided in a study conducted by Kirkpatrick and Shaver (1992) on the phenomenon of glossolalia. Glossolalia is a form of religious ecstasy in which the individual talks in an incomprehensible imaginary language, often in a state of trance, and is regarded by believers as a sign that God has spoken to and through that person.

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These authors found that individuals who had experienced glossolalia were more likely to be anxiously attached than those who hadn’t. The finding is consistent with research reported by Kildahl (1972), according to which 85% of those who experienced glossolalia did so after they had gone through personal crises laden with anxiety that had left them feeling powerless and worthless. As those believers reported, the glossolalia experience provided them with clear evidence that they were worthy and loved by God. Finally, research has shown that different types of attachment insecurity are linked with different aspects of religious experience. Zahl and Gibson (2012) conducted a study involving UK and US university students to investigate if different representations of God as an attachment object were related with different aspect of religious faith. The authors distinguished between two types of God representations, those based on theological doctrine and those based on personal experience. According to the findings, individuals who presented signs of an avoidant attachment towards God tended to have positives views about the doctrinal aspect of God, but not about the experiential. On the other hand, those who presented signs of an anxious attachment to God tended to represent God as critical, both in doctrinal and experiential terms. Secure and insecure religiosities Despite the strong evidence supporting a link between religious phenomena and attachment insecurity, empirical studies on attachment and religion paint a more complex picture. Although it seems clear that some individuals use religion as a sanctuary to protect themselves against deep-seated difficulties in relating to others and to themselves, research also seems to confirm everyday experience that many religious individuals are interpersonally comfortable and emotionally open. In the studies evidencing a link between attachment insecurity and sudden religious conversion discussed above, many individuals among those who were gradually socialised into a religious faith appeared to have histories of loving and supportive relationships with their caregivers and presented characteristics of a secure attachment style. Those believers were socialised into their faiths via relationships of trust with people of emotional significance, usually their parents, extended families, and wider social networks. Moreover, Cassibba and colleagues (2008) reported a greater than usual presence of attachment security among a sample of devoted Catholics. Using the Adult Attachment Interview, a method assessing unconscious


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representations of childhood attachment in adults, the authors found a higher proportion of securely attached individuals among a sample of dedicated Italian Catholics, compared with an Italian community sample and the worldwide distribution of attachment categories. The religious sample included devoted individuals and priests who led reclusive lives in the monastery or the church. The authors found no differences between the groups in relation to the three insecure attachment categories as assessed by the AAI (dismissive, preoccupied, and unresolved). Although the evidence supporting a link between the quality of attachment to parents and that of attachment to God was mixed in this study, and it was unclear from the reported findings whether any of the religious participants classified as securely attached had actually earned their security,2 the fact remains that these individuals were classified as secure using a sophisticated method of assessing attachment representations. Many authors assert that the observed link between religiosity and both secure and insecure attachment make a case for the correspondence hypothesis (Granqvist et al., 2010). According to their argument, the attitude one adopts towards religion and the type of relationship one establishes with God are informed by the type of relationship one has with his/ her own parents. If the child has formed a secure and loving bond with the parent then that child and later adult would also tend to perceive God as compassionate and supportive, while if the relationship with the parent is defined by neglect and rejection, God will tend to be perceived as critical and punishing. Researching a sample of US university students, Kirkpatrick (1998) found further empirical support for the correspondence hypothesis, as the participants from his sample who held images of God as loving and caring tended to be the ones who had constructed positive models of self and others through systematic positive experiences with caregivers (in other words, securely attached individuals). Authors providing support for the correspondence hypothesis argue that individuals’ religiosity is based, on the one hand, on a representational correspondence in a way that insecurely attached individuals would tend to form an insecure relationship with God and a problematic involvement with their religious faith, while securely attached individuals would tend to form a secure relationship with God and an enhancing and productive involvement with their faith. These theorists have also argued that representational correspondence is linked to a social correspondence, or the idea that securely attached offspring would tend to adopt the positions of their parents on religion (either religious or non-religious), while insecurely attached offspring would tend to adopt religious positions markedly different from those of their


parents. This view is in agreement with other studies discussing the intergenerational transmission of cultural codes. Spilka and colleagues (2003) argue that the religiosity of offspring is more similar to the religiosity of parents in more favourable parent-child relationships compared with less favourable ones, while Richters and Waters (1991) suggest that securely attached offspring have a greater tendency to adopt parental socio-cultural codes in general. The above arguments may help us understand how the correspondence hypothesis can explain the link between attachment security and speed of conversion presented above. Children and young people who are gradually socialised into the religious system of their parents are more likely to have a good emotional relationship with them, while children and young people who are less likely to adopt the parental religious attitudes, particularly those who more abruptly deviate from them (for example, by converting to another religion), are less likely to have formed a secure bond. Although the relevant literature clearly suggests a link between religiosity and insecure attachment, it also emphasises that attachment insecurity is not the only route to religion. The above studies seem to suggest that both securely and insecurely attached individuals may become religious, although they approach religion in different ways. Although culturally and philosophically similar in significant ways, secure and insecure religiosities also have important differences between them.

Attachment and spirituality In addition to evidence suggesting that the attachment system is implicated in the experience of religion proper, studies have also indicated that attachment is also relevant in understanding important aspects of spirituality beyond the established religions. Interviewing a group of participants who belonged to religious groups and another group of individuals who simply had an interest in spirituality, Granqvist and colleagues (2012) found a link between mystical experience and disorganised attachment. Testing a meditational model, the authors suggested that individuals who were classified as having an unresolved state of mind in relation to attachment in the Adult Attachment Interview tended to report “metaphysical” experiences at one or more points in their lifetime. The findings also suggested that those individuals were predisposed to absorption, or the experience of altered states consciousness. According to attachment research, an unresolved classification in the Adult Attachment Interview suggests childhood experiences that


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have had a disorganising impact on the attachment system, such as abuse or severe neglect, or other parental behaviours perceived by the child as frightening. There is strong research evidence linking disorganised attachment with various forms of psychopathology, including a tendency to enter altered states of consciousness (Granqvist, 2012). According to the findings reported by the authors it was that predisposition towards entering altered states of consciousness that led disorganised individuals to develop mystical experiences, such as the feeling of connection between the self and all things or of the sense of being revealed the ultimate truth. Granqvist and colleagues (2012) suggested that the above mechanism linking insecure attachment and mystical experience needs to be evaluated with caution. On the one hand, absorption is an example of dissociation, therefore classified as a form of pathology, and it is well known that mystical experience can lead to destructive behaviour both for others and the self. On the other hand, the authors argue, absorption is only a mild form of dissociation, while we should also keep in mind that in some cases mystical experience could be reparative – the sense of unity with an imagined positive entity may provide a new attachment experience with a substitute attachment object and increase, at least partly, the individual’s attachment security. What seems to be suggested in both scenarios, however, is that the quest for a secure emotional bond with another may be one of the important motivating factors behind an interest in spirituality.

Attachment and political ideology A number of empirical studies support the idea that the attachment system may also be implicated in the adoption of political ideological positions. In an interesting study during the 2004 American elections, Weise and colleagues (2008) did not find any link between attachment security in adult relationships and candidate preference. However, when the authors put their research participants under the experimental condition of mortality salience, the relatively insecure individuals tended to move their preference towards the more conservative candidate (Bush), while the relatively secure participants tended to shift towards the less conservative (Kerry). Mortality salience is an experimental technique according to which thoughts of one’s own mortality are experimentally brought to one’s mind (e.g. participants are asked to think of their own death).


In their second study of the series, these experimenters assessed the participants’ level of support for an extreme American military response to the 9/11 attacks and exposed them again to mortality salience. However, before the salience exposure half of the participants were asked to think of a person who was “very accepting” of them (relationship prime) and the other half to think of a colleague with whom they almost never socialised (neutral prime). When their exposure to salience was completed participants were asked to indicate their level of support for an extreme military action to be taken by the USA. According to the findings, those who had received the relationship prime reduced their support for such action compared with their first report, while those who had received the neutral prime didn’t. In a similar experimental study involving American undergraduate students, Gillath and Hart (2010) wished to find out if thoughts relating to attachment security would buffer the effects of mortality salience on participants’ views on American foreign policy. Following a similar mortality salience method to that utilised by Weise and colleagues, the authors asked half their participants to imagine their own death and write down the thoughts and feelings that this generated. They also asked the other half to imagine an episode in which they suffered from dental pain and also write down thoughts and feelings. Then, researchers split each of the two groups into two subgroups: one subgroup were asked to bring to mind and describe in detail their emotionally closest current relationship (security prime) and the second subgroup were asked to do the same in relation to an individual they knew personally but not very well (acquaintance prime). After the priming procedure was completed, the experimenters asked all participants to complete a questionnaire providing their views on two major foreign policy issues: the war in Iraq and the attitudes USA should adopt towards North Korea. According to the study’s findings, individuals who had been exposed to mortality salience expressed greater support for the Iraq War than those who had been exposed to the dental pain scenario. Also, participants exposed to the security prime reported less support for the war in Iraq and advocated a softer foreign policy towards North Korea, compared with those exposed to the acquaintance prime. Findings also indicated that the type of prime participants received buffered the effects of mortality salience on individuals’ support for the Iraq War: those who after being exposed to mortality salience were also exposed to the acquaintance prime reported greater support for the war in Iraq, while those who, in addition to the mortality salience, were exposed to the security prime (that is, they wrote about an


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attachment figure rather than a simple acquaintance) did not change their views on the war. This very interesting study also found that although individuals high in conservatism initially expressed greater support for the Iraq War compared with those who scored low in conservatism, when all participants were exposed to mortality salience the two groups did not differ in their support for the war. Also the findings showed that while the most conservative participants increased their support for the war when they had been exposed to mortality salience, when salience had been accompanied by security priming such an increase in support was not observed. In addition to suggesting that the need for attachment security may play a role in a range of political choices (e.g. choice of candidate, choice of foreign policy), attachment-inspired research has also indicated that the quality of attachment representations is linked with the type of political ideology an individual subscribes to. Although a few studies report correlations between a liberal political orientation and a dismissing attachment style (Thornhill and Fincher, 2007), most research supports links between attachment security and liberalism, on the one hand, and attachment insecurity and conservatism, on the other hand (Weber and Federico, 2007; Weise et al., 2008). In a correlational study involving the participation of university undergraduates, Weber and Federico (2007) found that different world and political beliefs were underpinned by different attachment dimensions. In particular, using structural equation modelling, the authors found that attachment anxiety was directly linked with the set of beliefs that is known in the literature as dangerous world beliefs (Altemeyer, 1996). According to this view, the world is rapidly descending into a state of moral decay, physical threat, and anarchy. On the other hand, the authors’ findings suggested that attachment avoidance was directly linked with a different world-view – what in the relevant literature has been known as competitive jungle. According to that view, although the world has an order and there are rules to be followed, eventually all social law boils down to one fundamental principle: dog eat dog. According to the competitive jungle world-view what really matters in life is to be a winner – that is, wealthy and powerful – leaving very little room for morality and an inner world. Weber and Federico argue that these two sets of links involving the two attachment dimensions constitute distinct pathways arriving at different socio-political ideologies. Driven by a sense of uncertainty regarding the availability of support and little trust in their own efficiency, anxious individuals adopt the dangerous world-view that makes

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them susceptible to what in the literature has been called right-wing authoritarianism (Altemeyer, 1981). Right-wing authoritarianism seems to promise the security that anxiously attached individuals crave for as it proposes that the unchallenged acceptance of tradition rather than critical reflection and free debate should be the foundation of both moral values and the written law and that law violations should be severely punished with no mitigating circumstances considered. Right-wing authoritarianism becomes a further source of certainty and acceptance for the anxiously attached as it tolerates no deviation from the social norms and calls for its strong condemnation and stigmatisation. On the other hand, the findings of the above study suggested that individuals with an avoidant attachment style tended to be driven to a different political ideology that was more compatible with their competitive jungle world-view. Feeling confident in their self-efficiency and defensively dismissing the need for human support and collaboration, avoidantly attached individuals perceived the world as a jungle and tended to adopt what in the literature has been termed social dominance orientation (Sidanius and Pratto, 1999). Having their needs for human relating initially rejected and then suppressed with no major interference in the instrumental competence of the self, individuals scoring high in the avoidance dimension seemed attracted to insensitive and cynical political ideologies. According to the social dominance orientation view, social inequality is regarded as being part of the natural order of things and sometimes social oppression is justified. Both right-wing authoritarianism and the social dominance orientation as measured in the above study are important empirical constructs in the political psychology literature, as they have strongly predicted public opinion and voting behaviour in previous studies. According to the findings of the above study, individuals who placed themselves on the right of the political spectrum were more likely to have followed the anxiety-dangerous world–right-wing authoritarianism pathway, rather than the avoidance–competitive jungle–social dominance orientation pathway, suggesting that attachment anxiety rather than avoidance was more closely related to right-wing socio-political views. Informed by the past experience of caregiver’s inconsistent availability and the ensuing restrictions in the ability of the self to cope with stress, anxiously attached individuals may be particularly motivated to adopt political ideologies that offer absolute certainties and tolerate no ambiguity.


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Attachment and materialism Being a major ideological component of contemporary Western culture and also present in different forms in other cultures current and past, materialism, or the excessive ascription of value in the possession of material goods, may be linked with insecurity of attachment. Unfortunately, only one study so far has directly investigated the link between materialism and attachment style (Kosmicki, 2002). According to the findings of that study, participants who presented relatively high materialistic traits and values tended to also score relatively high on both attachment anxiety and avoidance. Nonetheless, avoidantly and anxiously attached participants presented a somewhat distinct materialistic profile: while the former tended to be characterised by lack of generosity, the latter presented higher levels of materialistic envy. Although no other study so far has confirmed or disconfirmed Kosmicki’s findings, empirical evidence involving variables closely related to the concept of attachment has repeatedly indicated that materialism is linked to problems in emotion-laden human relating. Some of that evidence comes from research on the development of materialistic attitudes in children. That research seems to suggest that the quality of family interactions that permeate the care of children play a major role in whether children become materialistic. Moschis and Moore (1979) found that children adopt more materialistic values when they are raised by “socio-orientated” parents – that is, parents who expect them to give in in arguments, avoid confrontation with other family members, avoid the expression of negative feelings, and generally make sure they don’t engage in any behaviour that could be seen as a danger to cohesion of the family group. On the contrary children raised by “concept-orientated” parents – that is, parents who encourage the expression of ideas, value debate, and invite their children to explore the different sides of an argument – are less likely to adopt materialistic values. It would be reasonable to expect a greater number of insecurely attached children among the children raised by the former type of parent. Of course children are not influenced only by their parents but also by sources outside the family like peers or TV programmes. Research has shown associations between such sources of potential influence and materialism in children (Bachmann, 1997). However, since those studies tend to be correlational, it would be difficult to claim causality in the relationships between the different variables. For example, although it is possible that materialistic peers and commercial TV programmes


make children more materialistic, it is also possible that children who have become materialistic primarily due to the quality of the relationship they have with their parents tend to choose materialistic peers to socialise with and to watch commercial TV programmes. Empirical findings seem to indicate that the latter may be the case. For example, in a study conducted by Moschis and Moore (1982) the correlations between materialism and commercial TV viewing became non-significant when the effects of parental communication were controlled for. Interestingly the authors report that children who were able to communicate openly with their parents about consumer matters did not become materialistic in the long run even when they spent many hours watching TV. Nonetheless, even if it is accepted that the parent-child relationship sets the interpersonal foundations of materialism, the contribution of factors outside the family should not be ignored. Important relationships such as those with peers may still play an important role in further enhancing or buffering some of the effects of unsupportive parent-child relationships. Further indirect evidence supporting an insecure attachment–materialism link comes from a study conducted by Kasser and Kasser (2001). Utilising a sample of undergraduate students, the authors found that the dreams of those scoring high on materialism tended to depict parent-child role reversal, family conflict, and the inability of parents to support their child’s autonomy. Those dreams also described difficulties with intimacy in current relationships and past experience of rejection to haunt the young person’s present attempts to remain close to others. Such themes were contrasted with the dream themes of individuals who did not appear to endorse a materialistic approach to life: those dreams depicted characteristics of secure bonding: supportive family relationships when the students were young children and greater desire for and capacity to form emotional ties in the present. Another source of indirect evidence potentially linking insecure attachment and materialism comes from studies exploring the interesting concept of experiential avoidance. Kashdan and colleagues (2006: 1301) define experiential avoidance as “a process involving the excessive negative evaluations of unwanted private thoughts, feelings, and sensations, an unwillingness to experience these private events, and deliberate efforts to control or escape from them”. A critical characteristic of experiential avoidance as a dysfunctional strategy of self-regulation is the pervasiveness of such efforts. Although no studies so far have empirically looked for a link between experiential and attachment avoidance, authors have emphasised the close affinity between the two concepts (Shear, 2010).


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Mild attempts to restrain negative emotion are part of psychologically healthy functioning, for example managing to be diplomatic when we are annoyed with someone. However, individuals who systematically engage in experiential avoidance suppress core aspects of their experience in a very forceful and rigid manner, based on evaluations that contradict reality in an apparent way. It is not surprising therefore that numerous empirical studies have found experiential avoidance to correlate with measures of general psychopathology, anxiety, and depression (Chawla and Ostafin, 2007). Research suggests that experiential avoidance is not part of a particular psychiatric disorder per se, but rather constitutes a vulnerability factor for such a disorder. In an empirical study with university undergraduates, Kashdan and Breen (2007) found not only that experiential avoidance was clearly related to materialism, but also that it provided the mechanism by which materialism led to decreased well-being. Using measures of general negative emotions, social anxiety, depression, competence, autonomy, the capacity to feel gratitude for others, the capacity to establish deep emotional relationships with others, and the capacity to find meaning in one’s life, these authors found that individuals driven by materialistic values suffered in all those domains because they engaged in experiential avoidance. It seems that those individuals strived to possess more and more material goods and acquire more and more wealth as they were desperately attempting to block the resurfacing of distressing experiences and the overflow of unmanageable negative emotions. On the basis of those findings, materialism appeared to be a defence against the experience of psychological pain. Another important relevant area of research is the work conducted on the link between the adoption of materialistic values and what has been known in the literature as “existential insecurity”. In particular, a number of studies using both experimental and correlational methodologies identified a link between materialism and anxiety over death. In their interesting study exploring students’ dreams referred to above, Kasser and Kasser (2001) found that materialistic individuals were much more likely to dream about death or falling, while the non-materialists were more likely to transform danger into something exciting and amusing in their dreams. The authors have suggested that this difference indicated an important disparity in how the two groups dealt with anxiety: non-materialist individuals were able to deal more confidently and finally master the challenges of life, while those with a materialistic viewpoint appeared overwhelmed by anxiety, eventually surrendering to the demands of reality.

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Attachment and attitude towards death Research suggests that excessive anxiety over death is also linked with insecurity of attachment. Based on the central claims of attachment theory that an individual’s emotional response to a distressing situation is decisively informed by his/her attachment style and that secure individuals are less overwhelmed by danger and the unknown as they feel they can turn to others for support, Mikulincer and colleagues (1990) conducted a study investigating the link between attachment and fear of death. Recruiting a sample of Israeli university students who defined themselves as non-religious and who had not experienced any bereavement in the year before the study, the authors found that insecurely attached participants were more likely to fear death compared with participants who were insecurely attached. In particular, the authors reported that the fear of ambivalent individuals seemed to be linked to their perception of death as a loss of social identity, while the fear of avoidant individuals seemed to be linked with their perception of death as something obscure and unidentified. Moreover, while ambivalent individuals showed more fear of death than the secure when such fear was assessed at all levels of awareness, dismissing individuals differed from the secure only when the fear of death was assessed at a lower awareness level by the use of the projective Thematic Apperception Test but not when it was assessed at a higher awareness level by the use of a self-report questionnaire. This was in agreement with previous findings suggesting that dismissing individuals use more effective defences in excluding feelings of neediness and vulnerability from awareness than ambivalent individuals do. Such defensive exclusions often result in positive reporting distortions as participants complete self-report questionnaires, but they do not work effectively when a lower level of awareness is assessed as is the case in projective testing. Some of the above findings were replicated by another study also involving Israeli Jewish students, conducted by Mikulincer and Florian (1998). In that study as well, compared with the secure, ambivalent individuals reported greater fear that death would bring a loss of social identity; however, according to those findings, both ambivalent and avoidant students feared death as the unknown. The authors also report that avoidant students were less concerned than either the secure or the ambivalent about the legacy they would leave behind after their death – what in the literature has been referred to as symbolic immortality. In particular, avoidant individuals were less concerned than the others about the survival and well-being of their children and the next


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generation, as well as about the intellectual or spiritual inheritance they would pass on through their creativity and work. Finally, this study suggested that while among securely attached individuals the relationship between fear of death and the need for symbolic immortality was inverse, among each of the two insecurely attached groups it was positive. In other words, while on the one hand, the secure individuals who were concerned about their after-death legacy the most were the ones who feared death the least, the ambivalent or avoidant individuals who were concerned about their legacy the most were the ones who also feared death the most.

Attachment and attitude towards stigmatised groups One area of prejudicial social attitudes that have been linked to attachment insecurity is homophobia. Using a student sample from a Midwestern American university, Gormley and Lopez (2010) found that a dismissing attachment style was linked to homophobic attitudes, but only among men. Dismissing women did not differ from individuals with other attachment styles regarding attitudes towards homosexuality. However, in another study also involving a US student sample, this time from a southern university, Schwartz and Lindley (2005) found a negative correlation between attachment avoidance and homophobia among women (that is, the more dismissing women tended to be less homophobic), while they found no association between attachment style and homophobia overall. Those two studies seemed to suggest different moderating effects of gender on the link between attachment avoidance and homophobia: while in the first study dismissing men tended to be more homophobic, in the second study women tended to be less. Nonetheless, the methodological limitations of the above research need to be considered. First, more robust statistical procedures were required in order to test for the moderating effects of gender, that could possibly clarify the interaction between gender and the dismissing dimension. Moreover, in both studies the samples consisted predominantly of white, female university students from traditionally conservative regions of the USA while in the Schwartz and Lindley paper the sample included almost exclusively Christian fundamentalists from a “Bible Belt” college community. It is possible that socio-cultural beliefs are a stronger predictor of homophobic attitudes than adult attachment and perhaps attachment style could be more appropriately utilised as a moderator of the link between such beliefs and homophobia. In other words, it is likely that

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attachment insecurity is a significant factor in turning an individual of a particular world view or religious persuasion into a homophobe compared with another securely attached individual belonging to the same broader socio-cultural or religious group. In addition to contributing to the adoption of prejudiced attitudes towards others, studies suggest that attachment insecurity plays a significant role in directing homophobic attitudes towards the self. Researching a sample of homosexual men, Jellison and McConnell (2003) found that attachment security was related to greater levels of accepting one’s own homosexuality and disclosing it to others, while Sherry (2007) has reported similar findings involving a mixed sample of homosexual men and women. According to Sherry’s findings, a fearful and a preoccupied attachment style predisposed homosexual men and women towards developing more internalised homophobia, as well as a greater sense of shame and guilt about their own sexual orientation. Moreover, investigating a possible relationship between attachment style and attitudes towards disability, Vilchinsky et al. (2010) found that although an imagined encounter with a disabled individual increased participants’ negative emotions regardless of attachment style, attachment style moderated the participants’ cognition and behaviour. In particular, when student participants were asked to read a hypothetical scenario involving an encounter with a disabled person, only the anxious and avoidant participants thought and behaved more negatively than students who had been given a similar scenario of an encounter with a person without disability. Nonetheless, it was only the thinking and behaviour of the insecurely attached individuals that were affected by the disability status of the hypothetical fellow human more than the thinking and behaviour of the secure. Interestingly, attachment style did not make any difference in the emotional reaction of the participants hypothetically interacting with the disabled individual. The authors suggest that although secure individuals may also experience negative emotions when they encounter a disabled person, they are able to manage those feelings and quickly restore their usual positive and caring attitudes towards others. Insecurely attached individuals, on the other hand, have a reduced capacity to regulate negative emotion and engage in functional and constructive social interaction. The authors report that the anxiously attached female participants were particularly overwhelmed, emotionally distant, and unempathetic towards the imagined disabled individual when that individual was also female. They suggest that a tendency for psychological merger


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that characterises the relationships of anxiously attached individuals resulted in a lack of clear distinctiveness between the self and the disabled person and focused the negative feelings on the self. Encountering a person who is perceived to be vulnerable immediately signals danger to the anxiously attached individual, as she always needs to occupy the care-seeking position herself. Moreover, by getting too close to someone who is perceived to be less socially acceptable, indicates social rejection by association to the anxious person and deepens her feelings of vulnerability and isolation. With such unclear boundaries between self and other, the capacity for empathy, understanding, and pro-social action is radically compromised, as is the individual’s agency. In this chapter I argued that the most essential security-bearing quality of a social group is its network of ideological and institutional elements that organise life in the group and therefore make survival possible. I also reviewed important studies providing empirical evidence in support of the idea that the attachment system is implicated in the construction of frameworks of value and belief, including religions, political ideologies, and a variety of socio-cultural attitudes. Those studies seem to suggest that insecurity of attachment motivates individuals to seek refuge in rigid and uncritical systems of thought, as they attempt to attain emotional states of felt security. Motivated by security needs, individual attachment dynamics feed into the construction of ideological and institutional systems that aim to provide protection for the group – they feed into the construction of the group as an attachment object. In the next chapter I will discuss how the social group as a collective entity transcends the contributions of individual dynamics and in turn bounds the individual’s attachment experience.

4 Beyond Dyadic Relationships: The Collective Manifestation of Attachment

In the previous chapters I presented the argument that human attachment to social groups is intrinsically linked with an attachment to systems of meaning. Such systems make the existence of social groups possible as they ensure group functioning, promote the exchange of social support, attain social cohesion, and define the group’s identity. I based my argument on the existing literature suggesting that the attachment system is implicated in the establishment of emotional bonds with the social group as a whole as well as with group leaders and other group members. I also referred to many studies suggesting that the attachment system is involved in how individuals engage with religion, political ideology, and social attitudes. The above literature has made a vital contribution as it has highlighted the role of attachment in wider socio-cultural processes. In this chapter I will attempt to extend that contribution by addressing an important limitation I think that literature presents, a limitation that goes beyond the over-reliance on student samples and laboratory experiments: the assumption that attachment is only a dyadic (and an individual) phenomenon. In this chapter I will attempt to stretch my argument further and claim that the attachment system is not implicated only in how individuals relate to social groups, ideological systems, and social institutions, but also in how systems of meaning and group identities are constructed collectively. I will attempt to make a case for the phenomenon of collective attachment. The main aim of the literature discussed in the previous chapters has been to expand attachment research beyond the domain of interpersonal relationships into the study of wider socio-cultural phenomena. That literature has drawn on the main theoretical premises and empirical findings of attachment research in order to elaborate the role of emotional factors in how individuals position themselves in relation to their social groups, group leaders, political ideologies, or religious 68

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doctrines. The researchers conducting those studies have suggested that individuals’ experience in intimate interpersonal relationships, primarily with caregivers in childhood, is somehow linked with their experience of major aspects of the social world beyond such relationships. The main contribution of those studies was that they extended the notion of attachment. They provided empirical evidence suggesting that the attachment system is involved not only in fundamental interpersonal and self-regulatory processes, but also in wider social sociocultural phenomena. The above studies seem to imply that human beings do not look for attachment security only in intimate others, but also in a variety of other resources anchored in the social world. Nonetheless, despite their vital contribution, those studies present an important limitation: they refuse to transcend the levels of the dyad and the individual. Although in the above literature the individual has been shown to be emotionally engaged with aspects of the wider social world, that engagement is treated essentially as a dyadic bond. In those studies, social groups, God, and political leaders tend to be presented as part of the individual’s network of interpersonal relationships and those relationships tend to be formed primarily on the basis of the individual’s personal history. Although there is little doubt that political leaders, religious figures, or ethnic groups are often experienced as intimate others and that the individuals’ personal relational histories substantially inform those imagined bonds, individuals do not invent their leaders, their social groups, and their systems of belief ex nihilo and they don’t define them as attachment objects in isolation guided only by their personal past. Leaders, ideological systems, and social institutions are essentially constructed by collectivities and therefore their treatment as attachment objects begins long before they enter a particular individual’s “supportive network”. When human beings attempt to find safety, connectedness, recognition, and meaning in their links with such attachment objects, they do so within complex webs of social relationships, applying elaborate cultural codes, and operating at very specific points of an incessant socio-historical process. Those aspects of the wider social world that provide human beings with safety and security are constructed collectively and publically, not simply dyadically and privately, and such collective construction always occurs in a particular socio-cultural and historical context. A god, a political leader, or a social institution enter the individual’s network of supportive bonds after these started to be constructed as securitybearing objects by members of a specific socio-cultural group. Such collective construction takes place at a specific historical period and in a


specific geographical location, building upon similar collective constructions of the past, while the individuals involved are already exposed to particular social debates conducted in particular ways and including particular arguments. It is in such multifaceted collective processes that political and religious leaders, ideological systems, and social institutions are identified as security-bearing objects and it is therefore crucial for attachment research concerned with those aspects of the social world to identify human collectivity as one of its major focal points. As in other social animals, in human beings the basic biological needs of the species are manifested both at the level of the individual and that of the group. Finding food, securing shelter, or protecting the young is not only an individual concern among humans; it is also a concern manifested and organised at the level of the social group. Social groups not only define the rules by which group members should address those needs individually, but they also identify and respond to those needs collectively. For example, it is not only individuals who respond to the basic human need to be fed by going hunting, or getting a job, but the social group as a whole needs to engage in such need-satisfying action by developing a collective approach, a “policy”, on food production or food gathering. In other words, the individual is not the only human system that needs to survive; critically, the human group also needs to do so by addressing one of the basic human needs. The individual and the group are the two inseparable sides of the human coin and the survival of one is inconceivable without the survival of the other. As this fundamental human duality applies to all basic human needs, there is no reason to assume that it does not also apply to the need for attachment. In fact, as it will be argued in detail in the reminder of the book, there is every reason to expect that the human need for attachment is manifested at the level of the collective as it is at the level of the individual. In this book I argue that, in addition to individuals, social groups address the attachment needs of the human species. Throughout the historical process, social groups generate constructions that relate to their collective needs for security and protection. They define what constitutes a group threat and what the best strategy is to protect themselves from it, and identify ways in which they aim to strengthen their prospects of long-term survival. They attempt to construct the best possible regulatory frameworks so that the group as a whole, as well as individuals and subgroups can maximise their skills on the mastery of the world. On the one hand, they attempt to exert effective control over the physical environment, for example by sustaining adequate food and material production or by maximising immunity against illness and natural disaster. On the other hand, they wish to deepen their understanding of the human


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psyche. By generating sophisticated accounts of the human mind and behaviour, social groups reduce the chances of self-damaging internal conflict and incohesion and increase their competence in defending against aggressors as well as succeeding as dominators. Although attachment is rooted in the biology of the species, like any other basic human need, it is manifested through culture. Unlike other animals, humans do not simply inherit their social rules from biology, but even basic biological requirements need to unfold according to systems of beliefs, value, and practice that social scientists have called culture. The satisfaction of basic biological needs in humans, therefore, is not only a social but also a cultural concern. How, when, and what food or clothes are produced and how they are distributed, who should have sex with who, how and when one can use aggression to protect one’s self are all examples of basic biological needs being met according to a diversity of cultural codes that define humans as a species. As anthropologists have put it, there is almost nothing about human beings that is not cultural (Levi-Strauss, 2008). While socio-cultural codes prescribe how individuals should go about their daily lives addressing their basic biological needs, they also stipulate how need and fulfilment should be dealt with collectively. The intrinsic link between an economic policy or a national health strategy with the fundamental cultural assumptions of a contemporary society is just one example of how culture and biological need are closely entwined at a collective level. Culture plays also a critical role in the organisation of attachment. Although the human need for security is rooted deeply in the evolutionary panoply of the species, culture considerably influences the particular ways in which those needs are defined, experienced, fulfilled, or frustrated, at the individual, dyadic, and collective levels. Very importantly, the relationship between cultural construction and fundamental biological need is bi-directional. While cultural codes prescribe the manner in which attachment needs are defined, expressed, and addressed, the fundamental human need for attachment influences socio-cultural organisation in important ways. As they intend to protect from danger and provide long-term stability and prosperity in the human group, collectively established ideological and institutional frameworks function as objects of collective attachment. Conceptualising ideological and institutional systems as objects of collective attachment does not imply of course that the human need for collective security is the only force contributing in their construction. Ideological systems and social institutions are created and continuously transformed throughout history as a multiplicity of human needs keep constructed and reconstructed. Attachment is one of those fundamental needs.


Nonetheless, the human need for security as a motivating force in the construction of ideological and institutional systems has been largely neglected among the relevant social sciences and perhaps it is now time to be appropriately recognised and systematically researched. The construction of ideological systems and social institutions as objects of collective attachment should be understood in relation to the wider culture within which such a construction occurs. Cultural assumptions unrelated to the provision of collective security may influence the construction of collective attachment objects, while the construction of the security- and safety-related aspects of ideologies and social institutions may shape cultural elements that do not directly relate to attachment concerns.

The function of collective attachment It was mentioned above that the function of the attachment system at the level of the group is to protect the group from danger and enhance its medium- and long-term well-being by creating living and working conditions that breed security. In that sense the notion of collective attachment complements attachment theorists’ proposal that attachment is an evolutionary behavioural system ultimately aiming at increasing the chances of species survival. However, that notion of collective attachment should also be considered in the context of the latest conceptual refinements of attachment research, as theorists have moved beyond that elementary level of function and highlight the importance of attachment relationships in the development of complex socio-emotional capabilities in humans. Fonagy and colleagues (2002) argue that early attachment relationships introduce the infant into the intricacies of the human interpersonal and psychological worlds, laying the foundations for the individual’s competence in comprehending and mastering those worlds. It is through the relationship with a sensitive caregiver who accurately recognises and reflects the child’s mental states in his/her own behaviour, that the child identifies and assigns meaning in its own feelings, thoughts, and behaviour. According to these authors, it is a secure attachment relationship with a sensitive caregiver that critically defines the context in which human beings acquire the capacity for mentalisation, or the capacity to perceive self and others as beings with minds as opposed to bodies behaving in space. It is through that supportive relationship with another that a developing individual would be capable of seeing behind observable action and into the workings of the human mind that influence such action and give it meaning; it is through that supportive relationship that


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the developing individual will become capable of recognising intentions, wishes, fears, subjective perceptions, and misperceptions. On the other hand, an insecure parent-child relationship would tend to compromise the capacity to conceive of the internal world as subjective and representational, allowing the development of only a loose link between internal and external reality. Such a relationship would prevent the developing individual from transcending infantile modes of thinking, for example that of psychic equivalence, according to which subjective thoughts and feelings are thought of as external reality. The link between attachment security and the capacity to understand self and others as psychological and social agents has important implications in theorising about the function of the attachment system not only as attachment is manifested at the dyadic/individual but also at the collective level. As human beings are social animals, their well-being and ultimately survival depends on their capacity to understand how others think, what they really want, when they could be supportive, and when they could be threatening. The capacity to explore and understand accurately human mind and human relationships is expected to have a positive impact on individuals’ capacity to regulate the self, establish satisfying intimate relationships, and integrate with one’s social groups. It is expected to increase individuals’ social resources, social status, and general well-being. Such capacity also benefits the social group as a whole. Individuals with an increased mentalising capacity would be expected to form more cohesive, less conflictual, and more effective social groups, better able to establish conditions of long-term security and protect the group from internal and external threats. Nonetheless, the cohesiveness, effectiveness, and well-being of social groups do not only depend on the attachment security and mentalisation capacity of the individual members. As it will be discussed in detail below, the security–insecurity continuum may be relevant in making sense of collective attachment as it is in making sense of interpersonal bonds. The same may apply to the capacity to understand the human mind. Assuming that the principles pertaining to collective attachment are similar (although not identical) to those permeating interpersonal attachment, I suggest that both the capacity to experience secure as well as insecure bonding and the capacity to comprehend the human mind and human action define collective attachment as they define dyadic relationships. As they construct their objects of collective attachment, social groups construct interpretative frameworks that can be trusted or not trusted, frameworks within which human thinking, feeling, and behaviour, collective or individual, needs to be made sense of. By


creating ideological and institutional systems intended to protect them from immediate danger and foster long-term security, social groups also define the terms in which their own but also others’ collective needs, intentions, and subjective perceptions are to be allocated meaning and responded upon. As social groups generate constructions of their own collective needs, intentions, and perceptions as well as those of others, they create and re-create attachment objects that would protect them from danger and support them in the endeavours defined by those constructions.

Collective attachment strategies and collective attachment representations I mentioned above that the terms “secure” and “insecure” can be used not only to describe interpersonal attachment strategies and representations, but also collective ones. In this work I suggest that it is not only individuals who differ regarding their capacity to evaluate threats realistically, devise effective protective strategies, and experience genuine feelings of peace and calmness when not under threat. Social groups differ in relation to those capabilities too. I argue that group differences in those capabilities can be explained to a large extent by differences in the degree of security underpinning these groups’ collective attachment representations. As was discussed in Chapter 2, attachment researchers have empirically shown that individuals’ attachment to the social group are organised along the same fundamental dimensions that underlie interpersonal attachment: anxiety and avoidance (Smith et al., 1999). These authors suggest that high attachment anxiety (that is, continuous worry and preoccupation with being accepted and valued by one’s social group) and high avoidance (that is, exaggerated feelings of independence and lack of emotional involvement with the group) are defining characteristics of insecure states of individual-to-group attachment. Although the authors imply that an individual’s history of intimate relationships, particularly with caregivers in childhood, as well as group experiences, seem to predispose the individual to be securely or insecurely attached to a social group, they make no systematic attempt to elaborate on group characteristics that also may be likely to contribute to the formation of a secure or insecure individual-to-group bond. The present work proposes, first, that a more complete account of how individual-to-group bonds are constructed can be achieved if the notion of collective attachment as an important group characteristic is considered alongside the individual’s contribution to the bond and, second,


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that attachment security not only varies across different individual– group relationships, but also across different instances of constructing collective attachment objects. I will explore the latter issue first. I suggest that as is the case in dyadic attachment, security is also the fundamental element of collective attachment. I also suggest that the degree of security experienced by social groups in relation to their collective attachment objects differs across social groups, in many respects comparably to variations in attachment security individuals experience towards their groups (that is, the collective objects themselves), or other individuals. According to attachment research (see Chapter 1), attachment security is manifested in behaviour, or the behavioural strategies individuals use to respond in the presence of a perceived threat – for example, if and how they approach the attachment figure for support, how they deal with separations from an attachment figure, how much autonomy the exhibit in their actions. These researchers additionally suggest that attachment security is also manifested as representations, or internal mental structures that organise the processing of external and internal attachment-related stimuli, generate interpretations of attachment-related situations, and advise on the adoption of the best behavioural strategy. These general principles also refer to collective attachment phenomena. Social groups as wholes need to construct strategies of dealing with attachment-related events. For example, they need to assess realistically the damaging potential of external and internal threats to the wellbeing and cohesion of the group, they need to take specific defensive action against those threats, and they need to evaluate the effectiveness of their action also making any necessary adjustments. They also need to contain their negative emotions, such as intense fear or anger which, if left unmanaged, may eventually harm the group. Social groups conduct all these cognitive, behavioural, and emotional operations collectively and they do so within the organising frameworks provided by their institutional and ideological systems – that is, their collective attachment objects. Those collective operations are conducted under the guidance of collective representations that “inform” the group on the protective capacity of those objects, on how threats should be perceived, how protective action should be decided, conducted, and evaluated, how periods of calm should be organised, and what group-enhancing goals should be set. I will call those representations collective attachment representations. Like representations of interpersonal attachment, collective attachment representations are constructed in social interaction; however,


such interaction is not dyad- but group-referent. In other words, individuals construct collective representations of attachment when their interactions, either group or dyadic, have as their main focus attachment-related themes concerning the group (e.g. discussing a war) rather than the personal relationship between the interactants (e.g. discussing the need to talk to each other more). Although those interactions may be public or private, they will always focus on the concerns of the group for security and protection, rather than those of the individual. In other words, one way or another, they will debate the capability of ideological and institutional systems to act as effective objects of collective attachment and be part of the continuous process of revisiting that effectiveness. Even private conversations between intimate partners on social, political, or religious matters contribute directly to the construction of collective attachment objects and their representations. Public debates provide perhaps the most obvious terrain on which collective attachment representations are constructed and reconstructed. Media reports, televised debates, conferences, public meetings, political and religious rallies all construct representations of the collective attachment objects, but are also guided by them. It is important to note that collective attachment representations are intrinsically linked with the social interaction during which they are created, as they are with the objects of collective attachment themselves. At both the interpersonal and collective levels, attachment-related social interaction is guided by the representations currently in operation while, at the same time, it re-constructs such representations. Collective attachment representations are essentially historical entities in a process of incessant transformation that both inform and are informed by social interaction as the latter unfolds through time. Another point to be emphasised is the nature of the distinction between the representations of interpersonal and those of collective attachment. I mentioned above that while the latter are associated with social interaction focusing on a dyadic relationship, the former are linked with social interaction focusing on the group. This view is consistent with the findings of Smith and colleagues (1999) suggesting that individual-to-group and individual-to-individual attachment constitute different attachment domains. One would expect the domain of collective attachment to have its additional distinct characteristics. On the other hand, Smith and colleagues claimed that the separate attachment domains are also linked. Indeed a number of studies report that representational manifestations of interpersonal attachment (for example, attachment style) are linked to representations of individual–group attachment and aspects


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of individuals’ ideological stance (see Chapter 3). It would be therefore equally reasonable to expect that such interpersonal representational elements are also implicated in the construction of collective attachment objects as the individual takes part in ideological debates, overt or implicit, public or private. Provided the empirical evidence that individuals with a childhood history of insecure attachment to the caregiver tend to seek protection in all-powerful leaders and rigid political or religious doctrines as well as to form relatively incohesive groups (see Chapter 3), it would be reasonable to expect that if insecurely attached individuals were the majority in a social group that group would tend to form collective attachment objects underlain by insecurity. It would also be reasonable to assume that a social group with little trust in its social institutions and core ideological components would encounter difficulties fostering parent-child as well as close adult relationships relatively free from excessive anxiety or defensive avoidance. Nonetheless, although some link between the quality of group members’ interpersonal attachment representations and the quality of the group’s collective attachment objects is expected, such a link may not be straightforward. Despite their commonalities, dyadic and collective attachment are different spheres of attachment manifestation and one cannot be reduced to the other. Future empirical research in the area may provide interesting findings.

Secure vs. Insecure collective attachment In the previous section I defined the concepts of collective attachment strategy and collective attachment representation, emphasising that the former is informed by the latter while at the same time confirms or modifies the latter’s main elements. In this section I will discuss further the notion of security in collective attachment and elaborate on the distinction between security and insecurity in the collective attachment domain. According to the attachment theorists, attachment security is almost synonymous with trust and predictability. Secure children trust, or can predict, that their caregiver will understand and respond to their needs appropriately, while secure adults tend to form long-term emotional bonds with those they can depend on. According to Bowlby and the attachment theorists, when a caregiver reads correctly the needs of a child and responds appropriately, the secure child forms singular mental models of the caregiver, the self, and the interactions that have taken place between them. On the hand, an insecure child raised by a relatively insensitive caregiver will form multiple, or contradictory mental

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models, as the caregiver’s interpretations of those interactions have been contrary to the child’s own experience. For example, a parent may justify the harsh and unfair punishment of a child as being imposed for the child’s “own good”, an interpretation that contradicts the child’s own experience that his/her own feelings had not been considered. As fully experiencing their caregiver as uncaring, neglectful, or abusive would generate more distress in the him/ her, the child will unconsciously attempt to exclude from awareness the disturbing parental representations that more genuinely relate to his own experience and “overwrite” them with those consistent with the parental interpretation. As the child’s true experience cannot be really erased from the mind but only be partially set aside, the child will be guided by two sets of contradictory representations: a representation of the parent as both unloving and loving and a representation of the self as both unlovable and lovable. Attachment research has shown that these representations will underpin the child’s insecure attachment to that parent, create a long-lasting disposition towards relationship insecurity, and manifest themselves as incoherence in the insecure adult’s attachment narrative. In this book I suggest that similar processes leading to either singular and coherent or multiple and incoherent representations also define the operation of the attachment system at the collective level. Contrary to collective attachment security that is characterised by relatively congruent collective attachment representations and a coherent social narrative, collective attachment insecurity is underlain by contradictory collective attachment representations and marked incoherence in the collective attachment narrative. In the next chapter I will discuss in detail how the profound contradictions in the social narrative supporting the invasion of Iraq in 2003 suggested the operation of insecure collective attachment representations in American and other Western societies. Here I wish to explain how such insecure collective representations are constructed. Contrary to secure objects of collective attachment that are constructed through a relatively large social consensus and in the context of social debate characterised by limited animosity and bitterness, insecure objects of collective attachment are typically constructed in the context of a marked domination of one social group by another. When ideological and institutional systems are constructed in conditions of relative social concord, where social debate is relatively open and tolerant and collective reflection is made possible, social groups develop a relative trust in their collective attachment objects and construct relatively coherent representations of them. In those instances collective


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attachments objects genuinely reflect important aspects of the group’s experience. Conversely, secure collective attachment objects provide a framework with which less conflictual, more consensual, and more collaborative social interaction can take place. Secure collective attachment representations enable the group to contain potentially disruptive emotion-laden states such as those dominated by fear, anger, or shame and facilitate reflective and productive debate towards effective problem solving. On the other hand, when social groups dominate upon others imposing their own ideological and institutional systems either by physical violence or psycho-social coercion, insecure objects of collective attachment are constructed informed by contradictory collective attachment representations. When the world-view of one group is violently dominated by that of another, sooner or later the former would have to adopt at least some of the ideological and institutional characteristics of the dominator. As this adoption is motivated by fear and does not reflect the subordinate group’s genuine social experience and does not constitute a genuine revision of the collective attachment objects, it does not result contradictory representations of those objects will be built. Just as Bowlby’s insensitively cared for child is required to adopt the parent’s version in order to avoid further anxiety, the dominated social group attempts to derive some sense of security by forcibly adopting the collective attachment objects of the oppressor. I am not suggesting here that social groups should be conceptualised as children or that collective phenomena operate just like dyadic relationships but that attachment manifestations in different domains of social life may be underpinned by some similar fundamental principles. When African men and women started being brought and sold as slaves to work in the plantations of the American South, despite their distaste for the social order to which they had been violently introduced, if they wanted to survive, they had to adapt, at least partly, to the new culture. In other words, in order for them to derive even the most negligible social protection available to a black slave, that highly traumatised social group had to adopt an ideological and institutional system that encouraged their very own dehumanisation and enslavement. It is perhaps no surprise that even now, one and a half centuries after the abolition of slavery and well into the second term of the first black American president, African Americans do not really feel safe on the American land (American Psychiatric Association, 2010b; Shapiro et al., 2013). As evident inter-racial prejudice and high rates in almost every socio-economic deprivation index still define social experience

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in many African American communities and despite the successes of particular individuals, African Americans as a group still struggle to construct secure collective attachment objects. Forceful domination of one social group over another does not necessarily involve physical violence, or at least, physical violence may not necessarily be the main mechanism of imposition. The rapid industrialisation and abrupt Westernisation of many parts of the developing world currently in a new phase constitutes a violent intrusion of the Western way of life and its ideological and institutional systems into non-Western societies, even when no military force is used. The ruthless demands of West-invented economic institutions for global obedience has threatened livelihoods and entire communities as effectively as tanks and air-strikes. As such a forceful process overwhelms and destabilises local cultures, it also questions unreflectively the adequacy of local collective attachment objects and damages the local populations’ trust in them. Pressurised by poverty and deprivation that the Western ways promise to cure and confused by the destabilisation of their traditional sources of certainty, local cultures are being forced to adopt the collective attachment objects of the “invaders” and gradually abandon their own. However, as this is not a process of gradual, conscious, freely debated, and reflected upon transformation but a forced fragmentation of existing social worlds for international and local individual profit, the “revised” attachment objects will be encoded in contradictory collective attachment representations and will be experienced simultaneously as both untrustworthy and trustworthy. Authors have described social experiences defined by physically or psycho-socially violent imposition as social and cultural traumas and have provided a long list of historical events that meet the criteria (Alexander, 2012). As I will discuss in more detail later, the concept of collective attachment could shed more light on important aspects of such social and cultural traumas. A central characteristic of traumatogenic processes, both at the individual and the social/cultural levels, is the absence of a support resource, either its total absence or the presence of a serious split in a previously functioning bond. As a distinction should be made between a painful and a traumatic experience (the latter being defined by pain that just cannot go away although its objective causes have long gone), traumatic experiences at the collective level seem to be generated by those difficult and painful historical events that overwhelm the group’s collective attachment system and render its collective objects inadequate. Researchers working on collective trauma have emphasised


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how on those occasions the resources of social groups appear inadequate to deal successfully with painful collective experience (Bell, 2010). Finally, it is important to emphasise the multiplicity and dynamic nature of collective attachment representations. Those characteristics have also been noted by attachment researchers in relation to interpersonal bonds (Collins and Read, 1994). For example, a child may be securely attached to one parent and insecurely attached to another, or an adult may be securely attached to one partner but present avoidant characteristics when interacting with another. According to attachment research, how an adult is constructed as an attachment figure depends on the attachment representations operating in the individual as well as on the partner’s input into the relationship. A similar complexity is expected to define collective attachment. For example, Christianity as a long-standing collective attachment object of Western society informed social experiences of great insecurity and instigated systematic violence devastatingly traumatising millions non-believers as well as Christians, while at the same time it inspired particular communities and individuals towards peace and humanity. Collective attachment objects are constructed through complex socio-historical processes and within diverse socio-cultural contexts so one would often expect both secure and insecure elements of collective attachment to inform the action of a particular group. What of course is critical is which of those opposing forces prevails at a particular time.

Collective attachment and unconscious social processes An essential characteristic of collective attachment, is critical in understanding socio-cultural imposition and the construction of incoherent collective attachment representations, is its unconscious nature. Attachment researchers have claimed that central aspects of interpersonal attachment processes are unconscious (see Chapter 1). What they mean by this term is not simply that mental material is left outside awareness. Although attachment researchers have downplayed the importance of drives and diverged from the psychoanalytic conceptualisation of the unconscious, they are also at odds with the cognitive perspective on non-conscious processes as being simply mental processes of which we are unaware. Drawing on its psychoanalytic origins, attachment theory advocates a motivational approach to unconscious mental life: important aspects of attachment experiences (e.g. parental rejection) remain outside awareness because they are painful and unsettling and if fully experienced, they would compromise the adaptive


capacity of the organism. I argue that processes of collective attachment are also unconscious in important respects as full recognition of a social group’s vulnerability may disrupt social order and eventually endanger the survival of the group. As discussed above, when social groups are faced with threatening events endangering their well-being they “increase their proximity” to their collective attachment objects – that is, they turn more intensely to their dominant ideologies and social institutions for devising a strategy of group protection. In addition to prescribing their content, ideologies and social institutions inform the manner in which those protective strategies need to be constructed; in other words they provide guidelines under which the relevant social debates need to be conducted. When those collective attachment objects provide frameworks that can generally sustain an open and reasoned social dialogue, group anxiety is generally effectively contained – it is appropriately expressed and symbolised in social conversation. Such relatively efficiently regulated collective anxiety will not prevent a realistic assessment of the threat, will not substantially obscure social reflection, and will not lead to ineffective action. In other words, such a relatively well-contained and metabolised anxiety will not substantially impede the capability of the group to become aware of its own needs and the demands of the world. When, on the other hand, collective attachment objects do not allow the adequate expression, understanding, and regulation of collective anxiety, substantial parts of that anxiety will be excluded from awareness as their sustained conscious experience would potentially increase the perception of the group’s vulnerability and endanger group functioning. In that case, important aspects of collective experience will remain outside awareness and their gaps will be filled in by constructions that prevent the resurfacing of threatening representations. Group domination, as it was described above, amplifies the processes of defensive exclusion from awareness since the protective function of the collective attachment objects is disrupted by those of the imposer, leaving the dominated group overwhelmed by anxiety. As the latter’s only viable option is to incorporate aspects of the imposer’s ideological and institutional world and as such an option only questions more deeply the identity and continuity of the group, the subjugated group resolves the impossible dilemma by collectively excluding its most essential aspects from awareness. While the group’s collective attachment objects simultaneously become protective and attacking, chosen and inflicted, own and alien such contradictions would rather be left unacknowledged, such incoherent representations would rather remain only very partially known.


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Understanding socio-cultural imposition as a process of fragmenting and forcefully overwriting collective attachment objects and the restricted conscious awareness that this process involves may shed further light on the experience and impact of social and cultural traumas. As I mentioned above, I will explore specific examples of traumatic socio-cultural domination from that angle in more detail later on in the book. Here I wish to comment in brief on the “trauma of traumas”, the Holocaust. Authors have argued that one of the catastrophic consequences of the Holocaust was that the Jews have re-enacted their devastating experience in the new state of Israel by becoming both assailants and victims in the Jewish–Palestinian conflict (Bar-On, 2000). One may utilise the psychoanalytic concept of identification with the aggressor (Freud, 1936) to make sense of the inhumanity with which Zionists have treated Palestinians over two-thirds of a century, beginning just a few years after the Holocaust. According to that defence mechanism, a person or group unconsciously identifies with the attacker – that is, mentally becomes the attacker – as they want to protect the self from disturbing experiences of helplessness, reduce their anxiety, and avoid increasing their objective vulnerability and susceptibility to further attacks. Through such an identification, the other and/or the self are now seen by the self as victims, as if through the eyes of the aggressor. I wish to revisit this very important concept of identification with the aggressor from the perspective I explore here and view the Zionist post-Holocaust response in terms of the fragmentation and violent displacement of the Jewish collective attachment objects by those of Nazi Germany during the 1930s and 1940s. Although it is obvious that the Nazis aimed not simply at the subjugation of the Jews but their actual extermination, (at least of the Jewish populations of Europe), the extermination of a social group by another is in fact its absolute domination. Moreover, although no one can deny the immense inner strength that so many persecuted Jews acquired through their powerful sense of religious and cultural identity, strength that helped them either survive the ordeal or suffer an honourable death, Jewry as a whole seems to have somewhat shifted its institutional and ideological frameworks after the war. Not only has a traditionally stateless ethnic group now established a state, but that state has become the most militarised in the world (Bonn International Centre for Conversion, 2013), has very often been driven by an intolerant Zionist ideology frequently described as racist (United Nations General Assembly, 1975), and has shown exceptional cruelty towards a much weaker and vulnerable ethnicity group. That state has also systematically defied international law and international


peace-keeping institutions that were established after the war specifically to prevent another Holocaust. It seems that despite their resistance, the Jewish objects of collective attachment were partially broken and overwritten by those of the aggressor. As those objects were unable to protect the group from experiencing overwhelming anxiety and fear of annihilation during and after the war, large segments of the Jewish community seem to have borrowed the aggressor’s collective attachment objects for their own protection. Of course this process has remained unconscious as bringing it to awareness would have caused even greater distress, shame, and a deep sense of collective worthlessness. Social domination and its ensuing sociocultural traumas seem to transmit collective attachment objects like viruses. The idea of unconscious social processes is not novel. Jung (1981) proposed the idea of the collective unconscious or a set of archetypes inscribed in the human brain through the basic commonly shared species experience, while contemporary psychoanalytic thinkers understand the social unconscious as shared assumptions residing outside awareness and being constructed in particular socio-cultural circumstances. Hopper (2001: 10) defines the social unconscious as socio-cultural and communicational arrangements that are “not perceived (‘not known’), and if perceived not acknowledged (‘denied’), and if acknowledged not taken as problematic (‘given’) and if taken as problematic, not considered with an optimal degree of detachment and objectivity”. Nonetheless, the exact nature and detailed psycho-social processes involved are the object of a lively debate among psychoanalytically orientated theorists (Weinberg, 2007).Although addressing those arguments in detail would be beyond the scope of the present work, the notion of collective attachment representations and their unconscious aspects as discussed above approach unconscious socio-cultural processes from an attachment theory perspective and relate closely to that conversation.

Collective attachment and the collective regulation of emotion A fundamental function of ideologies and social institutions is to regulate emotion in the group. Ideologies and social institutions provide collectively constructed frameworks within which fundamental human emotions are understood and managed. The idea that human beings are animals driven by primitive impulses ready to burst out of control and endanger the very core of human society has a long tradition in Western


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social philosophy and science. From the ancient Roman playwright Plautus to the seventeenth-century English philosopher Hobbes (1998), man has been regarded as “wolf” to man (homo homini lupus), while Freud’s notions of drive and the unconscious emphasise the primacy of instinct and its related concepts of affect and emotion in human life (Freud, 1990). Nonetheless, emotion is not simply an individual phenomenon but is also manifested and organised at both the interpersonal and collective levels. Social scientists have argued that regardless of any physiological processes involved, the experience and communication of emotion is to a great extent an interpersonal and cultural construction (Harré, 1988). De Leersnyder and colleagues (2013) suggest that emotions, like aggression or fear, are culturally regulated as their experience tends to be consistent with the belief, values, and goals dominating in a social group. Working in the sociology of emotion field, Spencer and colleagues (Spencer et al., 2012) argue that private emotional experiences enable social structure and indicate how emotions are an integral part of a dialectic relationship between the self and that structure. Moreover, intending to reinstate emotions as a focus of research on politics, Goodwin and colleagues (2001) emphasise the role of powerful emotions such as anger, indignation, fear, and disgust in the attempts of social movements to make sense of shattered collective identities and construct visions of a better and fairer future. Those studies suggest that an important concern of social groups is to manage and organise emotion. This book argues that the regulation of emotion at a collective level is one of the fundamental functions of ideologies and social institutions and this is one of the main reasons that these should be regarded as collective attachment objects. Attachment researchers have extensively commented on the crucial role of a secure attachment bond and its internalised representation in the regulation of emotion in individuals, both children and adults. Those researchers have argued that the capacity to reduce negative emotion and regulate distressing emotional experiences has its roots in the relationship between the developing child and an empathic caregiver. According to Fonagy and colleagues (2002), the child’s capability to identify, understand, and regulate his and others’ emotions is critically influenced by the caregiver’s capacity to mentalise or understand the child’s behaviour and emotional expressions in terms of internal states of mind. These authors suggest that an appropriate and contingent mirroring of the child’s emotional expressions and internal mental states would allow the child to represent those states and relate to, differentiate, and regulate emotions.

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Moreover, adults’ capacities to mentalise and regulate emotion are not restricted to the transmission of those capacities to their children. Adults use those capabilities on a daily basis as they deal with life events. Individuals guided by secure attachment representations and increased mentalisation capacity are able to fully experience and communicate negative emotion without being overwhelmed by it, while those with insecure attachment representations and a restricted mentalisation capacity are unable to manage emotion optimally and rely on defensive strategies to do so. Individuals employing an avoidant attachment strategy would tend to exclude negative emotion from awareness as they expect no support from their attachment figures, while individuals using an anxious strategy would tend to exaggerate the experience and expression of such emotion, particularly anger and helplessness, as they attempt to draw the attention of an attachment figure that may or may not respond. On the other hand, individuals guided by a disorganised attachment representation are predisposed to disconnect painful emotions from one’s experience and sense of self, as they attempt to deal with traumatic and overwhelming events (Liotti, 2004). The above studies suggest that both emotion regulation and the capacity to understand human beings as intentional, thinking, and feeling beings are by their very nature relational phenomena. Taking this fundamental position one step further this book will argue that these are also collective phenomena. In particular, I argue that it is not only dyadic relationships and their representations that provide individuals with a safe space within which they can explore the human mind and regulate their emotion – ideologies and social institutions can make similar provisions at the level of the social group. Ideologies and social institutions, the objects of collective attachment, provide frameworks within which group-referent states of mind are collectively explored and group-referent emotions are collectively regulated. When ideologies and social institutions allow the free expression of ideas, the articulation of emotions however unpleasant they may be, and the conduct of a fair and critical social debate about threats encountered by the group (including the protective strategies that need to be followed), then those ideologies and social institutions would be able to promote a culture of reflection and minimise toxic emotion. Such objects of collective attachment would facilitate the development of relatively sophisticated narratives on human nature, human needs and human behaviour and avoid expressions of extreme aggression, intense experiences of vulnerability, and introversive retreats into the self. In other words, such ideologies and institutions would function as secure


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objects of collective attachment. When, on the other hand, ideologies and social institutions inhibit expression and promote unfairness, domination, and compliance, they would be less likely to allow the development of a complex understanding of human nature and to prevent the escalation of destructive emotion. Such ideologies and institutions would function as insecure objects of collective attachment.

Collective attachment and social memory As discussed above, attachment researchers suggest that experience in emotionally important relationships, most characteristically with caregivers in childhood, is inscribed in the individual human’s mind in the form of mental representations. Those representations are essentially memory structures providing guidelines on how the past should be remembered. Memory is essential for species survival as human beings get to know quickly what to avoid and what to approach without requiring either many instances of exposure to danger or a large number of missed opportunities. Attachment representations organise the memory of relational and emotion-laden events and provide templates of how current relationships should be experienced. Having particular expectations from others and the self, even when those expectations are occasionally inappropriate, seems to be preferable overall to having to learn everything afresh in every new emotional interaction. Without good memory, social partner selection, communication, and emotional regulation would have been very difficult, ultimately compromising the adaptability of the species. Nonetheless, it is not only individuals who remember; human groups have memory too. Social groups create narratives of events and pass them on from one generation to the next, memory narratives that form the core of the group’s cultural heritage. Indeed, in his classic work Halbwachs (1992) argued that ultimately no memory is really individual as all memories are created and retrieved in the context of social interaction and are therefore linked, one way or another, to the social life of the group. As collective memory narratives are depositories of vital social knowledge constructed by the group throughout history, the way the past is remembered is of crucial importance for the intergenerational continuity, cohesion, and identity of the group. In recent years a number of social scientists and historians have argued for a new field of investigation – social memory studies. While the discipline of history is concerned with what happened in the past, the study of social memory attempts to reveal how, whatever it was that happened in the past, is remembered in the present (Bell, 2010).


I argue that the phenomenon of social memory could be more fully understood in light of the notion of collective attachment. As representations of collective attachment are essentially guides constructed in the past to be used in the present, they inform the intergenerational transmission and reconstruction of social narratives relating to group experiences of threat, protection, and long-term security. Collective attachment representations will not only advise on how the group should make sense of current experiences but also on how it ought to remember events of the past. Such collectively constructed social knowledge and memory structures provide semantic frameworks according to which the present is understood through the narrated experience of the past. As a remembered experience is now applied to a new context, it is inevitably reconstructed. If the collective attachment representations that have been called for are perceived to be helpful, they will be further consolidated; if they are perceived to be unhelpful they will be partially or wholly revised. Regardless of which route the represented past will be impacted upon by the past-informed present, memory will be collectively revisited and reconstructed in the light of new experience. Such reconstruction is a continuous and multifaceted process. The degree of security underlying the collective attachment representations at work will substantially influence how memories of the past relate to constructions of the present. If collective attachment representations are underpinned by relatively high levels of security they will allow any outdated, inappropriate, and dysfunctional historical constructions to be identified as such and revised in the light of the new circumstances. Such representations will refer to collective attachment objects that can afford a relatively open and free social debate, question problematic traditional memory narratives without breaking the links with the past, contain intergroup conflict between the old and the new while acknowledging differences, and perceive of the social group as a live and continuously evolving organism. Collective attachment representations underpinned by security will allow a relatively free flow of communication between the past and the present, between representation and action, without experiencing an undue fear that the group will either lose its historical continuity and be destroyed by the future or that it will be imprisoned within and devoured by the past. On the other hand, when collective attachment representations are underlain by insecurity, the group will find it difficult to part with dysfunctional and self-damaging protective strategies it has inherited from previous generations. Insecure representations will refer to attachment objects that cannot afford an open and free social dialogue as they


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cannot prevent the group from being overtaken by the fear of its disintegration. Such collective attachment objects will be unable to protect the group from feelings of intense ambivalence towards its own tradition and the symbols of it. On the one hand, the group will need to address its present concerns on the basis of dysfunctional social memories (e.g. memories of vulnerability and victimisation), while on the other, any attempts to revise those narratives will be obstructed by paralysing anxiety over the loss of historical continuity. Such groups will appear unable to conceive themselves as moving through time, as past and present experience are fused into one. Unable to reconstruct their collective memories of safety-related events beneficially, social groups guided by insecure collective attachment representations will tend to be drawn deeper and deeper into vicious circles of stillness and vulnerability. As discussed above, such groups are likely to have experienced collective trauma, or violent domination by another. Scholars have identified particular characteristics that permeate the social memory of traumatised groups. One such defining feature is the tendency of traumatic social memory towards selective remembering and forgetting (Resende and Budryte, 2013). On the one hand, the collective narratives of traumatised social groups appear possessed by the past as references to the traumatic events dominate public discourse and constant reminders order private lives. On the other hand, essential elements of the past appear completely “forgotten”. Unless directly linked to the traumatic event, history before and after the event appears to be covered in silence and treated almost as if it had never existed. In the memory narratives of traumatised social groups, although it is constantly present, the past cannot be fully seen. Directly linked with the inability of traumatised groups to fully remember and to fully forget is their limited capacity to properly represent or symbolise the traumatic event. Like traumatised individuals, traumatised social groups appear unable to narrate their experience in an appropriate language. Fierke (2010: 121) argues that social narratives of trauma compel current social experience to remain “within the linguistic boundaries of a past world”, while remembering and forgetting become habitual social performances ritualistically re-enacted and disconnected from the reflective operations of the group. Moreover, as researchers have repeatedly emphasised, the language of traumatised groups often reveals their desperate need for a sense of collective unity to fight off their deep-seated fears of incohesion and fragmentation that accompany the traumatic experience. Hopper (2003) points out that social groups characterised by massification, a phenomenon often linked to social trauma, tend to use cult-speech, speaking in tongues, using


jargon words and catch phrases that only core group members with a shared past experience can understand. Klimová (2011) also describes how the forced removal of the polite “you” in the plural and its replacement by the more informal form in the singular imposed a false sense of “brotherhood” and social wholeness in an Eastern European country after the trauma of the Second World War.

Social trauma and the disorganisation of collective attachment A number of studies suggest that the presence of supportive others is of paramount importance for the adjustment of individuals who undergo potentially traumatic experience. As only some of those going through painful experience become traumatised, the perceived availability of social support has been regarded by those authors as one of the major intervening factors. Through empathic and supportive interaction important others seem to facilitate the formation of an interpersonal interpretative framework within which the traumatised individual can make sense of the experience and eventually be able to leave it behind. Empirical data from war veterans suggested that the level of their narrative coherence was linked to the level of social support they perceived after the event (Burnell et al., 2009). Those veterans who seemed to have received substantial emotional care from their social environment presented coherent narratives of their war experience, while those who felt unsupported presented narratives with marked inconsistencies. In agreement with other clinicians and social psychologists, attachment researchers argue that meaning making, including meaning making in trauma, occurs in the context of human relationships, primarily attachment relationships. Studies have identified attachment insecurity as an important vulnerability factor towards developing a traumatic response after a major negative event. Kumar and Fonagy (2012) found attachment avoidance to predispose children to developing a traumatic reaction after the experience of natural disaster. As non-traumatised avoidantly attached individuals already employ suppression strategies in many respects similar to those identified in trauma victims (e.g. exclusion of negative emotion and feelings of vulnerability from awareness), it would be easier for an avoidantly attached individual to develop avoidant coping and a maladaptive response to trauma. Avoidant coping, or pretending that the problem does not exist in order to get rid of anxiety, has been identified my researchers as one typical dysfunctional response in traumatic experience. Researchers


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have argued that such a strategy of dealing with negative events renders the individual unable to bring closure, as it interferes with the successful processing of the painful memory and its associated emotions while it prevents the extinction of fear responses linked with event reminders (Keane and Barlow, 2002). Discussing the emergence of shame in the context of war and violent conflict, Van Vliet (2010) points out that an avoidant mode of coping prevents the healthy resolution of painful events and facilitates the incubation of trauma by providing an immediate relief from intense feelings of shame among survivors of violent conflict: it reduces excessive emotional arousal and preserves a sense of self following significant loss and disruption. Although traumatic avoidance (avoiding reminders of the traumatic event), avoidance coping (escaping from finding a solution to a problem), and attachment avoidance (artificially switching off the need for emotional closeness so that one does not lose their attachment figure completely) are conceptually distinct, research seems to suggest that in the context of traumatic experience they are often connected. As traumatised individuals attempt to avoid external stimuli as well as internally generated feelings and thoughts that directly relate to the traumatic event, avoidance becomes a pervasive strategy of regulating the self as well as managing relationships with others. After all, as an avoidant attachment strategy is consolidated only after a history of systematic caregiver rejection, one could say that this strategy is necessarily precipitated by some kind of trauma. Research suggests that in addition to avoidance, attachment anxiety also marks the experience of trauma. Studies report that attachment anxiety mediates the relationships between early abusive experience, adult psychological distress, and relationship adjustment (Browne and Winkelman, 2007), as well as the link between intimate partner violence and sexual victimisation, on the one hand, and post-traumatic symptomatology, on the other (Sandberg et al., 2010). These findings seem to illuminate the causal mechanism underlying the link between interpersonal violence and post-traumatic stress, suggesting that painful experience leads to a dysfunctional traumatic response at least partly because it activates the dysfunctional anxious attachment strategy. Since anxiously attached individuals are unable to perceive their attachment figures as consistently available they cannot utilise essential supportive resources to communicate traumatic pain and make sense of the experience. According to attachment research, high attachment avoidance and high attachment anxiety occurring simultaneously are indicative of disorganised attachment. When an individual who appears desperate for

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human connection also goes to great lengths to prevent it, the attachment system appears to have been put to a halt. Indeed, numerous studies have supported a link between the disorganisation of the attachment system and traumatic experience, particularly when trauma is inflicted in the context of intimate relationships, most notably the parent-child bond. As in those instances the attachment figure him/herself is the very source of trauma, the individual is put into an impossible situation. Abuse activates the attachment system (that is, the need for protection) and the individual instinctively wishes to turn to the attachment figure for comfort. However, in that case, the source of comfort is also the source of the threat. As the secure base is also experienced by the abuse victim as the source of danger, the attachment system is disorganised – the individual does not really know whether to approach or remain distant. As discussed in Chapter 1, studies report that children abused or otherwise frightened by their parents would suddenly interrupt their approach to them after separation, assume “frozen” positions, and engage in age-inappropriate stereotypies (e.g. head banging). Research also suggests that a history of childhood trauma and disorganised attachment have long-term consequences in the lives of individuals. Adults with a childhood history of direct abuse, domestic violence, or other frightening experiences, are likely to form highly conflictual or violent relationships with others, experience intense internal ambivalence between interpersonal approaching and distancing, and have a chaotic engagement with the world. Nonetheless, such adverse experiences have consequences that reach beyond the lifespan of single individuals. There is strong research evidence that the experience of unsolvable fear and disorganised attachment is transmitted across generations, as fearful and interpersonally disorganised parents are likely to expose their own children to aggression and other threatening behaviour. At an interpersonal level, the experience of attachment objects as both protective and dangerous and the unsolvable fear that such an experience holds have been proven to present strong historical continuity. Without losing sight of the fact that drawing parallels between individual psychological and group phenomena is a complex endeavour, one cannot help noticing the similarities between a traumatised individual with an insecure attachment representation and a traumatised social group. I suggest that the social narratives of traumatised social groups present the characteristics discussed in the previous section because their collective attachment objects were proven inadequate to protect them from an overwhelming collective experience. In other words, dysfunctional linguistic and memory elements often dominate those social narratives as


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the prevalent ideological and institutional systems seem unable to provide appropriate interpretative frameworks within which the threatening experience would find meaning. Moreover, traumatised social groups, particularly those traumatised either by internal violent conflict and oppression or by external subjugation, seem to be defined by the disorganisation of their collective attachment representations. I argued earlier that the violent imposition of a group’s ideological and institutional systems upon another (either external or subgroup) tend to rapture the subjugated group’s collective attachment objects inducing a state of helplessness and eventually leading to the defensive adoption of the dominator’s systems of meaning. As this process unfolds overtime, the aggressor’s attachment objects are experienced by the conquered as sources of both distress and protection, thereby disorganising the collective manifestation of attachment in the group. It is in that context of forced rearrangement and disorganisation of the group’s supportive resources that the templates of registering, remembering, and communicating a traumatic experience are constructed. It seems that social trauma and disorganisation of the collective attachment objects lie at the heart of socio-cultural domination. The numerous examples of social groups fiercely resisting such domination represents also their attempt to prevent converting their collective attachment objects from protective to threatening. After centuries of ferocious armed resistance against the European invaders and eventually on the brink of extinction, native Americans made their last attempt to stay alive as a community by assimilating the aggressor’s ideological and institutional apparatus. By 1827, led by a full-blooded native with a new European name, Western education and a white wife, the Cherokee nation had endorsed farming and private enterprise, created a constitution modelled exactly after the one in Washington, established an elected two-house congress and independent judiciary, passed a bill of rights, and even utilised the labour of African slaves (Bordewich, 1996). While all that was a very conscious attempt of the Cherokee leadership to save the Indian nation from complete elimination, three years later the state of Georgia declared Cherokee laws null and void, auctioned off Cherokee land, and sent troops to kill thousands, herding the rest into stockades. It is not only the millions of deaths in colonial and post-colonial America that the subsequent generations of native Americans have not stopped mourning until today, as the high rates of alcoholism, depression, and disorder in the Indian reservations may suggest (American Psychiatric Association, 2010a). Perhaps most of all, it is the loss of the group’s authentic collective attachment objects and their protective capacity,


their transformation into sources of danger, and the disorganisation of the group’s collective strategies of self protection that have sustained that tormenting traumatic experience for almost five centuries. Disorganisation of the collective attachment objects can also occur when subgroups within a larger social formation attempt to establish or maintain their socio-economic and political hegemony over others. Represented by authoritarian and elitist regimes, such groups typically attempt to impose their rule on the wider society by enforcing unfair living and working conditions on the majority and severely suppressing any different voices. As the law and other aspects of the dominant institutional and ideological apparatuses are used in inflicting injustice and pain on the underprivileged, collective attachment objects may be perceived as both protective and damaging, threatening the attachment organisation of the group. When the law or the official religion is experienced by the group as a tool for the unlawful ostracism, imprisonment, and murder of civilians in the hands of the oppressor, the social structures meant for protection and security become a source of threat. It is such a reversal in the protective function of collective attachment objects that primarily defines the social trauma so often experienced in societies ruled by ruthless dictators, rather than the painful experience of fighting and dying for what one believes in. Of course individuals are also traumatised in acts of violence and often in great numbers, but the notion of social or cultural trauma goes beyond mass traumatisation. In this section I have attempted to extend the notion of attachment from a dyadic or dyadic-like phenomenon to a collective one. I have suggested that social groups collectively construct their attachment objects – their ideological and institutional systems – the function of which is to protect the cohesion, identity, well-being, and ultimately survival of the group. I have also claimed that such construction is informed by collective attachment representations, or the socially shared and historically formed past experience of the group in dealing with threat and promoting its own welfare. In the next chapter, I will discuss the notions of collective attachment and collective attachment representations in relation to an event that shook the planet’s most powerful nation and the entire Western world – the attacks on 9/11 and the collective response they generated.

5 Collective Attachment and the Response to 9/11

Drawing on the relevant literature, in previous chapters I presented two main arguments. First, I suggested that attachment to the social group essentially means attachment to the ideological and institutional systems that prevail in the group and, second, I argued that attachment to ideological systems and institutions occurs not only at the individual but essentially at the collective level. In Chapter 4 I outlined the main characteristics of collective attachment. Specifically, I suggested that, like interpersonal attachment, collective attachment is guided by representational structures constructed during social interaction of emotional significance but noted that those interactions focus on security-related themes that concern the group rather than a dyadic relationship. I claimed that such interactions and their related collective attachment representations aim at constructing and reconstructing the ideological and institutional frameworks upon which social life in the group depends and in which social groups look for a collective sense of safety; in other words they construct and reconstruct their collective attachment objects. I also distinguished between secure and insecure collective attachment, noting that the latter is defined by relatively open, unintrusive, and collaborative social interaction, while the former by domination, aggression, and insularity. Drawing on the attachment and other relevant literature, in Chapter 4, I also argued that collective attachment security is likely to be linked with discourse coherence, as the social narrative constructed to capture themes of collective bonding more or less reflects deeper layers of social experience, while collective attachment insecurity tends to be permeated by discourse incoherence as the social narrative constructed contradicts authentic experience. I suggested that incoherent narratives of collective attachment are constructed when one social group attempts 95

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to subjugate another. Drawing on another important marker of security in dyadic attachment, I also suggested that group protective action informed by secure collective attachment representations would be expected to be effective and functional – that is, eliminate or reduce the threat that triggered it without exposing the group to another. In this chapter I will explore the idea that collective attachment security is related to the coherence of social narrative and efficiency of protective response in reference to a sequence of recent significant historical events – the events comprising the American-led Western response to the 9/11 attacks. In brief, I will argue that, defined by two major wars and the establishment of what many regard as an illegal detention centre, that response has constituted an incoherent and dysfunctional strategy of self-protection informed by insecure representations of collective attachment.

9/11 and the activation of collective attachment What happened on 9/11 had all the characteristics of a threatening event that one would expect to activate the attachment system at the collective level. Those events involved a major and unexpected physical attack against America’s most iconic city, more specifically against the city’s international centre of economic activity and the symbolism that such an activity carried for the American and Western culture in general. That was the only attack carried out by a foreign power in USA mainland in almost two centuries and it resulted in very substantial loss of life as well as the loss of buildings with great emblematic power. It was clearly an attack on both the physical existence and cultural identity of the American and greater Western society. The Al-Qaida terrorists not only managed to defeat a very sophisticated aviation security apparatus causing the death of thousands of innocent civilians, but they also did so utilising disturbingly simple means – a few small utility knives (National Commission on Terrorist Attacks in the United States, 2004). As expected, the attack mobilised society’s support resources to deal with both the physical and identity wounds. Moreover, the attacks signalled a source of imminent major danger for further attacks and signified not only a threat to the physical well-being of individuals but also an aggressive act of defiance against a very large group’s entire way of life. Despite the fact that the 9/11 attacks seemed to be the climax of a series of Islamic terrorist activities targeting American citizens abroad and although the animosity between Americans and the Arab world had been constantly increasing since the end of the Second World

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War, an attack of that nature and magnitude caught American society by surprise. The American public felt vulnerable, perhaps for the first time, confronted by such a determined and cunning aggressor and painfully realised that the country’s technological and material may not be enough to protect it from danger. Any society would be alarmed by such an event and would immediately start to construct its defences. As both the physical and the psycho-social existence of American society had to be protected, its collective attachment system became activated. According to the premises of attachment theory, the perception of threat in humans activates the attachment system and individuals need to respond in such a way that the sense of safety is restored. As argued in Chapter 4, similar protective mechanisms also operate at the level of the group and the whole process is guided by the group’s collective attachment representations. In order to set up its strategy of protection against Islamic terrorism, therefore, American society and its allies had to draw upon collective knowledge structures created over many centuries of social experience. In Chapter 6, I will discuss in greater detail the nature of such experiences, the quality of the collective attachment representations operating in American and European societies, representations to which those experiences have been intrinsically linked, as well as the historical contexts within which they have been constructed. For the moment let’s only note that those historically shaped collective attachment representations operating in American society at the time of the 9/11 attacks heavily informed the socio-cultural processes that were set off in response to the attacks. Such representations informed socio-cultural processes constructing accounts that evaluated the nature of the danger itself (e.g. its causes and its potential consequences, the likelihood of it happening again), society’s capacity to respond to the danger effectively, and society’s available supportive resources. They also informed socio-cultural processes that aimed to design specific protective strategies capable of eliminating the threat and restoring the sense of security and to implement that design in practice. Following the conceptualisation of collective attachment outlined in Chapter 4, if the American response to the 9/11 attacks were to be predominantly informed by collective representations underlain by security, one would expect that the social narrative constructed in support of the proposed action would be relatively coherent and that the protective action collectively adopted would result either in the elimination or the substantial reduction of the threat. More specifically, one would expect to see a relatively thorough and reflective consideration of the causes of the attacks, an appreciation of their multifaceted nature, a willingness to


admit America’s responsibility and contribution to the conflict if there were any, a realistic assessment of America’s capability to respond, the design of a feasible and effective protective operation, and a competent implementation of that design on the ground. One would also expect that those constitutive socio-cultural processes occurred in a climate of communicative openness, transparency, and a willingness of large segments of the population to participate in a reflective debate. On the other hand, if the response to the 9/11 attacks were to be informed by collective attachment representations underlain by insecurity, one would expect American and other Western societies to construct an incoherent social narrative attempting to make sense of events and proposing protective action and to actually carry out action that would eventually leave society worse off. In that case, the American public, its political representatives and public opinion leaders would be unable to fully reflect on the causes of the attacks and identify their complexity. They would also be unable to bravely explore their country’s own role in the long-standing conflict that led to the attacks and genuinely accept its share of responsibility, if there was one. Conducting a public dialogue constrained by fear, American society would be expected to make an unrealistic assessment of its capabilities to implement a protective strategy, underestimate or/and overestimate its available support resources, eventually adopt a dysfunctional plan of action, and execute it unsuccessfully. In this chapter I will argue that the American-led response to the 9/11 attacks was largely informed by insecure collective attachment representations. I will base my conclusion on two major characteristics that such a response presented: the marked incoherence defining the social narrative attempting to make sense of events and proposing protective action and the ineffectiveness of such an action itself. In the remainder of the chapter I will discuss how these characteristics were most obvious in the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the long war that followed, but also in other major protective operations undertaken after 9/11, most notably the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan and the establishment of the Guantanamo prison.

Coherence of social narrative and security of collective attachment The coherence of attachment-related narrative has been regarded by major attachment theorists as an essential characteristic of secure attachment. Main and colleagues (George et al., 1985; Main, 1985) were


the first to systematically explore the idea that attachment security is manifested in and can be empirically assessed by the organisation of people’s narratives when they talk about their emotionally important relationships. As discussed in Chapter 1, those researchers developed and extensively validated a ground-breaking empirical instrument, the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI), which inspired numerous studies and generated a wealth of empirical findings linking discourse coherence with the quality of attachment representations. This work aimed to investigate empirically Bowlby’s theoretical construct of multiple working mental models of attachment, according to which a secure parent-child bond leads to a coherent, or singular, mental representation of the other and the self while an insecure bond leads to multiple and, therefore, incoherent models. Based on the organisation of their attachment narrative, AAI interviewees are classified as having a secure or insecure state of mind in relation to attachment. Although aspects of discourse content are also taken into account in the overall classification of an interview transcript, the defining criterion that distinguishes between security and insecurity in the AAI coding system is the organisation of attachment-related discourse, in other words its coherence. Those researchers thought that the content of subjective accounts is not the most reliable domain of assessing the quality of one’s attachment representations as such accounts are susceptible to bias. Although individuals may unconsciously distort the narrated experience (e.g. idealise or unrealistically vilify others or the self) in order to avoid psychological pain, they have much less defensive control in how they organise their accounts. For example, they are much less aware of logical contradictions, and therefore discourse organisation may be a more trustworthy terrain of assessing painful experience. To define discourse coherence, Main and colleagues, turned to the work of the British philosopher Paul Grice (1975), more specifically to his four maxims of effective communication. According to Grice, in order to communicate clearly and efficiently, human beings need to adhere to four principles of coherence: the principle of quality, or the ability to be truthful and produce evidence for what you claim; the principle of quantity, or the ability to be concise and to the point but also provide adequate coverage of your subject matter; the principle of relation, or the ability to refer only to information that is relevant to the subject matter avoiding the inclusion of unrelated material; and the principle of manner, or the ability to talk about your subject matter in a clear and orderly fashion, without using confusing, entangled, or incomplete communications.


A large volume of empirical studies have shown that narrative coherence as assessed using those four maxims are closely linked with attachment security in adults and children (see Chapter 1). According to those studies, when individuals violate Grice’s principles of coherence as they talk about emotionally close relationships, their experience of such relationships is likely to be guided by incoherent attachment representations, or, multiple working models of attachment. Main and colleagues refer to individuals with a secure state of mind in relation to attachment as autonomous, as in their narratives they appear “free” to explore their own and others’ mental states and past experiences, even when those are painful and negative. According to those researchers, it is such emotional and reflective autonomy to explore the mind of the self and that of others that underlies the coherence of attachment narratives. As insecurely attached individuals operate in defensive modes when they address emotion-laden themes and systematically exclude potentially distressing mental material from awareness, their psychological reality rides on two incompatible levels and as a consequence they are unable to avoid logical inconsistencies in their narratives. On the other hand, as secure individuals do not need to employ such mechanisms of defensive exclusion, the experience of the self can be fully accessed, talked about and reflected upon, minimising contradictions and logical gaps. Fonagy and colleagues (2002) argue that the secure parent-child bond facilitates the development of the mentalising capacity in the child and adult to be, enabling humans to understand self and others as intentional, thinking, and feeling beings. In this chapter I will explore the idea that incoherence of narrative is an important security marker not only at the level of the individual but also at that of collective attachment a level at which social rather than personal attachment related narratives are most relevant. In particular, I will empirically explore the idea that when social groups attempt to address their collective attachment needs by engaging in socio-cultural processes defined by constrained social debate, non-transparent decision-making, and limited capacity to reflect on human motives, such socio-cultural processes are likely to be guided by insecure collective attachment representations and result in the construction of incoherent collective attachment narratives. Referring to relevant public documents and scholarly analyses, in the next few sections I will argue that the social narratives supporting the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan as well as the establishment of Guatanamo prison in response to the 9/11 attacks violated Grice’s principles of coherence, while the operations themselves failed to achieve their


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declared aims – that is, the protection and welfare of American society. Both those characteristics suggest that the American-led response to the 9/11 attacks, in its major components, was an ineffective protective strategy informed by insecure collective attachment representations.

The Iraq invasion: an incoherent narrative of collective attachment The argument I present in the following sections rests on the premise that the narratives supporting, or opposing, the war in Iraq or other action taken in response to the 9/11 attacks (e.g. Afghanistan invasion, Guantanamo) also constitute collective attachment narratives. If major events that threaten the physical existence and/or the identity of a social group are understood as activators of the group’s collective attachment system as proposed above, then it is reasonable to assume that the collective narrative that attempts to make sense of the experience, understand the nature of the threat, assess support resources, and design a protective strategy is a narrative of collective attachment. When under threat, social groups turn to their collective attachment objects, their ideological and institutional armoury, in order to protect their identity and physical existence. As they attempt to construct effective interpretative narratives and strategies of protection, social groups reassess and often redefine some of their core ideological and institutional characteristics. When such narratives are coherent, the collective attachment objects they reconstruct will be promoting security; when they are incoherent, those objects will be compromising security. When we explore the social narrative supporting the invasion of Iraq in 2003 we notice that it violated three of Grice’s principles of coherent communication: the principles of quality, relation, and manner. The principle of quantity could not really be adapted in a sensible way from the level of the personal to that of the social narrative. Violating the principle of quality The first principle of coherence violated in the pro-Iraq narrative was that of quality. The most obvious violation of that principle refers to the claim made by the American, the British and other Western governments that the regime of Saddam Hussein was secretly developing weapons of mass destruction (WMD), including chemical and biological weapons. This was the main threat that Saddam Hussein’s regime supposedly posed according to the war-authorising resolutions passed

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by the American Congress (2002) and the British Parliament (House of Commons Library, 2003). According to the pro-war argument, Iraq’s secret WMD programme was already at its final stages and that country was able to sustain an imminent attack on the West. Such a claim was of central importance as it attempted to provide the basis of both the legality and the moral legitimation of the war. According to the principle of quality, an attachment-related narrative needs to be able to support its claims with evidence and establish a sense of truthfulness. As it became clear very quickly after the invasion and as we all now know, a WMD development programme did not exist in Iraq in 2003 – it had actually been abandoned long before that (The Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, 2005). It may be that this inconsistency between the claims made in the pro-war narrative and the facts is the first major indication that the coherence of that narrative was violated and that insecure representations of collective attachment may be operating underneath the surface. It is undeniable that individuals as well as organisations and other social groups can make mistakes without necessarily being motivated by unconscious emotional needs as the notion of insecure attachment implies. Human beings can make mistakes for a number of purely cognitive reasons – they may be given the wrong information or they may have to process large amounts of data within a very limited time. Although such factors may have also played a part in the decisionmaking process (e.g. obtaining accurate intelligence was difficult in the water-tight dictatorial regime of Saddam Hussein, certain circles in the American political establishment and intelligence service purposively fed the wrong information), that part was not very significant for the purposes of my analysis. It appears that the American and other Western intelligence agencies had enough information at the very least to seriously question the credibility of WMD-related evidence and a significant number of senior CIA and State Department officials, including the CIA director, had opposed the invasion on the basis of such insufficient evidence (Pillar, 2006). Additional doubts about the presence of WMD were raised by the fact that no such weapons had been found until then by UN inspectors who appeared reasonably confident about the thoroughness of their search (United Nations, 2003). Despite the very doubtful evidence regarding the operation of a WMD programme in Iraq and despite the possibility of breaking international law if a sovereign country was invaded in the absence of an immediate


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threat, a large part of American and other Western societies (including a large part of the public, its political representatives, and the mass media) did not adequately consider a number of voices raising doubts about the Iraq’s capability to threaten the West. Such voices were suggesting patience and restraint before the full picture emerged and they would have been expected to convince a reflective and open society at least to wait until the UN inspectors had completed their work. As I will discuss in more detail below, despite the various unintentional or deliberate intelligence failings, the decision to go to war was a decision taken collectively by the American and other Western societies through their systems of political representation and other forums in which public opinion was voiced. However, an even clearer indication of American society’s collective difficulty in detecting and resolving contradiction in the pro-war narrative was the election of G. W. Bush for a second term, after winning even the popular vote. That election took place in 2004, over a year and a half after the invasion and after it had become clear to all that there were no WMD in Iraq. The election also took place after the United Nations Secretary-General had publically declared that the invasion of Iraq was illegal as it had violated the UN Charter (MacAskill and Borger, 2004). Shouldn’t the confirmed absence of WMD in Iraq reduce the society’s trust in a government that took it to war on the basis of false evidence and, according to authoritative sources, by violating international law? Shouldn’t that reduction in trust be manifested in the election results? Notably, although in a somewhat different tone, even the Democratic presidential candidate had voted for the war, suggesting that large and diverse segments of the American society had contributed to the collective construction of the pro-war narrative. Finally, findings reported by the Program on International Policy Attitudes, of the University of Maryland, also seem to suggest a social narrative unsupported by evidence: in a survey conducted long after the American victory over Saddam Hussein had been declared, one third of the respondents believed that American forces had found WMD in Iraq, while 22% believed that such weapons had actually been used by the Saddam regime against the Western forces during the invasion (Program on International Policy Attitudes and Knowledge Networks, 2004). In addition to false claims about the existence of WMD in Iraq, the pro-war narrative also presented a second important contradiction with reality. Proponents of the war had repeatedly suggested that the Saddam regime had a collaborative relationship with Al-Qaida and some went as far as implicating that regime in the 9/11 attacks. Nonetheless, it has

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now been confirmed that no evidence of such a relationship ever existed (The Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, 2005). Like the credibility of the evidence for the presence of WMD, the evidence supporting a Saddam–Al-Qaida link had also been questioned by senior intelligence officials, diplomats, and international affairs analysts (Hoffman, 2006). Those experts had pointed out that Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath party belonged to a very different religious and political tradition from that of Al-Qaida and finding common ground between the two would be extremely unlikely given the dogmatic approaches of both sides. Saddam Hussein’s pan-Arab secularism seemed to detest Al-Qaida’s diametrically conflicting position of political Islamism. Those approaches were not simply very different, but it was also obvious to many analysts that the Saddam regime saw Al-Qaida’s increasing popularity in many parts of the Muslim world as a threat that should be kept out of Iraq. Astonishingly, the Program on International Policy Attitudes survey mentioned above also found that 50% of the respondents believed that Iraqi citizens participated in the 9/11 attacks and 40% believed that Saddam Hussein directly assisted the hijack-bombers (Program on International Policy Attitudes and Knowledge Networks, 2004). Violating the principle of relation In addition to violating the principle of quality, by turning its attention to the Iraqi regime the pro-war narrative seems also to defy a second principle of coherence as identified by Grice, the principle of relation. If this principle were to be applied to the analysis of a collective attachment narrative, one would expect that a coherent account would be able to support the truthfulness of its main theme by the employment of relevant sub-themes and the exclusion of unrelated material. In the case of the Iraq invasion as a major component of the American response to the 9/11 attacks, we note that the relevance of the Saddam Hussein regime as a target of that response did not seem to be supported by historical facts. The terrorist activities of 9/11 were conducted by Islamic fundamentalists, members of Al-Qaida, the leadership of which at the time was offered refuge by the Islamic government of Afghanistan. As discussed in the previous section, the regime of Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with either the 9/11 attacks or Islamic fundamentalism, and it was not posing any other immediate danger to the USA and its allies. Nonetheless, the pro-war narrative did not base the targeting of Saddam entirely on his alleged involvement in the 9/11 attacks as many social actors (e.g. individuals, media) eventually accepted that there was


no evidence, while supporting the war anyway. At the time of the Iraq invasion, Al-Qaida and its leadership were still at large, while the other major and more relevant front the USA had created a few years ago, Afghanistan, still presented many substantial military and socio-political problems with no solutions in sight. By focusing its military campaign on the regime of Saddam Hussein, America and its allies seemed to direct their human and economic resources towards a target that was highly irrelevant to the major threat that Americans and the West were facing at the time. By incorporating the proclaimed dangerousness of the Saddam regime in the 9/11 narrative, America added irrelevant material to that narrative and diverted its attention from where it should have been: Al-Qaida and radical Islamism. Violating the principle of manner The third principle of coherent communication that appeared to be violated in the social narrative supporting the war in Iraq is the principle of manner. According to that principle, one would expect an attachmentrelated social narrative to be relatively orderly and clear, avoiding confusing and incomplete claims. I argue that this principle as well was violated in the pro-war narrative as the stated reasons for invading Iraq kept changing as the operation progressed, creating lack of clarity and bewilderment. During the period between the beginning of the pro-war campaign, in which the American government and its allies attempted to convince the world about the necessity of the war, and the time following the invasion when the war had been “won”, the American government and its allies kept changing their argument. While in the period building up to the invasion the case for the war was mainly being made on the basis of Iraq’s supposed possession of WMD and the regime’s collaborative links with Al-Qaida, as the war progressed and it increasingly became clear that evidence for such claims was not going to be found, a different type of argument started to move to the centre of the narrative. I would call it the humanitarian argument. According to this new rationale, whether Saddam Hussein’s regime possessed WMD or not, or whether it did have links with Al-Qaida was of little importance. What now seemed to matter the most in the pro-war rhetoric was that Saddam’s regime was an “evil” one, led by a ruthless dictator who in the past had attempted to exterminate many of his own people, and who should be removed from power without delay. On the one hand, shifting the focus on the oppressed of this world creates an internal inconsistency in the pro-war narrative as it raises the question of why such a higher order moral imperative hadn’t been

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the focus of the campaign from the beginning. If the welfare of vulnerable others is of such high moral order so that the welfare of the self (American soldiers and their families) and some of those others (Iraqi civilians) are put at risk by launching a war, why did the narrative of the war initially focus on the presence of WMD? With or without the presence of such weapons or Al-Qaida links, the regime of Saddam Hussein should have been inhumane enough to be removed. On the other hand, a main focus on humanitarian concerns seems to contradict the bulk of American, and generally Western, foreign policy until then. Over the years, American and other Western governments have provided support and friendship to ruthlessly violent and oppressive regimes, if doing so has been considered to be beneficial to the Western country’s economic and geopolitical interests. According to a recent report (Freedom House, 2013), four of the most tyrannical states in the world (Saudi Arabia, Equatorial Guinea, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan), all very rich in energy resourses offering tremendous opportunities for economic profit, have enjoyed ample support and friendship from the USA and other Western governments. Most interestingly, the USA and its Western allies militarily and financially supported the regime of Saddam Hussein itself during the 1980s as it fought a war of Western convenience against Iran. Western support was generously given to that violent dictator, despite his repeated violations of international law, his use of chemical weapons against Iran, and his attempts to develop a nuclear arms programme. It seems that Western powers supported Saddam Hussein when he had indeed used WMD, while they attacked him when he didn’t. Astonishingly, the name of the special Middle East envoy of the American government at the time who rushed to offer American support to Saddam Hussein was Donald Rumsfeld (Borger, 2002)! As the humanitarian moral imperative never seems to have been a dominant force in American and generally Western foreign policy, the decision to sacrifice so many American lives and spend so many billions of dollars on the welfare of a foreign people seems to contradict the very principles that policy rests on. Of course sometimes nations genuinely change their attitudes over a period of time, particularly after a major collective experience such as the attacks of 9/11. Although it would be theoretically possible, and in fact very desirable, for an American administration to suddenly and genuinely adopt humanitarian principles when they officially deal with other countries, all the available evidence suggests that this wasn’t the case with the Bush government and its allies. Not only had that government failed to show any concern about


serious human rights violations in various places around the world or other important issues like climate change, but it also disregarded international and humanitarian law and its institutions during the preparations for the Iraq War itself. Indeed, this late humanitarian turn in the pro-war narrative appeared to contradict central humanitarian principles, as defined by the international community. According to the annual report of Human Rights Watch (2004: 17), one of the world’s leading independent organisations for defending and protecting human rights, the invasion of Iraq violated the principles upon which humanitarian intervention lies. According to Ken Roth, the director of the organisation, humanitarian intervention that occurs without the consent of the relevant government can be justified only in the face of ongoing or imminent genocide, or comparable mass slaughter or loss of life. To state the obvious, war is dangerous. In theory it can be surgical, but the reality is often highly destructive, with a risk of enormous bloodshed. Only large-scale murder, we believe, can justify the death, destruction, and disorder that so often are inherent in war and its aftermath. Other forms of tyranny are deplorable and worth working intensively to end, but they do not in our view rise to the level that would justify the extraordinary response of military force. Only mass slaughter might permit the deliberate taking of life involved in using military force for humanitarian purposes ... The capacity to use military force is finite. Encouraging military action to meet lesser abuses may mean a lack of capacity to intervene when atrocities are most severe. The invasion of a country, especially without the approval of the U.N. Security Council, also damages the international legal order which itself is important to protect rights. (Roth, 2004: 17–18) Militarily weakened from the first Gulf War twelve years earlier and economically exhausted by a long trade embargo, in 2003 the regime of Saddam Hussein did not seem likely to engage in genocide or mass slaughter and neither did it seem likely to endanger its neighbouring countries. The collective nature of the pro-war argument In this chapter I argue that the decision to invade Iraq was made collectively by American society and its allies in the “coalition of the willing”. It is the collective nature of that decision that makes the investigation of collective attachment relevant. Nonetheless, many analysts have claimed that the decision to invade Iraq was a calculated, cold-blooded


move orchestrated by circles of the American socio-economic elite and its allies in order to seize Iraqi oil (Juhasz, 2013). These analysts claim that the American public was purposively fed wrong manufactured information by large media corporations, which also had high stakes in the war. If this is true and the decision to invade Iraq was made by a minority administration (Bush very marginally and controversially made it to the presidency the first time, with a minority of the popular vote) then the collective nature of the decision can be questioned. Although I strongly share the view that the invasion had been pre-decided and unreliable intelligence was purposively distorted by powerful circles not in the least concerned about the actual existence of WMD or Saddam Hussein’s brutality, the public still played an important role in the construction of the pro-war narrative and the approval of the plan to invade. First, the decision to attack Iraq, together with decisions on all other major actions the USA took in response to 9/11 (e.g. Afghanistan, Guantanamo), was made by the elected American government and was approved by the elected American Congress. Although I deeply share with other analysts (Douglas, 2002) concerns regarding the democratic legitimacy of non-proportional systems (and the validity of the first Bush election), the truth of the matter is that in Western countries with winner-takes-it-all systems, like the USA and the UK, the majority of citizens do participate in elections and one way or another seem to accept the election results. Although, in my view, these types of public approval are evidently not enough to render the process properly democratic, they do provide some form of legitimation. Moreover, and very importantly, Bush won the second election comfortably, gaining also the majority of the popular vote. As that election occurred after both the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions and after his government’s approach to the problem of terrorism had been clearly laid out,1 Bush’s war on terror appears to have had a considerable degree of public approval at the time. Moreover, it is important to note that collective does not necessarily mean democratic. As human history has repeatedly shown, ideas and behaviours can be collectively adopted by social groups in the context of very undemocratic social processes – intimidation, coercion, and violence. For example, authoritarian regimes can enforce the adoption of particular behaviours, ideologies, and ways of life through fear, leaving their subjects with little choice. As I discussed in Chapter 4, subjugated social groups tend to internalise the ideological systems imposed upon them, as they are in need of security and social order. It is such internalisation that can make a particular ideological element to be regarded as collectively but not of course as democratically shared.


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Therefore, regardless of the clear limitations of the American and other Western political processes in relation to citizen involvement, the relative lack of transparency in making important decisions, and the strong economic-political interests of powerful news corporations, the choice to invade Iraq (as well as to invade Afghanistan and establish Guantanamo) can be regarded in some important ways as collective decisions, made by large segments of the American and European public. As such, they were choices informed by representations of collective attachment.

The Iraq invasion: an ineffective protective strategy In addition to narrative coherence, another crucial marker of attachment security refers to the effectiveness of the attachment strategy employed. As attachment strategies are developed by human beings in order to deal with threats and the anxiety these threats generate, an effective attachment strategy cannot be thought as a tactic that restores a subjective perception of safety only temporarily. An attachment strategy that truly generates security either in an individual or in a group, is one that addresses a threat at its root – one that optimally utilises both the competence of the self and the available support resources. The ultimate test for such a strategy would be to minimise the chances of the threat appearing again in the future and maximise the capacity of the organism to deal successfully with it, should it re-emerge. Attachment theorists claim that although particular insecure attachment patterns may provide the best possible adaptive capacity in a specific context,2 those patterns will always have limitations. On the other hand, as it provides the optimal overall functionality, the secure strategy should be regarded as the primary attachment strategy (Main, 1990). According to those researchers it is only with the employment of a secure attachment strategy that human beings can maximise the use of supportive resources and fully develop the competence and autonomy of the self. As discussed in previous chapters, research suggests that compared with the insecure, securely attached individuals have greater social and emotional competences in a number of important areas of psychosocial functioning. For example, they can read social reality more accurately, avoid activities that are likely to harm them and seek to establish mutually supportive and satisfying relationships with others. In addition, securely attached individuals have the psychological capability to tolerate uncertainty, regulate negative emotion, and take time to reflect before they take action. These important competences enable securely

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attached individuals to be more effective in promoting the well-being of the self, while sustaining meaningful and enriching relationships with others. On the other hand, driven either by excessive anxiety or by the need to conceal their feelings of vulnerability (or by both), insecurely attached individuals tend to engage in poorly reflected-upon action that could only reduce subjective perceptions of insecurity in the short term without properly dealing with the roots of the threat. As discussed in Chapter 4, it is reasonable to hypothesise that such a link between attachment security and adaptive effectiveness may also apply to the domain of collective attachment. If social groups operate under the influence of secure collective attachment representations, they should be expected to engage in self-protective action that brings about the intended results: minimises the group’s exposure to threats, promotes its well-being, and strengthens its sense of collective identity. On the other hand, when social groups’ self-protective strategies are guided by collective representations primarily underlain by insecurity, such strategies will be expected not only to fail to protect the group from existing dangers, but, often, even to expose them to new ones. Such strategies will be expected to create obstacles in promoting the welfare and facilitating advancement of the group. In this section I argue that as they constructed an incoherent pro-war narrative, American and other Western societies engaged in action that failed to deliver their intended protective outcomes. Like the other major operations after the 9/11 attacks (e.g. Afghanistan, Guatanamo), the Iraq invasion and the long violent unrest that followed seem to have done very little towards achieving the desired outcomes as stated by the US-led alliance – uprooting terrorism, stabilising potentially volatile Muslim regions, making the USA, the West, and the world a safer and better place. Although it may have removed the regime of Saddam Hussein, which after all was not Islamic, the invasion of Iraq seems to have ignited militant Islam across the globe, even in places where it had not been active before. A long series of attacks have erupted since the Iraq invasion, leading to the death and serious injury of thousands of civilians in Iraq itself, Pakistan, Somalia, Kenya, Yemen, Indonesia, the UK, Spain, India, the USA and other countries. While this book was getting ready for printing, the news about the establishment of the Islamic State and its disturbing trail of violence in both Iraq and Syria was added on this unfortunate list. According to a report by the Institute for Economics and Peace (2012), since the war started, the overall number of terrorist attacks across the globe increased by over 350%, including a substantial increase in attacks


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within Afghanistan, which should have been the focus of the American protective strategy. Most characteristically, a new type of “home-grown” Islamic terrorism has emerged in the West (e.g. UK, USA, Germany), conducting a significant number of violent operations, while numerous additional plots have been disrupted by security agencies in those countries. Moreover, many British-born Muslims have recently joined the war in Syria and participated in the appalling acts of violence committed by the fighters of the Islamic State. In addition, Islamic fundamentalism seems to have had a substantial impact on mainstream politics, with examples including the Hamas victory in the Palestinian elections, the adoption of a harder anti-Western line by the Iranian government, and the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan. Although a variety of factors may lie behind those events, the American reaction to the 9/11 attacks, particularly the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, seem to have defined the context of their occurrence in essential ways. Moreover, since the beginning of the Iraq War, perceptions of America and its allied West as profit-driven, unprincipled, and deceiving neocolonial powers have become even stronger among large populations around the world (Pew Research Centre, 2007) and an increasing number of socio-economically deprived and marginalised Muslim social groups appear to feel deeply threatened and determined to lash out. By violating international law and the UN charter, USA and their allies seem to have undermined the very institutions that they proclaimed they wanted to fight for and try to convince the world about, inflicting serious damage on their perceived credibility and moral integrity. Instead of the image of the honourable peace-loving giant that they wished to promote for themselves, America and its Western allies have been increasingly seen as untrustworthy and decadent, precisely among those populations that they needed to win over. Although airport security may have been enhanced since the events of 9/11, it would be very hard to claim that either America or its allies have become a safer place after the invasion of Iraq. The outcome of the protective action undertaken, seems to have contradicted its aims. Even if one assumes that, after Iraq, the terrorist threat to America and the West has been reduced by a little (and run the risk of being called a naïve optimist), the effectiveness of the defensive strategy needs to be assessed not only considering what is gained, but also what is lost. Taking into account the human and economic cost of the war, it seems that America and its allies have paid too much for such an obscure and strongly disputed gain. According to a recent multidisciplinary academic

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report (Watson Institute, 2011), in the ten-year period after the invasion at least 190,000 individuals lost their lives as the result of direct military activity, including 4,488 US service members, 3,400 US contractors, 11,000 members of the allied forces, 300 journalists and humanitarian workers, and 134,000 Iraqi civilians; the number of deaths suffered by the opposition was 36,400. On the other hand, the number of Iraqi civilians dying due to the destruction of health-related infrastructure, malnutrition, and environmental degradation is estimated to be many hundreds of thousands, while 2.8 million people have been displaced indefinitely or fled the country, often living in appalling conditions. Moreover, it is estimated that about 350,000 American veterans have been officially classified as disabled due to physical or psychological injury during the Iraq War while over 100,000 are estimated to suffer from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD); their unemployment rate is 2% higher than that of the general population and sex crimes by active duty soldiers have tripled since the invasion. According to the Watson Institute report, more than one million American children have coped with a parent going to the war, while a quarter of them have been clinically depressed. Iraqi children have also been badly affected: all critical health indices as well as the mortality rates among them have deteriorated since the war, while around one million Iraqi children have lost either one or both parents and more than three million are estimated to suffer from war-related PTSD. In addition to America’s failure to reduce terrorism, the protective action of invading Iraq contradicted yet another of its aims: instead of preventing a humanitarian catastrophe, it created one. In addition to the loss of human life, limb, and sanity, another area of the war’s seminal failure seems to be its spiralling economic cost. According to researchers in the Watson Institute (2011), the total economic cost of the war so far is estimated to be around 1.7 trillion, while the figure is expected to reach 6 trillion by 2050, including interest, as most of the money spent had been borrowed. If a fraction of that amount had been spent on alleviating poverty, social inequality, lack of education, and prejudice through peaceful and diplomatic avenues, much greater sociopolitical stability would have been achieved in unstable regions that may harbour terrorism across the Muslim world. Money would have also been saved towards improving the well-being of the American people, particularly those in disadvantaged socio-economic groups. Such a level of financial waste presents further evidence of an ineffective protective response by America and its allies and highlights an additional contradiction between the outcomes of that response and the stated aims of the pro-war narrative.


Finally, there is evidence suggesting that the war in Iraq has damaged the very institutions it set out to protect. According to the annual surveys assessing confidence in social and political institutions conducted by Gallup (2013), of the American citizens that took part in the 2013 survey, only 10% reported that they had considerable confidence in Congress, 36% reported considerable confidence in the Presidency, 23% in the newspapers and TV news, 34% in the Supreme Court, and 76% in the military. The figures for 2003, the year of the Iraq invasion, were 29% for Congress, 55% for the Presidency, 34% for newspapers and TV news, 47% for the Supreme Court, and 82% for the military. These figures clearly suggest a considerable decline in public confidence in all major socio-political institutions in the decade following the Iraq invasion and the “war on terror” with confidence in Congress reaching the lowest figure on record.

Further evidence of an insecure response: Afghanistan Although it was perhaps the clearest example suggesting that after the 9/11 attacks insecure collective attachment representations clouded the judgement of a substantial part of the American public, its representatives, and sections of other Western societies, Iraq was not the only one. The other major protective response of the US-led alliance was yet another invasion and yet another war which started before the Iraq invasion – that in Afghanistan and its neighbouring regions of Pakistan. As was the case with Iraq, the decision to launch this war violated important principles of narrative coherence and involved the undertaking of ineffective and dysfunctional action. The Afghanistan narrative It is undeniable that Bin Laden and a large group of Al-Qaida members were guests of Afghanistan’s Taliban government for a number of years before the 9/11 attacks. It is also undeniable that the two groups shared a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam and had developed a rather close relationship over time. However, it is also true, as a number of experts have strongly argued, that, despite their ideological similarities Al-Qaida and the Taliban have been separate movements with distinct identities, aims and strategies (Franzen, 2012). Griffiths (2009) emphasises a difference of major importance: while Bin Laden and Al-Qaida declared war against the Western occupiers of the holy Muslim land and praised martyrdom, the Taliban had no wish to spread their beliefs beyond the boundaries of their immediate region or to open up conflict with the Western powers.

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Based on extensive fieldwork including interviews with Taliban decision-makers, field commanders, and ordinary fighters, and drawing on their own experience of living in southern Afghanistan for many years, Strick van Linschoten and Kuehn (2012) argue that treating Al-Qaida and the Taliban as one and the same is an oversimplified Western construction. These authors argue that Western politicians, media pundits, and senior military personnel have consistently failed to notice that, despite their ties and their religious affinity, the ideologies of these two groups have been discrete and often diverging. Although both have adopted fundamentalist interpretations of the Koran, they adhere to different strains of Islamic thought: while the Taliban are influenced by the Saudirooted Wahhabi school and follow the Hanafi teachings, Al-Qaeda subscribes to the more radical and rigid Hanbali approach. Moreover, the authors emphasise the important socio-cultural differences that also existed between the two movements at the time of the 9/11 attacks. While the Taliban consisted of largely younger rural, unschooled Afghans with very little knowledge of the outside world, Al-Qaida members tended to be older, well-educated Arabs or other non-Afghans. It is not surprising, therefore, that given those multifaceted differences, there has often been tension between the two groups. In fact, according to the evidence collected by Strick van Linschoten and Kuehn, a substantial number of Taliban members grew increasingly disillusioned with Al-Qaida views and started considering it as harmful to the Taliban cause. They even kept putting pressure on Mullah Omar to loosen ties with the Arabs and ask them to leave the country. Unfortunately that internal Taliban opposition lost momentum with the death of their leading figure. Most importantly, there seems to be no reliable, independently corroborated evidence that the Taliban was involved in the 9/11 attacks. On the contrary, a number of pointers, other than the Al-Qaida–Taliban divergence, suggest that such an involvement was rather unlikely. First, the Taliban regime publicly condemned the attacks, officially gave its condolences to the American government, and called for the perpetrators to be brought to justice. Al-Qaida leaders, on the other hand, publically approved and rejoiced in the attacks. Immediately after the attacks, Abdul Salam Zaeef (2011: 143–144), the Taliban ambassador in Pakistan at the time, submitted the following note to the American embassy in Islamabad on behalf of the regime: We strongly condemn the events that happened in the United States, in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. We share the grief of


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all those who have lost the nearest and dearest in these incidents. All those responsible must be brought to justice. We want them to be brought to justice and we want America to be patient and careful in their actions. Second, there is evidence that Taliban leaders appeared surprised at the news of the attacks, both in public and private communications (Strick van Linschoten and Kuehn, 2012). Moreover, various sources have suggested a range of different scenarios, all inconsistent with Taliban involvement. One of those referred to the rejection by Mullah Omar of Bin Laden’s proposition to collaborate in an attack on the USA, another referred to Americans receiving tips from the Taliban regarding a possible attack, and a third to Mullah Omar receiving information about the imminent attacks only at the last minute (Strick van Linschoten and Kuehn, 2012). As the evidence for any Taliban involvement in the 9/11 events is doubtful at best, the narrative supporting the Afghanistan invasion and the assault on the movement on the basis of such an involvement violates the quality principle of coherence. Although Americans and the world had every reason to be vigilant and put pressure on the autocratic Taliban regime, the Taliban’s relationship with Al-Qaida does not automatically constitute evidence of a crime. The Taliban demand for evidence of guilt before handing over Bin Laden, a demand that was the actual pretext for the invasion, was a reasonable one and consistent with international law as Al-Qaida had never claimed responsibility for the attacks. The conclusion constructed in the pro-war narrative that refusal to hand over Bin Laden meant collaboration or at least approval of the attacks appears arbitrary and lacks substantive supporting evidence. The invasion of Afghanistan and attack on the Taliban also appear to violate the principle of relation, as the proposed and eventually adopted protective strategy set largely irrelevant targets. As discussed above, despite the undeniable ties between the two movements, constructing Taliban and Al-Qaida as being one and the same disregarded important elements of reality, suggesting obvious limitations in the collective agent’s reflective capacity. The narrative supporting the Afghanistan invasion also seems to violate the coherence principle of manner. As was the case with Iraq, the justification provided for invading Afghanistan kept shifting between a number of untested hypotheses. One time the focus was on the Taliban’s supposed involvement in the attacks, the next time it was the hospitality the Taliban provided to the Al-Qaida terrorists, and then, another time, it was the Taliban’s violation of human rights and international law.

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While the fanaticism and brutality of the Taliban regime are undeniable, as was the case with Iraq, no humanitarian catastrophe was under way at the time of the invasion to justify the killing and devastation that followed. Although it is irrefutable that the Taliban regime routinely violated human rights and international conventions, as its non-recognition by the UN and most world countries suggested, the violation of fundamental principles of the UN Charter by the US-led coalition in defence of international law is a logical contradiction not easy to miss. As many analysts have argued, the UN Charter opposes many of the actions the American government and its allies have taken in Afghanistan (Gray, 2012). These include the killing of civilians, the bombing of areas where civilians cannot be distinguished from soldiers, the removal of other nations’ governments, and attacks on states as a response to actions committed by individuals. Moreover, at the beginning of the Afghanistan war, the USA was the only Western country that had not signed the treaty establishing the International Criminal Court, a UN-backed body specifically founded to bring terrorists and other international criminals to justice. At that time, the US Congress also introduced a bill prohibiting any co-operation with UN member states that had ratified the treaty and authorised the US president to exert any necessary effort towards liberating American citizens detained by the Court (Tolworthy, 2002). As the USA appealed to the world community for co-ordinated action against terrorism and the protection of international law, at the same time, it showed a staggering disregard for the very institutions that promoted international peace and justice, plunging its pro-war narrative deeper into incoherence. The Afghanistan action Moreover, like the war in Iraq, the invasion of Afghanistan was defined not only by the incoherence of its narrative but also by the ineffectiveness of its protective action. Although the main stated aim of the invasion was the democratisation of the country and thereby the isolation of the terrorist groups that used it as a safe haven, according to a recent Democracy Index3 (Economist Intelligence Unit, 2012), 11 years after the invasion Afghanistan is still classified as an authoritarian regime in position 152. In that classification, the category authoritarian regimes contains the least democratic states in the world, including among others North Korea, Syria, and Iran. Afghanistan was placed in such a low position because of its extensive deficits in all areas of democratic functioning – electoral process,


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functioning of government, political participation, political culture, and civil liberties. That assessment has been in agreement with various other reports emphasising the extraordinary levels of corruption among postinvasion Afghan officials (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 2012) and the persisting high levels of violence against women (Barr, 2014). In its most recent report on the condition of human rights and civil liberties across the world, Freedom House (2014) has also highlighted fundamental problems in the establishment of democracy in Afghanistan by classifying it as a not free country (as opposed to free and partly free – the other categories used in the report). Nonetheless, the gross violations of human rights and the high levels of lawlessness currently observed in US-led are not simply due to the country’s autocratic and corrupt post-war regime but, to a large extent, due to the violent confrontation between the American-led occupying forces and the powerful insurgent Taliban groups. According to the Watson Institute report (2011), ten years after the invasion, the intensity of fighting went back to levels observed at the beginning of the war and more lives have now been lost compared with the time that the Taliban were in power. According to the analysts of the Economist Intelligence Unit (2012), the Afghan government seems unlikely to reach consensus with the insurgent groups by the time the American and other Western troops are scheduled to leave in 2015 and Afghanistan is likely to regress into large-scale conflict. If we assume that the most fundamental human right is the right to life, then the failure of the US-led invasion to attain its stated goals and protect human rights in the country seems even clearer. It is estimated that between October 2001 when the invasion started and February 2013, 130,000 people have been killed in Afghanistan and Pakistan as the direct result of military action. Casualties include around 55,000 civilians, over 300 humanitarian workers, over 80 journalists and media personnel, around 16,000 local military and police, over 2,100 US and 1,000 allied military personnel, and over 2,000 US contractors (Watson Institute, 2013). In addition to the thousands killed and seriously injured by direct military action, many civilians have died as an indirect consequence of warfare. The destruction of food resources and health-related infrastructure as well as the unprecedented breakdown in security resulting from the war are estimated to have caused death and serious ill health to tens of thousands. According to an Afghan Ministry of Public Health report, ten years after the military invasion two-thirds of the Afghan population suffered from mental health problems (Watson Institute, 2013).

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In addition to the human cost, the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan have had a very substantial economic cost. Experts estimate that the total economic cost of these wars for the USA will reach £1.8 trillion, including future obligations such as interest payments and disability allowances to military personnel (Crawford, 2013). That would only be the cost to the USA, while the other allies also have their own expenses. The cost for the UK, the main US partner in the war on terror, is estimated to reach £37 billion, the equivalent of a contribution of £2,000 by every tax-paying household (Ledwidge, 2013). Like the invasion of Iraq, the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan have been remarkably counterproductive, ultimately failing to guarantee the long-term protection of America and other Western countries from terrorism and to establish enduring stability in those volatile regions. It seems that America and its Western allies chose the wrong strategy to promote their collective safety and well-being, ignoring and misinterpreting a wealth of historical experience and expert analysis. Those have clearly suggested that violent interventions in foreign countries in defiance of international law can only breed further violence, destruction, and disadvantage to everyone involved. A research report analysing data from 268 terrorist groups whose activity both started and ended between 1968 and 2006 suggests that the military campaign as a method of containing terrorism is clearly ineffective (Rand Corporation, 2008). According to the report, only 7% of those terrorist groups were defeated militarily while by far the most effective strategies in their containment and eventual eradication were the peaceful political process (43% of the cases successfully resolved) and the employment of effective intelligence and policing methods (40% of the cases successfully resolved).4 The Western governments that took part in the invasion and the large social groups that supported their decisions did not pay enough attention to similar available data, neither did they manage to listen in a constructive way to their own collective experience of war and violence. There is no doubt that the Taliban regime had to be challenged and be pushed out of its zone of comfort so that its deeds remained consistent with its words and it assisted the international community in bringing the 9/11 attackers to justice. There is also no doubt that the Taliban regime had to be put under international pressure to respect human rights and engage with the world. However, launching a destructive war upon one of the world’s poorest and repeatedly traumatised by violence nations was not the way to do it. In fact, that was the best recipe to achieve the exact opposite. As, in the context of heightened international insecurity, the


Taliban was given an ultimatum that went far beyond the handing over of the 9/11 suspects5 and was allowed no room for negotiation, the American-led engagement with that regime was destined from the beginning to be perceived as offensive, intrusive, and intimidating. Such level of misjudgement on the part of the Western public supporting the action and of those political elites that genuinely believed in its effectiveness suggests a collective incapacity to understand the mind of the other – it suggests the operation of insecure collective attachment representations.

Guantanamo Another important component of the American-led response to the 9/1 attacks was the establishment of the Guantanamo prison in an American naval base in Cuba. Like the launching of the two major wars, this operation has also been fraught with logical contradictions, providing further evidence that the American-led response to the 9/11 attacks has been heavily informed by insecure collective attachment representations. The Bush administration set up the Guantanamo prison camp so that it could detain and interrogate terrorism suspects outside, both the American and international law as the American Supreme Court as well as numerous international bodies have stated that the camp is illegal. In four decisions of major importance, the US Supreme Court ruled that international law applies to those held in Guantanamo and that the Combatant Status Review Tribunals set up by the Bush administration to bypass the jurisdiction of the American federal courts violated both the American Constitution and the Geneva Conventions (Seligson, 2013). The US Supreme Court also ordered that Guantanamo suspects cannot be detained indefinitely without a trial and that constitutional habeas corpus protections apply to them. Similar statements have been issued by numerous international organisations. The United Nations Commission on Human Rights expressed serious concerns about the indefinite detention of suspects in Guantanamo, the independence of judges and lawyers that deal with their cases, and the violation of a range of prisoners’ human rights such as freedom of religion and the right to health (United Nations News, 2006). The commission also expressed serious concerns about the attempt of the American government to “redefine torture”. Similar views describing the Guantanamo camp as illegal have been expressed by additional international organisations such as the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (2013) and the International Committee of the Red Cross (White and Mintz, 2004).

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Attempting to protect themselves from the Islamist danger, America and its allies have engaged in action that contradicts the fundamental principles of contemporary Western justice. Both the Bush and later the Obama administrations never complied with the rulings of the highest American court and repeatedly contradicted the very international organisations that the USA itself has assisted to build. The stated aim of those organisations is to promote international justice, support co-operation between nations, and safeguard democratic law and order across the globe. In their attempt to protect themselves from a fanatical enemy and driven by inappropriately managed anxiety, America and its allies have contradicted their very fundamental institutions, suggesting that they operate under the guidance of insecure representations of collective attachment.

Collective insecurity and the axis of evil In addition to the organisation of narrative, attachment research suggests that content of language may also be a marker of attachment insecurity. Authors have argued that individuals experiencing difficulties bonding with others and regulating the self tend to generate descriptions of self and other characterised by negativity, lack of psychological sophistication, and ambivalence (Blatt and Auerbach, 2001). I suggest that this also applies to the collective construction of in- and out-groups and that an important factor behind social groups’ oversimplified perceptions of themselves and others is the insecure collective attachment representations that inform such perceptions. Just as is the case at the level of the individual, the systematic stereotypical and simplistic constructions of others by social groups result, at least partly, from the groups’ inability to collectively create accurate accounts of other groups’ “states of mind” – their intentions, perceptions, and needs. As with individuals, that collective capacity to understand the mind of the other is linked to insecurity of attachment, in particular insecurity of collective attachment. It seems such simplistic descriptions were present in the narrative of the American response to the 9/11 attacks, providing further evidence for the operation of insecure collective attachment representations during its construction. I will limit the present discussion to the most typical example of such a description, that used by the Bush administration when they referred to the enemies of America as evil, or the axis of evil. Such a description initially applied to the regimes of Saddam Hussein, North Korea, and Iran for harbouring terrorism and attempting to develop nuclear weapons, but it was later expanded to also include Syria,


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Libya, and Cuba (Gardner, 2003). Nonetheless, in everyday language the term has often functioned as a metaphor referring to all those countries and groups perceived as wishing to violently harm America and its interests. Of course, Bush and his administration were not the first to utilise the term evil in political rhetoric. Among others, another hardliner Republican American president, Ronald Reagan, used the term evil empire in the 1980s to refer to America’s most despised enemy at the time – the Soviet Union. Although the term evil may sometimes be used mainly for its rhetorical effect, other times, as I think is the case with the American-led military response to 9/11, the use of the term essentially suggests an incapacity to understand the other as human. Not simply an intentional effort to devalue the opponent, the use of the term in Republican and other political discourses suggests a genuine lack of comprehending the nature of the rival group as thinking and feeling. It seems that those subscribing to the use of the term after the events of 9/11 have been unable to understand the minds behind the attacks, their motives, their desires, their way of thinking. Why would human beings want to induce so much suffering in the American people? How is it possible that human beings wish to destroy America and its allies? Why would human beings wish to wipe out the best examples of humanity? Those who have used the term evil to describe America’s enemies have been unable to answer properly those questions because they have been unable to conceive their opponents as having minds worth exploring. It is indeed noteworthy that the most technologically advanced country in the world and one of the pioneers in the scientific understanding of humans as biological but also as psycho-social beings, when it comes to comprehending its most dangerous adversaries ignores all those academic advances and draws on the supernatural. It is indeed remarkable that when faced with the possibility of a substantial threat, American administrations and their supporting public deny one of the most defining aspects of the country’s social identity – science. The use of the term evil provides additional evidence that the Bush administration and at least part of its supporters were unable to view Islamic fundamentalists, the regime of Saddam Hussein, or various other enemies from the developing world as essentially human existences, not even as beings irreversibly damaged by violence, trauma, and deprivation, psycho-socially crippled by prejudice and fanaticism. Neither did they suggest that such enemies represented a degenerate form of human biology, like the Nazis thought of the Jews in the Second World War and white American Southerners of American blacks before the

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1960s. Attempting to properly apply either psycho-social or biological understandings of human behaviour in the beginning of the twentyfirst century would have automatically granted America’s adversaries an unconceivable special status – that of a being possessing a mind that deserves exploration. The inability of war supporters to represent terrorists in human terms provides further evidence for the operation of insecure collective attachment representations during the construction of the post 9/11 pro-war narratives.

The response to 9/11: keeping the tradition In the previous sections I have presented some evidence suggesting that the narrative in support of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars as well as the operation of the Guantanamo camp was defined by incoherence and that these three major US-led actions taken in response to the 9/11 attacks have been essentially ineffective. I argued that narrative incoherence and ineffectiveness of protective action suggest the operation of collective attachment representations underlain by insecurity. Faced with an unexpected and highly destructive threat that activated the collective attachment system, large parts of the American and other Western societies constructed a social narrative to make sense of the threat and implemented a protective strategy to restore their sense of safety. Nonetheless, in doing so they drew on a history of collective experiences of coercion and violence and the insecure collective attachment representations that such experiences have been intrinsically linked with. I will discuss those Western experiences in greater detail in Chapter 6. When faced with danger referring either to their physical well-being or their socio-cultural identity, social groups turn to their ideological and institutional systems for protection. As discussed in Chapter 4, if those systems have been constructed in circumstances of relative openness and reflectiveness they will be experienced as genuinely protective and be registered in social memory as coherent collective attachment representations underlain by security. If they have been constructed in a context of social coercion and violence they will be incoherently registered as both protective and unprotective, in the form of insecure collective attachment representations. Despite its advances in relation to basic democratic principles, human rights, social equality, and justice, Western society is still to a large extent informed by insecure collective attachment representations. As I will discuss in greater detail in Chapter 6, in the past two millennia Western social experience has been defined by coercion, violence, and


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collective trauma. America has had more than its fair share of the above process, marked from the start with socio-economic disadvantage, genocide, slavery, racism, and materialism. Constructed in the context of subjugation, coercion, and social trauma fundamental ideological principles and institutions of the American and other Western societies have been historically experienced by large social groups in two contradictory modes – as both protective and unprotective. As it previously happened in other historical moments, when the 9/11 attackers struck, the incapacity of those incoherently registered collective attachment objects to provide a real sense of security became evident. The US-led coalition attacked sovereign states and replaced foreign governments in the name of international law, violating international law itself. It has inflicted violent and painful death, mutilation, serious disease, starvation, and devastation upon hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, including thousands of children, in the name of defending humanitarian principles. The US Supreme Court itself has been bluntly ignored by four consecutive American governments, both Republican and Democrat. It seems that many Americans and other Westerners could not really trust some of the very fundamental institutions and ideological cornerstones upon which they have built their societies. Many Americans and their allies could not really trust their own collective attachment objects, objects that systematically have been constructed in historical contexts of subjugation and violence, too often overriding genuine social experience. As such a lack of trust was not connected with a process of conscious reflective ideological and institutional revision but broke out as a misguided unconscious attempt to avoid further psycho-social pain, the narrative of the protective response was incoherent and the action it informed unproductive.

6 Collective Attachment and the Western Tradition of Coercion and Violence

In the previous chapter I claimed that two important contemporary social narratives constructed in the United States and other parts of the Western world, the narratives supporting the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, were characterised by notable incoherence. I also argued that such incoherence indicated the operation of collective attachment representations permeated by insecurity, as I described the relevant terms in previous chapters. In Chapter 4 I discussed socio-cultural processes that underlie collective attachment and emphasised that the construction of insecure collective attachment representations is linked with practices of social coercion – socio-cultural domination, excessive restrictions in public debate, and often violence. I argued that domination of one social group over another tends to erode the collective attachment objects of the subjugated group and forcibly impose those of the dominator predisposing the latter towards the construction of incoherent collective attachment representations and often the disorganisation of the collective attachment system. In this chapter I will attempt to address the question why the American-led response to the events of 9/11 was so powerfully driven by insecurity. In particular, I will suggest that, like many other social narratives constructed in Western society, the Iraq and Afghanistan War narratives were informed by insecure collective attachment representations that have dominated social life in the West for many centuries. Although, at an immediate level, those war narratives are linked with American and generally Western foreign policy in the Middle East in the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries, this policy has been based on larger ideological and institutional pillars that have defined Western society for centuries. Considering those narratives as characteristic contemporary expressions of such deeply rooted Western principles, 124

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I will review some of the latter and I will argue that they have systematically failed to be experienced as genuinely protective and security promoting and have therefore been systematically constructed as insecure collective attachment objects. I will argue that despite Western victories in the struggle for more democracy, freedom of thought, and human understanding, such insecure objects have been intrinsically linked with repeated collective experiences of socio-cultural domination, coercion, and violence defining Western history in the past two millennia. Despite its moments of peace and compassion, European history has been permeated by collective experiences of coercion and violent trauma. In the past two millennia, Europeans have lived through a long succession of wars, dislocations, poverty, and devastation involving the death and serious injury of millions, the destruction of countless communities, and the violent persecution of numerous social identities. Scholars report that post-traumatic stress at clinical levels was widespread throughout the medieval and modern times as soldiers and civilians suffered repeated man-made as well as natural disasters. Some authors estimate a typical prevalence of post-traumatic stress disorder of about 50% during that period (Cobb and Cobb, 2005). Given the longterm effects of psychological trauma and its tendency to be transmitted to subsequent generations, it is easy to understand how a large number of Europeans in the past two millennia could have presented psychological structures prone to violence and relational disturbance. Traumatised individuals would have been unconsciously compelled to re-create the traumatic experience, inflicting further damage on the self and others and inducing in their children what in the literature has been call unsolvable fear (Cassidy and Mohr, 2001). Moreover, such individuals would have relatively willingly submitted to ruthless and inhumane authority or have become such authority figures themselves, taken part in bloody warfare, and devastated human life. Finally, such individuals would have been expected to contribute to the construction of insecure rather than secure collective attachment objects, as through their action and their argument, they would have participated in the consolidation or a new formation of ideological and institutional frameworks meant to protect the identity and well-being of their social groups. It is true that although personal histories play a significant role, collective action goes beyond the experience and behaviour of particular individuals and that the social processes involved in the construction of collective attachment objects acquire their own unique dynamic that transcends individual experience. However, when traumatisation is inflicted on such a mass scale, both concurrently

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and longitudinally, it transcends individual boundaries and becomes a collective experience. When large numbers of people are repeatedly coerced and traumatised, either through human-made threats or natural disasters perceived as preventable by human action, social identities are injured as well as personal ones. In Chapter 4 I argued that socio-cultural processes relating to collective trauma are tightly interwoven with those of collective attachment. When ideological and institutional systems are perceived as unable to protect social groups from overwhelming experiences – that is, when ideologies and institutions are proven unable to provide interpretative frameworks within which painful group experiences can be made sense of – social or cultural trauma develops and trust in those ideological and institutional systems is put in further doubt. As the “dialogue” between historically constructed collective attachment representations and current social reality occurs to a great extent outside awareness so that the group is protected from further anxiety, genuine experiences of vulnerability in the group are not communicated and the incapability of the collective objects to protect the group is not explicitly addressed. That makes the collective trauma difficult to resolve and makes the social group more susceptible to further traumatisation. It seems that European history has been locked in a succession of coercive and traumatising events and social conditions that have rendered social groups and individuals unable to escape. Despite moments of victory for the forces of human connection, mutual understanding, and critical reason (for example, during the Renaissance or the Enlightenment), Europe has been largely guided by collective attachment objects underlain by insecurity that have obstructed its true liberation from the regressive forces of social coercion and trauma. Ridden with a relentless class hegemony, ethnic conflict, and more recently the supremacy of instrumental reason, European history has been defined by social domination, continuously reconstructing objects of collective attachment that don’t allow the human mind to be properly understood.

European history, coercion, and violence: the role of Christianity Let us explore the history of the dominant ideological system in postantiquity Europe, the Christian religion. Christianity has been the dominant ideological force in European social life since the fourth century AD, when Emperor Theodosius established it as the official doctrine of the Roman Empire. Although in the West the number of people who define


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themselves as Christians has dropped substantially in recent decades and the state has long established its secularity, Christian tradition still exerts a significant influence on the contemporary European way of life. If European history infused by the collective experience of coercion and trauma, so is the history of Christianity. Numerous scholars provide accounts of the acts of barbarism and cruelty committed systematically by Christians against non-Christian believers during the 17 centuries of Christian domination in Europe (Ellerbe, 1995 Haught, 2003).These authors suggest that Christianity showed its violent streak from its very early days as it launched a ferocious anti-pagan pogrom during the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries, immediately after it became the dominant ideological force. Atrocities committed included the massacre of great numbers of pagans and their priests, the destruction of pagan temples and settlements, and the issuing of Emperors’ orders for the execution of those who remained loyal to the pagan religions. In the centuries that followed millions of individuals were killed, seriously injured, tortured, and terrorised, while villages were burnt, communities devastated, and identities nullified in the name of Christianity in a thick sequence of major “purifying” attempts. Those included, among others, repeated missions against the remaining pagans (e.g. the beheading of Saxons by Charlemagne, the slaughter of the peasants of Steding, the devastation of thousands of villages and temples in Poland), the campaign against heretics and other non-Catholic Christians (e.g. the slaughters of Manichaean and Albigensian believers, the massacre of Protestants in Magdeburg), the Holy Inquisition and persecution of Arabs and Jews in Spain and Portugal, and the burning of hundreds of thousands of witches at the stake. Christianity-inspired violence seems to have survived well into the twentieth century, as half a million Orthodox Serbs are thought to have been exterminated in a concentration camp run by Croatian Catholic fascists and Franciscan friars with the knowledge of the pope, during the Second World War (Manhattan, 1986). Finally, perhaps the most characteristic example of how official Christianity continues to emotionally damage European citizens in the twenty-first century is the recent exposure of the systematic attempt of the Catholic Church to conceal the numerous instances of child sexual abuse by Catholic priests over many decades. Those have been only a few among many instances in which Christian religion inspired the infliction of physical and psychological pain on masses of Europeans during its many centuries of reign in that continent (I will talk about equally devastating events relating to non-Europeans later). If the Christian Church had killed and burnt so that it could loot

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the wealth of its victims like other barbarians, the problem it would have posed in the construction of collective attachment representations would have been simpler. As I have mentioned previously, although certain devastating events have the capacity to overwhelm anyone, the critical factor in deep and long-lasting traumatisation is not the type of the painful event itself, but the way in which that event is made sense of by the sufferer. A village that is subjected to a violent attack by a savage intruder that is motivated for example by looting, would normally be able to regroup when the attack is over. If there had been reasonable cohesion in the group, the survivors could now bury the dead, construct a narrative that would make sense of the event, and discuss measures that would hopefully leave them better prepared in the future. After an initial period of shock and mourning, life would continue its course, there would be no injury in the identity of the group (on the contrary, reciting acts of heroism may reinforce the sense of identity); specific vulnerable individuals would have experienced post-traumatic stress. However, the Christian Church was after a spiritual loot. Although run by officials not at all indifferent to material wealth or sexual pleasure – on the contrary – according to the Christian discourse, the target of the Church was the human mind. But as attachment research has shown, a mind that is violently captured is a mind that is not understood and a mind that cannot understand. At the same time that it killed and devastated, Christianity preached love and human compassion. Moreover, when it massacred heretics and burnt witches at the stake, the Church claimed that it didn’t do all that for its own sake but because it had a compassionate mission assigned by God – to save the souls of the infidels. It is exactly at this point that the foundations of an insecure collective attachment are laid: the interpretation provided by the powerful other sharply contradicts the experience of the self. Constrained by slavery, repeatedly assaulted by waves of bellicose intruders, and increasingly doubtful of the fragmented power of pagan gods to protect them, in the first centuries AD Europeans started to find in Christianity a new safe place, if not necessarily on Earth then in Heaven. As the late Roman Empire was in turmoil and the ancient world seemed to come to a close, the idea of a single all-loving and omnipotent God and the grace of turning the other cheek to an enemy one can only love now seemed more appealing as a source of security. Nonetheless, together with the safety-boosting provisions of Christianity, along came coercion and violence. A collective attachment object that, according to Christian teachings, was set up to protect and enhance human life simultaneously


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became the instigator of fear and death. As Europeans turned to their god for protection, that god systematically threatened their existence, making it impossible for the Christian religion to function as a secure collective attachment object. Not only did Christian teachings of human compassion and humility sharply contradict the actual social experience of numerous social groups across Europe – the experience of the Christian Church as a savage and arrogant ideological dominator – but the threatening nature of the attachment object itself disorganised the collective attachment system in Europe. Unable to openly converse, either in public or in private, and reflect on painful experience, various social groups in Europe remained coerced and traumatised for centuries, repeatedly re-enacting their unprocessed painful experiences. Although the attitude of the Catholic Church towards child-abusing clergy at the beginning of the twentyfirst century could provide only a very rough approximation of how Christianity reflected on the effects of its earlier violent campaigns, it is nonetheless indicative. Secrecy, fear of openness, fear of thought, and a raw, un-metabolised guilt of being human seems to have underlain all too often human communication both within the Church and between the Church and the human community. In the past two millennia, Europeans kept reconstructing a collective attachment object that has been too scared to know the human mind. It comes therefore as no surprise that in the past two centuries, despite its hesitation, the Western world has slowly moved away from Christianity and other forms of traditional religion. In my discussion of Christianity as a collective attachment object I do not mean to suggest that many individuals and social groups in the Western world and elsewhere haven’t found genuine meaning in its teaching or that a number of enlightened Christians have not shown great compassion and humanism. Neither do I intend to suggest that Christian beliefs have not sustained certain human communities through serious crises or have not inspired action towards a brighter future. What I am suggesting is that when Christianity acted as a collective source of support and containment, such provisions tended to be temporary and partial, soon followed by the next wave of oppression and violence and very rarely allowing truly open and transparent human dialogue. I believe it was that dark side of Christianity that, to this date, has kept Europeans from properly breaking a very long and vicious circle of coercion and trauma and from collectively generating more sophisticated and human-centred understandings of the social world.


European history, coercion, and violence: the role of democracy In addition to Christianity, another major ideological and institutional system that has functioned as a collective attachment object in the last two millennia in Europe has been that of democracy. While the idea of democracy is highly congruent with the notions of openness, unobstructed communication, and critical reflection that define attachment security at the individual and collective levels, the manner in which that elusive concept has been constructed throughout European history has often prevented it from functioning as a secure collective attachment object. Although that history includes very long periods during which any notions of self-governance and public accountability seemed entirely irrelevant to the public discourse, apparitions of democracy have always lingered at the back of mind. While democracy officially entered sociopolitical thinking for the first time with the ancient Athenian Golden Age, it was at exactly that time that European democracy was also officially denied for the first time. Western democracy was marked at birth. On the one hand, Athenian democracy had all those enviable characteristics that contemporary Western democracies have never reached: it was direct, participatory, transparent, the best minds tended to influence policy, and it had no tolerance for corruption. On the other hand, it seemed to have a major problem: it wasn’t for everyone. While Athenian society constructed a collective attachment object that allowed open communication and critical reflection at an unprecedented level, that object was also discriminatory as such privileged states of mind were saved only for an elite social group called Athenian citizens. It was only that elite male minority, about a quarter of the city’s entire population, who were allowed to debate, reflect, and make decisions that impacted on their lives. All the remaining Athenian subjects – women, slaves, and immigrants – were regarded as somewhat less than fully human. As freedom of speech and freedom of choice were understood in the above terms, it hardly comes as a surprise that the mighty Athenian army slaughtered all male inhabitants of the small island of Melos and sold all women and children as slaves, in the heyday of Athenian democracy. Melos’s crime was that it decided to remain neutral during the war between Athens and its rival city of Sparta. In the Melian Debate, Thucydides (Jowett, 1900: 168) reconstructs the reply of Athenian officials to the Melian delegation who tried to convince them not to attack: Well, then, we Athenians will use no fine words; we will not go out of our way to prove at length that we have a right to rule ... for we both

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alike know that into the discussion of human affairs the question of justice only enters where there is equal power to enforce it, and that the powerful exact what they can, and the weak grant what they must. Like Christianity, Western democracy shows its two faces from the very beginning. On the one hand, freedom to debate and freedom to decide if you are an Athenian citizen, dehumanisation and death if you are not. To justify the domination of the powerful over the weak, Athenian democracy provided interpretative frameworks that often contradicted lived experience and was unable to properly contain the fear and anxiety pervading the ancient world. Moreover, Athenian democracy functioned both as a protective and a threatening collective attachment object, becoming the very source of trauma itself. Unsurprisingly, Athenian democracy declined relatively quickly, giving way to even more blood and social coercion as well as relative intellectual sterility during the Alexandrian and Hellenistic eras. The contradictory character of Western democracy as a collective attachment object continued to be constructed into the Roman era. On the one hand, Roman citizens gathered in mass assemblies to elect their officials, magistrates, judges, tax collectors, and ten “tribunes of the people” who looked after the poor (Ward, 2004). Those institutions could have provided the opportunity for open expression, reflective debate, and a collective sense that the needs of the group could be freely explored and productively met. They could have, if a number of serious restrictions had not been imposed on the republic of Rome. Voters in the official public meetings in the Forum could never initiate or debate proposed legislation, while candidates for high office could only come from the wealthiest classes and they had to be approved by the existing office holders (Ward, 2004). Such office holders were also the ones to oversee the elections, conducted in the centre of Rome. As only the relatively well-off could travel to the centre of the city, it is unsurprising that only 2% of Roman citizens were actually taking part in those elections. Moreover, an elected executive could veto the proposed legislation of another, while since the early years of the republic the centre of power gradually started to move from the elected representatives to the Senate (the Senate was a body of wealthy appointed officials that controlled Rome’s provinces and every branch of the state’s finances). Scholars have noted that the seemingly unexpected and sudden transformation of the Roman republic into an imperial system based on the autocratic and arbitrary exercise of power during the Augustus years was not actually that unexpected. Those scholars argue that the Roman republic itself was in fact an oligarchy controlled by a small number of


wealthy land-owning families that used tightly knit networks of personal relationships and patronage to influence elected officials and the Senate (Badian, 1968). In its second major historical period, therefore, Western democracy presents very similar characteristics as a collective attachment object as it did in the first. By maintaining a system of social dominance and the exclusion of the socio-economically disadvantaged from the decision-making process, democracy as constructed by the Romans, devalued and subjugated the citizens. Such a discriminatory collective attachment object not only had limited strength in regulating group anxiety triggered by external threats, but it also created its own sources of coercion and trauma. In such a context of problematic collective containment, the amount and nature of violence that permeated Roman life came as a logical consequence. On the one hand, Romans exhibited unprecedentedly systematic aggression and savagery towards almost every people in their known world. Based on extreme military discipline and ruthlessness and regularly applying the decimation method (commanders executing one every ten Roman soldiers if those were perceived to be less than fully committed to the fight) the Roman army conquered about one sixth of the world’s then population, massacring millions, enslaving the useful survivors, and draining the economic resources of the occupied lands. Romans’ relentless desire for aggressive expansion and human subjugation cannot be explained simply by the reality based insecurity and survival challenges of the ancient world. Although in those times a human group had to be militarily capable and always ready to fight, feeling obliged to conquer the entire Mediterranean basin and much of north-Western Europe in order to feel safe goes far beyond the boundaries of a reasonable self-defence. The incoherent collective attachment representations of the ideological and institutional system of Rome could not protect that ancient group from overwhelming experiences of anxiety and fear, compelling them into further aggression. It wasn’t only architecture and literature that the Greeks passed on to the Romans, it was also insecure representations of collective attachment to a republic built upon social domination. Nonetheless, in the Roman years violence did not stop in the battlefield or the exotic lands of the conquered. Blood and human pain was a routine experience of city life, most notably of life in Rome itself. Dehumanisation, torture, and death became a spectacle for mass entertainment, as great numbers of gladiators, unarmed offenders, and animals were slaughtered in grand amphitheatres. While paxromana had shielded the inner empire from war for about two centuries, battlefields were now re-created for public amusement within the Roman towns themselves.


Hopkins (1983) suggests that those public spectacles had a specific function towards the preservation of the Roman social order: they maintained an atmosphere of violence in time of peace and represented, as in political theatre, the confrontation between rulers and ruled. Ridden with internal contradictions and self-negation, the fragile Roman republic gave way to imperial rule, then to socio-political fragmentation and feudalism in the West and the Byzantine theocracy in the East. Unable to grow deeper roots and refrain from systematically inflicting collective coercion and violence, the tentative democracy that was constructed in ancient Europe was incapable of protecting social groups from experiences of excessive anxiety, social domination, and repeated cycles of trauma. Trapped within collective attachment representations underlain by insecurity and in the face of a changing world suffering sustained waves of tribal invasions from the east and the north, Europe let any seeds of ancient democracy slip through her fingers and fell into the promised absolute safety of the Christian God. After an initial period of marginalising Christianity, Roman subjects converted to the new religion at an astonishingly high speed (MacMullen, 1986). It is estimated that the number of Christian believers rose from about one thousand in 40 AD to about eight million at the end of the fourth century, when Christianity changed from a persecuted sect to the official religion of the Roman Empire. Attachment researchers report that even though the relationship between individuals’ attachment security and their religiosity is multifaceted, empirical evidence clearly supports a link between attachment insecurity and sudden religious conversion (Granqvist and Kirkpatrick, 2004). Although the cross-cultural and historical validity of those findings are open to further exploration and the relationship between individual and collective phenomena is a complex one, the findings seem consistent with my argument: guided by insecure collective attachment representations of the Roman republic turned empire and the Greek polis before that, Europeans now embraced the certainty of a single, omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent god. The violent imposition of Christian ideas by the first Christian emperors could not account alone for such mass conversion – the Roman population was also strongly in need of a new system of belief. Democracy could not be a feature of Church-ruled medieval Europe. Political power in the Middle Ages was absolute and centralised, like power and truth in the Christian dogma. Despite seeds of self-determination, such as the medieval communes and their municipal councils that later developed into attempts to establish the first European parliaments, the centres of political power in the Middle Ages were the feudal monarchs and the


pope, as the Church dominated the ideological landscape. Religious and political power in medieval Europe were closely interwoven and most of the violence in the name of Christianity was committed by the armies of feudal lords. Europe for many centuries would remain imprisoned in insecure collective attachment representations repeatedly fuelled by successive waves of violence, famine, disease, and ideological tyranny. Nonetheless, as feudal monarchs fought also against each other, as well as against papal officials, over wealth and political power, and as the Church itself split into bitterly colliding factions, the idea that political power should be closer to humans than it is to God started hesitantly to re-emerge during the Renaissance and early modernity. While monarchy and its close ties to the Church remained strong until the end of the eighteenth century, ideas about a new type of secular authority cautiously emerged. However, such an authority seemed unlikely to sustain a genuine sense of collective security across the populations of Europe. According to the founder of modern political philosophy Machiavelli, whose ideas defined political thinking in the era, political authority should only be based on the effective exercise of power, without yielding to the weakness of moral considerations. The ideal ruler of emerging modernity, according to the Italian thinker, should be willing to commit even acts of terrible evil, in order to exercise his power effectively. That banning of morality from the political sphere seemed to him reasonable and inevitable given the nature of human beings: one can say this in general of men: they are ungrateful, disloyal, insincere and deceitful, timid of danger and avid of profit ... Love is a bond of obligation which these miserable creatures break whenever it suits them to do so; but fear holds them fast by a dread of punishment that never passes. (Machiavelli, 1965: 62) Setting the foundations of modern political thinking, Machiavelli echoed Europe’s ongoing envelopment in insecure representations of collective attachment. Behind the exaggerated perceptions of an autocratic mind, the philosopher’s rather impoverished description of human beings seems to conceal an element of truth. The European subject emerged from the Middle Ages shaped by violence, coercion, ideological persecution, and recurrent cycles of trauma, often overtaken by fear and difficult to trust and be trusted. As I described in the previous section, Christianity and its institutions did very little to promote collective security and freedom of mind. What Machiavelli and his suggested theory of government were unable to provide, however, was an exit from that


cycle of insecurity. Although he claimed that individual leaders and monarchs have limited prominence and proposed the republic to act as the virtuous governor, the new vision of government emerging in Europe and so characteristically presented by Machiavelli built on the social domination and oppression of antiquity and the Middle Ages. It reinforced further the insecure representations of collective attachment that had been guiding the history of Europe for so long. While ethics have not been excluded altogether from modern Europe’s political sphere as Machiavelli envisaged, the integrity of the socioeconomic elites ruling Europe since then has been repeatedly questioned by socio-political movements and scholars. The combination of instrumental rationality, ruthless execution, and questionable morality that have typically characterised Western governments in the past centuries make Machiavelli a prophet of the dominant political ethos in modernity.

Europe, coercion and violence: the current role of democracy Although enhanced assemblies and parliaments were established in major European countries by the end of the eighteenth century, somewhat limiting the absolute authority of monarchs and supposedly defending the rights of the people, those bodies were not elected by the people themselves. Membership was typically determined by socioeconomic status and large segments of the population were by design excluded from the process. The first attempt at universal male suffrage in Europe was made in 1792 during the French Revolution, only to be revoked very quickly as concerns were raised over the elimination of socio-economic status as a voting eligibility criterion (Crook, 1996). Universal male suffrage was reinstituted in France during the revolution of 1848, but women would not have the right to vote in that country for another century. France was followed by Switzerland in 1848 and Germany in 1867, while only some men but not others could vote in Great Britain until 1918 and in the Netherlands until 1917. European women gained their voting rights much later and it was only by the late 1940s that most European countries had established universal female suffrage. Interestingly, at the heart of Europe, Switzerland only allowed women to vote in 1971 at the federal elections and in 1990 at the cantonal elections, while Liechtenstein established female suffrage in 1984! It seems that until the middle, and sometimes the end, of the twentieth century quite a few of the European democracies were excluding about half of their population from the democratic


process simply on the basis of gender. As they were officially denied the right to take part in decision-making as full members of their organised societies, it would not be an exaggeration to claim that until the mid- or late twentieth century women in parts of Europe were considered as less valued citizens than men. It is difficult to see how a secure object of collective attachment can be constructed when social groups exclude from public conversation and major decision-making processes other groups of the same society on the basis of socio-economic status or gender while at the same time they define themselves as democratic. It is difficult to see how Western democracy has been able to function as such an object in the past two centuries, when even the most fundamental right of a citizen in a democracy, the right to vote, has been so persistently denied. As was the case with the ancient city states and medieval Christianity, the interpretative framework provided by the collective attachment object in modern European democracy contradicts the citizen’s lived experience. Nonetheless, it can be claimed that, despite the exceptions of Switzerland and Liechtenstein, at least in the past 65 years the vast majority of adults in Europe have had the right to vote. Would that be enough for a community to be called really democratic? Regrettably, the European political system (in which I also include the citizens) have created additional mechanisms by which public debate and decisionmaking are kept in reality out of the reach of the people. One of those mechanisms refers to the electoral system, particularly the adoption of non-proportional representation. The main argument supporting the idea of representative democracy is that in contemporary, large, and complex societies, direct democracy similar, for example, to that first applied in ancient Athens would present important practical difficulties. A number of political thinkers have disputed the validity of such a claim, but for the moment let us assume that democratic representation is the most workable option – I will return to the argument for a direct contemporary democracy later. If the reason for restricting the right of direct participation in decision making is feasibility then one would expect that the different voices that take part in an election (e.g. the different political parties) should be reflected in the representative body in a way that corresponds to their true popularity among the voters (for example, if 30% of the electorate vote for a political party, then that party will have the right to 30% of the representatives). This seems like a reasonable and straightforward alternative, provided that one only seeks to solve the feasibility problem of direct democracy in contemporary society.


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Yet, only a small number of Western democracies have systematically applied such elementary logic in the elections of their representatives during those 65 years. Instead, most Western democracies advantage the first, second, and sometimes third most popular parties by allowing them to elect more representatives than the electorate has authorised to do through its voting. Such a distortion of the will of the people ranges from the winner-takes-all or first-past-the-post system adopted in the UK and former British colonies, such as USA and Canada, to mixed semi-proportional systems used in various European countries (e.g. France and Greece). Under those electoral systems, views shared by the minority of the people are artificially pumped up and rule as majorities in the parliament. The obvious question therefore is asked: why does a democratic political system attempts so persistently to deceive itself? The most frequently mentioned argument in support of non-proportional systems is that proportional systems are unlikely to result in strong governments, therefore requiring the formation of coalitions – a long and complicated political process that may leave the country in uncertainty. A related argument also is that coalitions will inevitably involve minority parties (as if not any party with less than half of the vote were a minority party), which may “force” their minority views and interests on the majority through blackmail – that is, by threatening to leave the coalition. The absurdity of these widely held beliefs is immense. It is astonishing that nowhere in these arguments is the will of the people appropriately considered, although democracy is, at the very least, about the majority rule – if the majority does not rule, there is no democracy. On the other hand, very importantly, this proportionality dysfunction hypothesis clearly contradicts empirical reality. While the British banking system was driven to self-destruction in 2008, the economy entered a deep recession, and the UK embarked on two major and largely illegal wars during three successive terms of arrogant New Labour rule that remained unchallenged thanks to the first-past-the-post voting system, Germany, with its supposedly insecure much more proportional electoral system and its supposedly unstable coalition government, has been by a long shot the dominant socio-economic force in Europe, borrowing in the financial markets on negative interest rates, and showing far greater respect for international law. Moreover, on the other side of the European spectrum, the long-lasting, majority-boosting Greek electoral system did not do much to prevent the country’s 30-year spiral descent into the degradation of public life, widespread corruption, and gross administrative incompetence that led to the recent crisis. In fact, many (including myself), believe that the


arbitrary electoral boost-up of the country’s two major political parties that have led the dysfunctional dance was one of the main political mechanisms that kept those parties in power for so long and so disturbingly unrestrained. On the other hand, neighbouring Italy, with a very proportional electoral system and a series of coalition governments has had a much better fate. Despite its long Berlusconi ordeal and various economic problems, until this moment it has managed to contain the financial crisis better than any of the other hard-hit countries of the European periphery (Greece, Spain, Portugal, and Ireland), all of which, incidentally, use much less proportional electoral systems. Incoherent justifications have their causes and those causes need to be explored. Marxist and other left-leaning analysts have long claimed that the ruling socio-economic elites do all they can to minimise popular involvement in the governing of society and promote self-serving ideological arguments that help them keep political authority under their tight control (Marcuse, 2002; Gramsci, 2011). I couldn’t agree with such an analysis more, except that it only sheds light on one side of the problem. When the picture becomes more complicated is when we consider that quite a few working-class individuals strongly hold such erroneous beliefs, as do members of the better-off classes with a genuine interest in social justice. These have nothing to gain in terms of socioeconomic and political status. Nonetheless, there is another kind of benefit that individuals and social groups are likely to obtain from a society that is not “too” democratic. They are likely to obtain, they hope, greater security. At least among the genuine thinkers, the quest for stability and security is what shifts the emphasis from the will of the people to the functionality and ultimately survival of the group. Like allowing servants to vote during the French Revolution or providing suffrage to Swiss women in the 1960s was perceived as compromising the well-being and survival potential of the group, genuine respect for the majority view is experienced by many Western democracies as a threat and a source of collective anxiety and fear. Guided, to a large extent, by insecure collective attachment representations constructed throughout centuries of social domination and violent trauma, contemporary Europe feels threatened by really open communication, the recognition of otherness, and the prospect of genuine social collaboration. Contemporary Europe seems to feel threatened by real democracy. In addition to the issues of representation, contemporary European democracy seems to have problems that have put question marks on its true political character. Citizen participation is one of them. Considering


the most elementary form of participation, voting in national and local elections, figures suggest that a substantial minority across different countries in Europe do not take part in elections. Among the lowest socioeconomic strata, the majority abstain. Not surprisingly, election turnout has been found to be lower when non-proportional electoral systems are used (Blais and Aarts, 2006). In addition to low election turnout, European citizens in recent years seem to be engaging much less with a number of public roles that in the past showed much greater popularity, such as political party membership or participation in local government. A number of social theorists suggest that this withdrawal from public participation and the encapsulation of citizens in their private worlds is an indication of radical transformation and crisis in Western societies. Simmel (1972) locates the turn to individualism in the emphasis of the modern era on self-construction and self-definition and the transcendence of the constrictions imposed by the externally defined, fixed identities of traditional society. However, such changes are viewed by the author as two-edged as liberation may also become a constraint: modernity’s emphasis on the individual brings with it the danger of impersonal relationships, the demise of meaning, and loss of personality. Adorno (2001) discusses how contemporary materialistic culture draws Westerners into a “pseudo-individualism” as a real sense of autonomy and identity is actually lost in mass conformist consumption, while according to Habermas (1984), through the intensive commodification and bureaucratisation of contemporary global capitalism, the public sphere disintegrates. Beck (1996) suggests that in contemporary Western society individuals are only party integrated in their social networks, as they continuously strive to redefine themselves in a fast-changing, ambivalent, and insecurity-generating world that no longer provides identity certainties. Two major themes seem to run through the main psycho-social theories that attempt to address the problem of individualism and receding participation in the political process of contemporary Western society. The first refers to an increased sense of individual freedom and unprecedented possibilities for self-definition brought about by late modernity, opportunities that seem at odds with the notion of human community at least as that was known so far. The second theme refers to the idea that democracy and its essential characteristic of being engaged in public conversation are fundamentally challenged in contemporary Western society by its all-powerful materialistic economy and culture. I argue that both these observations refer to socio-cultural processes underlain by collective attachment insecurity. I don’t intend to reduce the multitude of complex historical processes that define individual autonomy, human

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community, and economic activity to one single notion, that of collective attachment, but to suggest that such a notion may be potentially useful in our attempt to better understand those complex processes. Theorists suggest that attachment security is underpinned by a balanced development between the need for trustworthy relationships and that of defining and expanding the reach of the self. According to the pioneering attachment researchers (Ainsworth et al., 1978; Bowlby, 1982), attachment security is characterised by the undisrupted and functional link between the attachment and the exploratory behavioural systems, while Blatt (1995b), arguing from a psychoanalytic perspective, suggests that healthy psychological development rests upon an equilibrium between two fundamental human needs, the need for relatedness and the need for autonomy. According to Blatt, when human development is skewed towards one or the other direction, psychological disturbance ensues. The notion of attachment security as a balance between individuality and human connection may be valuable not only in understanding individual psychology, but also in illuminating important aspects of collective processes. Social formations guided by insecure collective attachment representations, like the Roman or medieval society, tend to substantially restrict individuality and freedom of expression. As the open expression of difference is likely to bring deep feelings of uncertainty and identity doubt to the surface both in individuals and in groups, choice is severely restricted and social roles become fixed and externally defined. By restricting individual autonomy, those insecurityladen societies attempted to hold together a tentative sense of community based on coercion and violent subjugation. When, in the context of complex socio-economic and cultural historical changes, collective attachment insecurity in mid- and late modernity starts erring towards the individual, a different type of social disequilibrium appears – the fundamental human sense of social connection is experienced as regressive and society seeks affirmation in its negation. However, as the above psychological theorists have argued, when relatedness is interrupted, the fragmentation of individual identity and the collapse of a genuine sense of autonomy follow. Although the speed of technological development in contemporary Western society has enabled economic profit to reach unprecedented levels for the few and the rich/non-rich divide to widen multiple times during the past decades (Kopczuk et al., 2010), the link between sociopolitical exclusion by design and the pursuit of material gain, primarily by the ruling elites, has been consistently present since antiquity. In Chapter 3 I reviewed empirical studies suggesting that materialism


as a personal attitude is linked to attachment insecurity and variables related to it (e.g. experiential avoidance, psychological distress). Here I suggest that materialism as a collective system of belief and value is also constructed under conditions of attachment insecurity, this time under the guidance of insecure collective attachment representations, becoming an insecure collective attachment object itself. I will discuss this idea in greater detail below, but at this point I only wish to make a note of the intrinsic link between insecure collective attachment, collective materialism, and problems in the application of democracy that seems to permeate contemporary Western society. Returning to the fundamental issue of political representation, a number of social theorists have argued that in Western democracies it is not simply the arbitrary non-proportional electoral systems that routinely invalidate the citizens’ voice, but the very nature of political representation itself. According to Arendt (1979), citizenship and political agency can be reaffirmed only through direct political participation, while political representation and the distinction between representatives and represented merely reproduce the divide between rulers and ruled. Castoriadis (1996) argues that behind the myth that citizens in Western democracies are free to decide how to be governed, lies the bitter reality that such freedom is actually given to them only once every four (or five) years. This theorist claims that despite the expression of unfounded and self-serving concerns, Western societies do have the administrative and technical capability to address successfully the organisational complexities of direct democracy. Finally, a review of major moments of European democracy as a manifestation of insecure collective attachment should not fail to include democracy’s most triumphant attempts to nullify itself. Nazi Germany is perhaps the clearest example of the failure of the twentieth-century European political system to provide safety for its citizens. Nazi Germany is not simply a German creation, it is essentially a European one. Emerging, like the rest of the continent, out of a very long history of social coercion and violent trauma and placed unfavourably in the post-First World War frame, Germany was Europe’s weakest link. Due to particular historical reasons and its specific psycho-social profile, Nazi Germany articulated in the most extreme fashion the ideological content that was already widely shared across Europe. At about the time that Auschwitz became fully operational, hundreds of thousands of non-combatants were killed, raped, and had their local communities devastated in the Spanish Civil War by Franco’s nationalist militias as well as leftist fighters, while Mussolini’s army killed

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thousands of civilians in the Balkans and Africa as villages were bombed with mustard gas, Red Cross camps were razed to the ground, and local peoples thought to be inferior were massacred. But even more revealing is the fact that due to the fear of communism that was gaining ground in Italy and Yugoslavia and in collaboration with the USA and UK, the post-war “democratic” Italian government attempted to cover up the events and refused all motions for justice made by the affected countries after the war (Focardi, 2010). The democracies of the Western world also engaged in other forms of indirect political violence during the war. In 1939, the democratic US government refused to accept about a thousand German Jews that sailed through the Atlantic fleeing Nazi persecution and the refugees were forced to return to Europe; nearly one third of them died in the Holocaust (Breitman and Kraut, 1987). Also notable is the fact that Hitler and his ideology had numerous sympathisers among the British aristocracy, including two kings – Edward VIII and George VI. When one also considers the international pressure that the country was put under both before and after the First World War, it becomes apparent that Nazi Germany was in fact the cracking point of the entire European political system in the first half of the twentieth century. It was the particular historical moment and the particular historical place at which Europe’s democracy as an object of collective attachment could not contain a gigantic explosion of fear, anger, shame, and hatred that had been allowed to gather momentum for years. Nonetheless, the number of people killed by the Nazis was by far surpassed by the total death toll of another deadly European regime in the twentieth century – Stalin’s Soviet Union. Stalin’s Soviet state and its variations across the countries of Eastern Europe represent the second major attempt to turn European democracy on its head. Through executions, torture, famine, and mass deportation of individuals who had a different view of the world, the Stalinist state is thought to have led 25 million individuals to their death (Courtois et al., 1999). Misusing Marxian notions such as those of ideology as false consciousness or the proletariat as the objective carrier of social progress (Marx and Engels, 1970), Stalinism recognised political rights only in those who could see the objectivity of its truths while for the rest there was ostracism, torture, and death. In that way Stalinism remained loyal to the long European tradition of giving more rights to those of a privileged social standing, although in this case the privileged were not the rich. The fact that the Soviet nomenclature possessed much more material


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wealth than the average Soviet worker, not to mention its tremendous centralised political power, was not identified as self-contradictory in the Stalinist narrative. As with the Nazi ideology, Stalinism and its variants need to be seen in the general context of subverting democracy in the Western world. The evident inconsistencies of the hesitantly emerging Western democracy in the twentieth century and its heavy dependence on an exploitative and socially unjust capitalist economy could provide no deep sense of security to large segments of Europe. Adopting McCarthyism and its varieties as its best safety strategy and forcefully reciprocating Cold War antagonism, Western democracy provided excellent ammunition to the Stalinists in the post-war years and made those looking for alternatives more insecure. Many Westerners disillusioned with the social injustice and commodification of human experience in capitalism during that period actively supported or passively tolerated the Stalinist regimes thriving in Europe and around the world. Being the product of millennia of coercion and trauma, the tentative European democracy of the twentieth century was unable to act as a secure collective attachment object, making individuals and social groups vulnerable to totalitarian political ideologies. Incapable of containing anxiety and social conflict and unable to create a safe social space within which differences could be debated and understood, the European and American political systems of the twentieth century persecuted identities and disposed of their own fears by inducing terror in others. I will explore collective attachment in America below.

Exporting and reconfirming the European traumas In the previous sections I discussed how, throughout the continent’s history, large segments of Europe’s population have repeatedly experienced violent persecution, extermination, ideological coercion, enforced impoverishment, and social exclusion and how those experiences have been intrinsically linked with the construction of insecure collective attachment representations. Perhaps one of the most defining characteristics of such malignant socio-cultural processes was their tendency to expand beyond the European geographical space and spread their harmful effects across the globe. The antagonism between Europeans and non-Europeans has been as longstanding as conflicts among Europeans themselves. Ancient Greeks called all non-Greeks barbarians, from the perceived incomprehensible sound of their languages, and regarded them an inferior kind. As the number of slaves reached unprecedented levels during the golden fifth

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century BC, the vast majority of those were non-Greeks, coming from various regions around the Back Sea or Asia Minor. Living in a period of political turmoil and aggression, Isocrates, the Athenian orator, stated that “mankind is superior to the lower animals and Greeks to barbarians” (Dobson and Mahoney, 1919, Antidosis §303) and he begged Philip of Macedonia to be soft on his conquest of the Greek cities and turn his military machine to the peoples of the East instead. If Phillip did not fully respond to that request, certainly his son Alexander did. Drawn deeper and deeper into a web of paranoia, megalomania, and violence, Alexander the Great led a ruthless military campaign against the peoples of the East, resulting in the killing of many hundreds of thousands of Asian soldiers, tens of thousands of Asian civilians, and tens of thousands of Macedonian fighters including the murder of two of his closest friends, which Alexander himself personally committed. In just a few years Alexander’s army conquered vast geographical territories ranging from Greece to India, including Egypt, Persia, and Afghanistan. During their military campaign, the Macedonian army made it their mission to forcefully impose Greek civilisation on the subordinated Asians. Although local cultures took their revenge as Alexander at the end thought of himself as an emperor and god, both very un-Greek notions, the Macedonians’ campaign was the first systematic attempt out of many to follow to violently impose Western ideological and institutional systems upon the cultures of Asia. As it was violently forced upon peoples with long and rich cultural traditions, the achievements of the Greek golden age including its concepts of democracy and critical reason had their enlightening potential very seriously compromised. Instead of intellectually liberating the peoples of Asia, Alexander and his army substantially contributed towards the dual encoding of the emerging Western notions of freedom of speech and freedom of thought on the Asian collective mind. On the one hand, those concepts were constructed as enlightening and enriching, particularly by part of the local elites, while at the same time they were experienced as violently coercive and traumatising. Driven by its own ambivalence towards social equality and reason and the underlying insecure collective attachment representations that were sustaining that ambivalence, the Macedonian army undertook Western culture’s first systematic attempt to infuse with such insecurity the collective attachment objects of Asia.1 This was the beginning of a new vicious circle of antagonism in West-East relations. In order to protect themselves from the unsettling realisation that they have been neither fully reasonable nor fully democratic, Europeans have been noting those unwanted characteristics mainly in others. They have also been very eager


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to correct them mainly in others. Interestingly, Macedonians not only failed to make any substantial intellectual contribution and restricted their domination over the Greek cities exclusively to the military arena in the decline of the Greek civilisation, but they also failed to convince a number of historians even about their very “Greekness” (Worthington, 2003). At the time when the Greek civilisation had indeed something to contribute to the world, the dominant city states of Athens and Sparta limited their expansiveness to their more immediate neighbourhoods – mainly the coasts of Asian Minor and southern Italy. It seems that the Greeks became particularly drawn to civilise the barbarians when their own intellect declined. As it was about to happen with many other European cultures to come, the insecurity underlying their collective attachment representations prevented ancient Macedonians from creating a safe psychosocial space within which the mind of “us” and the mind of “them” could be sufficiently understood. Alexander was indeed an innovator. By violently transplanting aspects of the ancient Greek culture into the East, he established a tradition of astonishing longevity: the infliction of large-scale coercion and trauma on the non-Europeans in the name of progress. As the coalition of the willing invades Afghanistan and Iraq at the turn of the twenty-first century, that tradition is still celebrated today. The Romans followed Alexander’s legacy as they occupied much of the Middle East and the north African coast, imposing their language as well as their legal and administrative institutions on the indigenous populations, in collaboration with the local elites (Badian, 1968). Making a slight adaptation that allowed the exclusion of themselves from the definition, Romans adopted the Greek concept of the barbarian and intensely utilised their Middle Eastern and African provinces as sources of slavery as well as agricultural and other local products. However, the transmission of Europe’s coercive and traumatic experience onto a foreign geographical field would reach its climax under the ideological rule of Christianity. The Crusades, a series of military campaigns sanctioned by the Pope during the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries and aiming to reclaim Palestine’s Holy Land from the Muslims, was one of the most ideologically defining moments of the Middle Ages. Military domination of the Middle East, Christian indoctrination, or elimination of its Muslim populations, and an increase in economic and political power within Europe have been identified by historians as the leading motivating forces behind the Crusades (Tyerman, 2006). Those campaigns were conducted by regular feudal


armies joined by fighting monks and fanatical peasants attempting to escape a life in poverty and insignificance. Those who took part, particularly the knights, enjoyed special privileges as they had any legal cases against them dropped and were offered eternal forgiveness for any past or future sins. The Crusades were responsible for the death of thousands of non-Christians as well as Christians and the devastation of numerous local communities. Studying the events of the first Crusade, Murray (2009) suggests that the slaughter of Jerusalem’s Muslim and Jewish inhabitants was not the result of pent-up religious zeal, as it was retrospectively constructed by Christians in an attempt to justify the act, but part of a cold-blooded strategy of ethnic cleansing. Such massacres seemed to be routine occurrences during the campaigns. Crusades were also organised by the Pope to deal with inconveniences on the European soil. Arabs were persecuted in the Iberian Peninsula over the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Jewish populations were massacred in Rhineland in 1096, and the Albigensian heretics of the South of France were slaughtered in the thirteenth century. Christian Europe seemed to be overwhelmed by fear, as the teachings of humanity and compassion were radically transformed when they became the dominant ideology. Jesus and his handful of followers were initially constructed as preaching humility, equality, and non-violence, values experienced as comforting by the large numbers of enslaved, dispossessed, and disillusioned subjects of the decadent Roman Empire. However, as this hazy frame of principles started to integrate with the apparatus of the power-propelled Roman state and become the dominant ideology of the splitting empire, Christian religion transformed itself into an ideological framework of social domination. As its internal contradictions were unable to offer collective security to the early Christian world, fear, anger and uncertainty could not be collectively regulated, becoming overwhelming experiences acted out in violence. Attachment research with small social groups has shown that in the absence of a security providing mental image, the out-group is perceived as more threatening and responded to more negatively, while the presence of such an image makes those threatening perceptions disappear (Mikulincer and Shaver, 2001). It seems that, to a great extent, medieval Europe could not collectively construct such a security-providing image of the Christian God and therefore was unable to perceive religious differences without feeling excessively threatened. As Christianity preached love and compassion while massacring and devastating, the interpretative framework it provided for human experience did not correspond very well with that experience. As the Christian dogma


became an instrument of domination and also needed to justify that domination, it contradicted the lived experience of many Europeans and negated its own protective nature. The Christian dogma became a traumatic attachment object itself.

Exporting and reconfirming the European traumas: America As the Middle Ages drew to a close, Portuguese and Spanish navigators colonised the African coast in pursuit of more profitable routes to the eastern markets and accidentally came across America. Soon the British, the French, and the Dutch would join in demanding their share in the riches of the New World. While the discovery of the Americas was unintended, primarily the by-product of wealth pursuit, the motives for its intentional colonisation became more complex, as Europe gradually parted from its medieval certainties and faced the unknown on the other side of the Atlantic. As the quest for additional wealth and status for the already rich and powerful royal elites and the need of the humble to escape poverty and marginalisation continued to drive the European interest in America, another attraction also emerged from the New World: a different form of human life. Although a few exceptions of more respectful approaches were noted, Christianity’s overall attitude towards the cultures and religions of Native Americans was one of intellectual and moral dismissal. In the eyes of the Church, Native Americans were not simply different people, living in a different world which regardless of whether it was better or worse, morally superior or inferior, had nevertheless the right to exist in some corner of this universe. According to Christianity (and many other religions), whatever was different was not only intellectually and morally wrong, it was a wrong that had to be put right. It was the ethical obligation of the Christian Church and its closely related socioeconomic elites of Europe to eradicate non-Christian ways of life from Earth. The Church had done that for years in the old continent; now it was the time to extend its geographical scope. Authors have emphasised the economic and political factors behind the violent Christianisation of the Native Americans (Lightfoot, 2004). Although those were certainly very powerful motivating forces (after all, the extraction of economic benefit may be an additional sign from God that one navigates well), the Church’s systematic pogrom against the Native American belief systems were, to a great extent, an identity struggle that should not be reduced to the desire for economic profit. Experiencing serious doubts over its own humanity, Christianity once

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again attempted to exorcise in the other the demons it could not control in itself. Guided by insecure representations of collective attachment, Christianity was unable to understand the Native American soul, felt deeply threatened by its mere existence, and responded as it always had: by traumatising and subjugating the infidels. The emerging “secular” state of early and later modernity Europe held a similar attitude towards Native Americans. Native Americans could not be conceived of as citizens of a different, even inferior, socio-cultural and political entity. They rather resembled natural physical beings, part of the exotic and dangerous American land that had to be brought under total human (that is, European) control. Native Americans were thought of like the thick forests, the violent storms, and the typhoid bacteria that troubled the settlers. Historians estimate that one hundred million Native Americans lost their lives in the New World due to the arrival of the Europeans through direct warfare, deprivation of natural resources, and transmitted disease making that the greatest genocide in human history (Stannard, 1992). The very few that managed to escape the attack were displaced in increasingly constraining reservations, that kept reducing year after year in space and natural reserves as the American government repeatedly failed to honour the treaties it had signed. It is therefore hardly surprising that five centuries after the systematic extinction effort began, poverty, alcoholism, mental health problems, and violent crime are so frequent among the remaining four million US Native Americans. Compared with the rest of the country’s population, Native Americans are more than twice as likely to live in poverty, six times more likely to die from an alcohol-related disorder, more likely to die from tuberculosis, diabetes, or accidental injury, twice more likely to experience post-traumatic stress disorder, and one and a half times more likely to experience any form of serious psychological distress (American Psychiatric Association, 2010a). Their life expectancy is six years lower than the US average and Native Americans are three times more likely than whites to lack health insurance. Moreover, the rates of violent crime in the remaining 310 Indian reservations in the United States reach two and a half times the national average, including an exceptionally high incidence of rape and murder targeting female victims. Women in those reservations appear to be four times more likely to be raped or sexually assaulted than the average American woman and ten times more likely to be murdered. Concerns have also been raised about the low rates of prosecutions made by US attorneys and the FBI, as according to recent data more than half of serious crime cases eventually fail to be brought to justice, including over 60% of charges


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for rape and child sexual abuse (Syracuse University, 2014). Regardless of whether it is prosecuting incompetence or a culture of unsubstantiated accusation that lies behind those figures, Native Americans still appear to live in a state of fear and absence of justice perpetuating the cycle of repeated traumatisation that started so long ago. As it did with many other outsiders (heretics, Muslims, Jews), the European state ruthlessly persecuted Native Americans because it was unable to support a civil society based on fairness, open communication, and un-coerced decision-making. Intrinsically linked with the Christian dogma and absolutist notions of authority, the European state enforced social order through ideological imposition and the suppression of uncertainty feelings, systematically reinforcing collective insecurity and a sense of threatened identity. Carrying with them a social memory of ideological coercion and violence, large groups of Europeans crossed the Atlantic into the unknown to escape poverty and social disadvantage. Guided by representations of collective attachment that couldn’t really make them feel safe in their own skin, settlers were unable to negotiate their economic and cultural differences with the natives without feeling in danger. As co-existence with the natives automatically meant loss of self in the wild cultural and physical world of the other, the other had to be wiped out. While the extinction of Native Americans was well under way another violent subjugation of non-Europeans began. This time it was the natives of Africa. Slavery had always thrived in Europe, from the Greeks to the Romans and all the way through the Middle Ages. However, it was the travels of Portuguese navigators around the black continent in the fifteenth century and the establishment of their bases around its coast that opened a new important chapter in the history of European-run slavery, with West Africa as its main source of supply. As Spanish, Portuguese, British and other Europeans colonised America and cheap labour was desperately needed to tame its feral land, the slaves of Africa were the obvious choice. In two successive bulls, Dum Diversas issued in 1452 and Romanus Pontifex issued in 1454, Pope Nicholas V officially gave forced labour and slavery the blessings of the Church, on the condition that the unworthy captives were non-Christians. The pope authorised King Alfonso of Portugal to claim the newly discovered lands in the name of his Christian kingdom and reduce all infidels into “perpetual servitude” after confiscating their property. Historians estimate that around 12 million African men, women, and children were shipped to America in abhorrently violent conditions, many in chains, while about 28 million are thought to have lost their lives in the process (Stannard, 1992). Although Europe


had changed in many ways between antiquity and early to middle modernity, in many ways it had also remained the same. Despite the religious transformations from paganism to Christianity and the political shifts from the Greek city state to the transatlantic empires of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a stream of coercion and violent trauma continued to run through the spine of the Western world. Almost five centuries after the trade of African slaves to the New World began, African Americans still do not seem to feel completely at home on American land. Compared with White Americans, Black Americans are over three times more likely to live below the poverty line (one in four do so), twice more likely to be without health insurance, young Black American men are seven times more likely to be in prison, and Black American households are three times more likely to be headed by a woman with no male partner present (American Psychiatric Association, 2010b). Also, compared to whites, Black Americans are more likely to use illicit drugs, be murdered, die from a range of physical diseases including heart diseases, cancer, diabetes and AIDS, and lack access to appropriate health care. Restriction of access to appropriate mental health services is particularly noteworthy, as only one in three Black Americans in need of mental health care actually receive it. Scholars have claimed that both the Native and the African Americans have suffered historical trauma, or the intergenerational transmission of dysfunctional reactions to threatening events in a large scale within a particular social group (Kirmayer et al., 2000; Williams-Washington, 2010). Historical trauma has two main devastating characteristics. The first is that it does not affect only those who directly experienced the traumatic events but also many generations to come as the capacity of traumatised parents to adequately care for their offspring may be seriously restricted. Research has repeatedly shown how traumatised parents can generate overwhelming feelings of fear and anxiety in their children through abuse, neglect, or other threatening behaviour, passing on their own trauma across generations. Second, although historical trauma affects large numbers of persons, as manifested by the increased levels of individual dysfunctionality and pathology evidenced in the above social groups, its deleterious consequences transcend the domain of individual psychology and affect the collectivity itself – in other words, historical trauma injures not simply large numbers of individuals but more importantly the social and cultural identity of the group as well. Collective trauma, is of particular relevance to this book as the role of collective attachment representations is crucial in the collective construction of threatening experience. As Native Americans were forced through


violence and death to adopt the ideological and institutional systems of the European settlers, they adopted highly conflicted and disorganising objects of collective attachment: the very ideological and institutional systems that were constructed as security providing by the invaders and forcibly imposed as such on the invaded (e.g. Christian religion, the European state) were at the same time being experienced as devastatingly frightening. Such a level of contradiction immobilised psycho-socially these two subjugated groups (as it has done to so many others throughout human history), severely disrupting their collective attachment organisation and persistently preventing the development of a coherent social narrative to make sense of and leave the terrible experience behind. America is not of course the only continent that the European tradition of coercion and trauma has been exported to. The physical and socio-cultural devastation of Australian aborigines by the European settlers has been well documented (Broome, 2010), with the Forced Assimilation Policy issued by the Australian government in 1869 being perhaps the most characteristic of the ideological climate of the period. According to the prescriptions of that policy a large number of indigenous children were violently removed from their own families and put under a system of state-sponsored institutional care so that they denounced their “savagery” and were introduced to the civilised (that is, Western) world. Racism and social exclusion are still common experiences among Australian aborigines today. Colonialism brought a similar experience of violent socio-cultural domination to many of Asia and Africa as well. I will touch upon aspects of that domination in the following sections.

European history, coercion, and violence: the role of science and technology Together with their first attempt on a democratic polis, ancient Greeks also made a systematic effort to critically question tradition and its main source of certainty, myth. The Greeks seem to be the first Europeans to have attempted to examine if a statement makes logical sense, as opposed to taking its truthfulness for granted simply because it had always been accepted as such by the ancestors. This new radical source of certainty, reason, appears to be the basis of the various branches of science the Greeks developed (mathematics, physics, medicine, philosophy) and the Western physical and social sciences, and humanities that were to follow. Nonetheless, in its long history, Western science has often been both irrational and biased.


The idea that reason and science were consistent with the concept of god prevailed throughout antiquity, the Middle Ages, and early modernity among European philosophers, scientists, and theologians, providing Christianity with intellectual legitimacy beyond the realm of faith. Even the scholars of the Enlightenment that challenged the authority of the Church and argued for a secular state separate from it, claimed that the existence of one god comes as a logical conclusion after empirically knowing the world (Barnett, 2004). The inevitability of the link between rationality and religion is systematically challenged for the first time only in the nineteenth century by the German philosopher Feuerbach (1957), who claimed that god is a human imaginary construction that should be approached anthropologically rather than theologically. Moreover, in the twentieth century various scholars criticised modern science and technology as playing a substantial role in the entrapment of human beings within an inauthentic existence and in sustaining oppressive socio-economic and cultural regimes. Heidegger (1977) argued that technology in the modern era has lost the creative, truth-revealing character it possessed in the past and degrades the relationship between human beings and nature. According to Heidegger, modern technology reduces nature’s complexity into that of a material resource only to be extracted, manipulated, and expropriated according to human calculations, ultimately turning human beings themselves into technological apparatuses. In addition, Horkheimer (2013) argued that late capitalism and its culture of mass consumption have induced the reduction or rational thought to instrumental calculations aiming at market domination and the maximisation of profit. As the prevalence of instrumental reason strengthens the socio-economic power of the few, the author continued, society fragments and culture becomes homogenised and monolithic. Indeed, it was the scientific revolutions starting in early modernity and continuing throughout the modern era that have enabled mass production and the concentration of so much wealth in so few hands. It seems that in Western society, technological advance has been related to increasing economic inequality. This has been particularly evident in recent decades, as the benefits of rapid technological innovation seem to have been distributed quite unequally, not simply maintaining the rich/ non-rich divide but substantially increasing it. As new technology has been at the forefront of wealth generation in the USA and other Western countries in the past 40 years, the average income of the top 1% earning US households almost tripled, while the earnings of middle-income


households increased only by under 40% (Kopczuk et al., 2010). Moreover, during the same period in the US the earnings disparity between white and African American families has tripled, suggesting that the income gap increase also has an ethnicity dimension (Shapiro et al., 2013). Interestingly, US GDP has been steadily decreasing since the early 1980s, evidencing in addition an increasing individualism in the country: although new technologies help individuals to get much richer, they don’t help as much the country as a whole. Similar trends indicating an economic gap increase have been noted in many other Western and fast developing countries (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2011). Although technology in itself does not possess either positive or negative social value and its impact really depends on the human agents that develop and use it, in the context of contemporary globalised capitalism it has been linked to greater socio-economic domination both in how the industrialised societies organise themselves and in how they relate to the developing world. It seems that the use of science and technology as instruments of socio-cultural hegemony over the non-Westerners has been a feature of the Western tradition for a long time. It was the advances in the science and technology of navigation and war that enabled the colonisation of the New World, Africa, and Asia and the developments in all physical, mathematical, and biological sciences that have sustained Western dominance for centuries, currently driving capitalist globalisation. Moreover, under the threat of superior military technology, the Western notions of economics, administration, education, democracy, health and progress became more “persuasive”. Headrick (1990) argues that the enormous transfer of Western technology to European colonies of Asia and Africa during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries did not stimulate industrial revolution and progress in those countries, but turned traditionally selfsufficient local economies into struggling underdeveloped and Westerndependent colonial provinces, a legacy that haunts them to this day. Moreover, technological expansion and intensification of capitalist production seem to threaten perhaps the most elementary source of security for the human being – the natural environment itself. Immersed in the logic of limitless economic growth and the ruthless pursuit of profit, much of the physical sciences have contributed to the draining of the planet’s natural resources and the destruction of the physical environment. Scientific reports suggest that dozens of species of animals and plants become extinct every day because of human activity, presenting the worst spate of species die-offs since the disappearance of the dinosaurs

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65 million years ago (Suckling et al., 2012). The current extinction rate is thousands times greater than the rate naturally expected and scientists predict that between 30% to 50% of all present species may be extinct by the middle of the century due to loss of habitat, environmental pollution, excessive hunting, or the knock-on effect of the loss of other species. Those scientists emphasise the crucial role of species interdependence in an ecosystem, suggesting that the systematic destabilisation of the human natural habitat by an unintelligent use of scientific and technological knowledge will eventually endanger humans’ own survival. Another major environmental phenomenon affected by the unrestrained use of technology in contemporary Western society is global warming and climate change. Although opinions may vary regarding the extent and speed in which global warming happens, most environmental researchers agree that the temperature of the Earth has been rising, primarily due to human activity. Scientists suggest that the high levels of carbon dioxide and other gases released by the excessive burning of fossil fuels, extensive clearing of land, and intensive agriculture are the primary causes of the average temperature on the planet rising in the past one hundred years by 0.4 to 0.8°C and predict a further increase between 1.4 and 5.8°C by the year 2100 (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2013). According to those researchers, global warming could melt the polar ice caps, which could in turn increase the sea levels as well as the frequency of storms and other severe weather events, and endanger additional species of wild life. There is no doubt that reason and scientific knowledge in Western society have also worked for the forces of social fairness, openness, democracy, and critical reflection. Scientific and philosophical reasoning in the past century or so have dethroned traditional religion as the only major system of meaning, have assisted in the official separation of the State from Church, have contributed towards an improvement in the health of the population, and have often challenged dogmatic and uncritical thinking. In that sense, therefore, at various historical moments Western reason and science have functioned as secure collective attachment objects informing reflective and liberating psycho-social processes. Nonetheless, as discussed above, they have also functioned as forces of social domination and stereotypical thought, and have promoted simplistic notions of human nature. As they have frequently prevented an open and reflective exploration of human needs and the human mind, both individual and collective, Western technology and science have also been acting as insecure collective attachment objects, guiding coercive, violent, and traumatic social experiences.


European history, coercion, and violence: the pursuit of material wealth Many social theorists have criticised contemporary Western society for its materialistic focus and culture of mass consumption (Adorno, 2001; Bauman, 2007). Although the generation of surplus and a strong productive capability have an obvious adaptive value for the well-being and survival of human beings and it would be regarded as sensible that social groups sought to prepare for future contingencies, the productive capacity of Western economy has exceeded by far the reasonable levels of material safety. Yet Western economy shows no signs of reducing either the volume or speed of its material production and generation of wealth. If the West’s frantic attempts to generate economic surplus is not really a response to pressures of physical survival, what is it motivated by? As discussed in previous chapters, human beings respond to their biological needs through the construction and use of complex cultural codes that help them define those needs as well as the best strategies to address them. In this section I will argue that insecure collective attachment representations are a major contributor in the socio-cultural processes that have constructed material need in Western society. A link between individuals’ emotional insecurity and the excessive ascription of value on the consumption and possession of material goods has been evidenced by a number of authors. Classical psychological theorists have claimed that children who experience sub-optimal levels of care are left with a sense of emotional insecurity they later seek to address through excessive consumption and material possession (Fromm, 1976; Maslow, 1954). These claims have also been confirmed by more recent empirical findings reporting correlations between unsupportive parental behaviour and children’s materialism (Kasser et al., 1995). Moreover, in studies with adults, materialism has been related to both attachment anxiety and attachment avoidance (Kosmicki, 2002) as well as the excessive and dysfunctional effort to avoid the experience of psychological pain (Kashdan and Breen, 2007), while an informative study by Kasser and Sheldon (2000) suggests that experimentally induced thoughts of death increase the need for material acquisition and the tendency for greed. These findings seem to support the idea that an excessive, often unspecified, and ineffectively managed sense of threat may be a major factor behind a materialistic approach to life. Linking individual attitudes with the wider socio-economic environment, Abramson and Inglehart (1995) have shown that poverty and other social conditions breeding economic insecurity are often linked with materialistic attitudes.

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Both at the individual and societal levels, materialism and the pursuit of excessive wealth seem to be linked with a variety of dysfunctions. On the one hand, studies have consistently linked materialism in individuals with indices of compromised psychological well-being such as depression, anxiety, and relationship problems (Burroughs and Rindfleisch, 2002). On the other hand, scholars have emphasised the various problems that materialistic society present as a whole. The critical theorists have argued that contemporary consumerist culture impoverishes human creativity, interpersonal relationships, and moral values, turning them into commodities (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002), while Bauman (2007) argues that the most defining characteristic of consumer society is that it turns into commodities the consumers themselves. One of the most damaging correlates of materialistic ideology has been the unprecedented levels of economic inequality created in Western societies by the current pace of consumption and wealth generation. Economists argue that the increasing economic inequality characterising contemporary Western society appears to threaten capitalist development itself. Marxist theorists have claimed that as the motivator of capitalist economic activity is profit, capitalism is destined to suffer recurrent crises defined by a variety of harmful economic phenomena such as profit fall, over-production, under-consumption, or overaccumulation of labour (Clarke, 1993). On the other hand, International Monetary Fund economists, who have traditionally supported neoliberal economics and policies of austerity, have recently argued that the increasing income inequality observed in Western societies has been a major contributor to contemporary economic crises, as people engage in unsustainable levels of borrowing to maintain their desired standards of living (Ostry and Berg, 2011). Having repeatedly experienced powerful waves of violence and death and having been largely guided by insecure collective attachment representations in the past two millennia, unsurprisingly, Western society has turned to materialism as an ideological framework to tentatively contain its collective anxiety. Being entrapped in collective attachment objects that have prevented the fluent exploration of human mind and human need, Western society has been unable to fully engage with systems of thought emphasising the quest for meaning, inner development, and genuine autonomy, seeking instead safety in the vicious circle of material possession, excessive consumption, and socio-emotional void. In America, where the anxiety of main social groups was particularly overwhelming since the early years, materialism has been at its strongest. Settlers and immigrants arriving in an inhospitable land, natives under


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extermination, and intensively imported captives, all groups defined by experiences of coercion and trauma, were predisposed to construct material possession as a collective object of safety. By reducing the human relationship with the inanimate world into series of short-lived utilisations of largely insignificant material items, America’s coerced and violently subjugated social groups have re-enacted their own objectification and attained an illusionary sense of control. Insecure collective attachment representations that have dominated Western society for many centuries have substantially contributed to the maintenance of socio-economic and cultural hegemony within that society, as well as domination over non-European social groups. Social theorists suggest that the reigning social classes and other powerful groups tend to use their wealth and power over resources to maintain and further expand their socio-economic supremacy (Gramsci, 2011). Nonetheless, even if we accept that in early human societies evolutionary pressures may have partly explained attempts to appropriate surplus production on behalf of one’s social group, it would not be sensible to think of contemporary Western economic elites as being susceptible to such pressures; the amount of wealth that contemporary Western technology and science can generate could easily dispel such basic survival concerns. Moreover, materialism in Western societies drives not only the rich and powerful but also the middle and lower classes, although these are excluded from any substantial accumulation of wealth by design. Middle and lower social classes appear eager to adopt materialism and consumerism as substantial components of their word view and to support socio-political arrangements of wealth distribution according to which they will always be the underdogs. As I discussed in Chapter 4, in inter-group domination the collective attachment objects of the dominated group are forcefully displaced by those of the dominator in a two-level constructive process. Materialism has been aggressively promoted by big business as an ideological framework, a collective attachment object that favours the socio-economic elite, and has been adopted by the subjugated social classes as a source of existential safety. However, such collective construction is destined to be incoherent as, at a deeper level, the designated object of safety is experienced as inauthentic. Research has consistently linked materialism with reduced rather than increased happiness. As over the centuries individuals and social groups in Western society move their positions in the socio-economic ladder, the security-bearing property of material possessions continues to be represented as an object of social domination across the social spectrum.


The type of materialism and consumerism appearing in contemporary Western society are of course only very specific manifestations of the wider phenomenon of ascribing critical value in the possession of material wealth. Like in many other societies, in Western society too wealth possession has been the main criterion of social stratification from the very early days. Material wealth implies control over the latest military technology and the maintenance of skilful warriors and therefore control over the entire social group. Nonetheless, it is evident that throughout history the lower classes and other disadvantaged socio-economic groups have repeatedly chosen to support socio-political ideologies and institutions sustaining or even expanding socio-economic inequality, in the absence of any immediate physical threat. Social theorists have attempted to explain that phenomenon using various concepts such as dominant ideology (Marx and Engels, 1970), cultural hegemony (Gramsci, 2011), or discourse (Foucault, 1972). Although any detailed reference to theories of socio-economic domination is beyond the aims of this book, the concept of collective attachment could perhaps illuminate aspects of the phenomenon that traditionally have been rather neglected. Like any other form of psychosocial domination, economic domination rests on the facilitation of collective attachment insecurity, as deeper more genuine social experience is forcibly overwritten by the narratives that justify the domination. As such narratives cannot really help the coerced or traumatised social groups to make sense of their experience, the socio-economically disadvantaged turn to the ideology of the powerful for safety, including ideological constructions that justify economic inequality. Laden with historical experiences of coercion, trauma, and collective attachment insecurity, Western society has consistently sustained a sharp division between the rich and the non-rich throughout the past two millennia.

Western trauma meets troubled Islam In the years after the Second World War, the West gradually entered a new era of conflict with the Muslim world. Although the discord between Europeans and the peoples of the Middle East goes back millennia, two historical developments of major significance put that turbulent relationship in a different phase: the increasing dependency of the West on oil and the establishment of the state of Israel. Driven by the wish to establish a loyal friend in the most critical world region but also by guilt for failing to protect the Jews from the Holocaust,2 the victors of the war, primarily the USA and Britain, became part of


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Jewish traumatic response to the horrific events of the war. Unable to fully comprehend either the causes or the consequences of those events, Western governments facilitated the traumatic re-enactment of the Holocaust in the Middle East and contributed to the distortion of a legitimate demand – the establishment of a new Jewish state. Responding to the war experience, Western governments established the United Nations, an international organisation aiming to prevent further wars and devastation. It is a pity, but hardly a surprise, that immediately after its foundation, UN’s first main intervention resulted in the creation of a new major international conflict involving the further traumatisation of two entire ethnic groups, the Palestinians and the Jews. That conflict was going to set off a new spiral of massacre, displacement, and persecution that still continues 65 years after it officially began. Informed by a long tradition of coercion, violent conflict, and colonial domination as well as the insecure collective attachment representations that those historical experiences imply, the Western world was unable to openly reflect on the war experience, understand the roots of the collective anxiety that led to but also resulted from it, and therefore was unable to properly stand up for a more reflective, peaceful, and democratic world. Entangled in the intricacies of socio-economic political, and cultural hegemony by birth, the creation of the UN was yet another incoherent attempt to construct an object of collective security. The failure of the UN to operate by the principles of democracy, openness, and determination upon which it was supposedly founded has been monumental since then, not only in reference to the escalating antagonism between West and Islam, but also to many other international conflicts in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The unfortunate handling of the Israeli–Palestinian problem by the relevant Western-led international institutions and, of course, by the two parties themselves had implications reaching beyond that particular conflict, as it substantially contributed to the creation of a wider rift between the West and the Muslim world. The Palestinian problem critically enhanced the image of America and other Western countries as self-interested and hypocritical imperialist powers among the cultures of the Middle East and set the scene for a new turn in the West-East antagonism. As the Cold War gradually receded towards the end of the twentieth century, a new conflict occupied centre stage at the turn of the millennium – the conflict between the West and militant Islam. The hot, infertile, and conflict-ridden land of the Middle East would have hardly been of any interest to the West in the post-colonial era if it wasn’t for its immensely valuable asset – oil. In the past 80 years or

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so, the operation of the entire Western economic machine and its explosive entrepreneurial activity has crucially depended on that fuel, while around 65% of the world’s crude oil reserves are found in the Middle East (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, 2014). Getting uneasy about their increasing dependence on the region, America and the West have forcefully attempted to influence geo-political developments while pursuing friendly relationships with the local regimes. Despite their obvious cultural differences, the Western and Middle Eastern socioeconomic elites have also had plenty to gain if they managed to work together. In return for the fuelling of Western economy, the lucrative economic deals brought great wealth to the ruling elites of the oil-rich Arab countries, further strengthening their socio-economic hegemony within those highly stratified, centralised, and non-transparent Middle Eastern states. On the other hand, the vast majority of those states’ populations has seen very little of the unprecedented extravagance defining the lives of their rulers. A recent UN report indicates that despite all the oil-related wealth, economic inequality in the Arab countries has increased in the past decades: at the turn of the millennium the real income of an Arab citizen had fallen on average to almost 14% of that of a citizen in a developed country, while 20% of the population lives on less that $2 a day (United Nations Development Programme, 2011). The report also notes that unemployment across the region stands at 15% and almost 40% of the population is illiterate, while the most intensive oil-producer countries tend to pass the menial and low-paid jobs on to immigrant workers, who have no basic employment and citizen rights. As the Western ruling elites seem to have every reason to support the absolutist feudal-like dynasties that run those deeply undemocratic states the Arab regimes themselves also have every reason to accept the Western intrusion into their traditional cultures. Nonetheless, this unholy alliance has been a chip in the armour of both as it has been experienced as ideologically incoherent by citizens in both camps. On the one hand, the wholehearted provision of support to the oppressive Middle Eastern regimes in the past six decades seems to contradict the Western declared allegiance to democracy and to expose what appears to be its real commitment – commitment to material wealth and socio-political power. On the other hand, Arab elites living in luxury while many fellow Muslims are starving and remaining too close to those whose only moral principle seems to be material gain contradicts Islamic teachings on economic prudence and a spiritual orientation in life (Chapra, 2000).


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What have been perceived to be an intrusive and disrespectful Western attitude towards the Islamic world and a corrupt submissiveness of local Muslim governments have generated increasing discontent in the past decades among large segments of Middle Eastern, North African, and Central Asian populations. Nonetheless, such uneasiness is only part of a much larger picture, in which economic globalisation and rapid Westernisation keep threatening traditional ways of life and local identities across the planet, including those in the Muslim world. Asian and African populations with long histories of social coercion, violent subjugation to oppressive regimes, and the construction of intolerant ideologies have been particularly vulnerable to experiences of identity threat and have often reacted with considerable hostility towards the West. In that context of deepening Western hegemony and an anti-Western sentiment growing more desperate and catastrophic, a number of radicalised Islamist groups have emerged in the region, Al-Qaida, the Taliban, and ISIS being perhaps the best known among them. The identity of social groups is perceived as being threatened when their collective attachment objects are threatened and when that happens social groups attempt, sometimes frantically, to revive those objects and salvage themselves. When social groups feel in danger, they retreat into their objects of collective attachment, often attempting to reconstruct their most safety-inducing elements. Largely guided by insecure collective attachment representations as their repeated historical experiences of coercion and violent trauma suggest, large segments of the Western and central Asian populations are susceptible to insecure and dysfunctional responses when they perceive themselves to be under threat. Calls for increasing insularity, sensitivity to insult, excessive fantasies of merger with the divine, and aggressive assaults on the sworn enemy have all defined the reactions of the Islamic fundamentalist groups that have grown in those regions as the Islamic collective attachment objects have been experienced to be under attack. On the other hand, emotionally blinded by its own history of social violence, coercion, and collective insecurity, and highly driven by the quest for material gain and geopolitical power, the West has been unable to comprehend the Asian mind. Instead of exhibiting true cultural and intellectual leadership, as it has often proclaimed to do, the West continues to threaten traditional identities and devour local ways of life. Instead of utilising the terrible experience of the 9/11 attacks as an opportunity for reflection, the development of deeper insight into its own responsibilities, and the initiation of a new international under-

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standing, the West responded to the tragedy using once again its favourite tools – indiscriminate violence and infringement of its own morality. Continuing the long tradition of Alexander the Great, the Christian Crusaders, and colonial Europe, the Western coalition led by Bush’s America invaded, devastated, and alienated again the peoples of Western and central Asia at the turn of the twenty-first century. Drawing on its own history of violence, social domination, and the collective attachment insecurity that such experiences imply, Bush’s and Blair’s West appeared more scared for its cultural identity than it did for its physical safety. Armed with a few small utility knives, the 9/11 terrorists not only took the lives of many unfortunate people but, very importantly, they also demolished the Western fantasy that superior technology and material wealth is all one needs to keep safe. In the same way that a Western globalised culture has threatened traditional collective objects of security and their associated social identities, the 9/11 Islamist terrorists with their Bronze Age technology seriously questioned the Western materialist certainty. Both rooted in historical traditions of social domination and trauma and despite their various differences, Bush’s West and Islamic fundamentalism resemble each other in important ways: neither of them is able to fully understand the mind of either the self or the other and neither of them can give up violence and coercion as their principal tools of negotiation. Both of them continue to construct and reconstruct emotionally and intellectually impoverished understandings of the social world, objects of collective attachment that cannot really offer the experience of safety.

Epilogue

Referring to the existing attachment literature, but also to studies from other relevant social science fields, this book has presented a rationale in support of the concept of collective attachment. In particular, the book has put forward two main arguments: first, that the main protecting and security-bearing element of the human social group is the set of ideological assumptions and their institutional applications that prevail in that group; and, second, that emotional engagement with those ideological and institutional elements does not only occur at the level of the individual or the dyadic relationship, but also at the level of the group as the group collectively constructs its ideology and social institutions. Further, the book has made three main subordinate points. The first is that important concerns of social groups (e.g. connection, threats, identity) are defined and addressed under the “guidance” of collective attachment representations – that is, of socially shared structures of thinking and feeling that have been historically shaped by the collective experience of the group in relation to those concerns. Those collective representations contribute significantly to the construction of ideologies and social institutions that the group needs to adopt in order to establish its identity, attain cohesion, and protect itself from danger. The second point that the book has made is that when collective historical experience has been permeated by coercion, subjugation, and physical and/or psycho-social violence those collective attachment representations tend to guide social groups towards the construction of ideological and institutional systems that are unable to provide them a genuine sense of protection and security. Such representations should be regarded as insecure representations of collective attachment and are 163

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intrinsically linked with the construction of insecure collective attachment objects. The third subordinate point this book has made is that, like many others, contemporary Western society is to a large extent informed by insecure collective attachment representations and tends to construct insecure collective attachment objects. Drawing on a long history of social domination, violence, and trauma, and despite its successes, contemporary Western society is still unable to provide prevailing systems of belief, value, and social institution that would allow a proper reflection into social experience and inform collective action that adequately supports social collaboration and identity development. There has been a long tradition of psychoanalytically-oriented scholars in both Europe and America who have attempted to integrate the two domains of inquiry in the social sciences – the individual and the collective. The classic thinkers of the Frankfurt school (Adorno, 2001; Horkheimer, 2013), contemporary American (Smelser, 1999) and European scholars (Žižek, 1989), as well as British academics working within the framework of psycho-social studies (Froggett and Hollway, 2010; Frosh and Baraitser, 2008), all subscribe to the general principle that the individual psyche and the social world are intrinsically linked and one cannot be really understood without understanding the other. The present book is an attempt to explore the potential contribution of concepts and empirical findings stemming from attachment research towards such an integration. Nonetheless, the motives for this work were not exhausted only in the desire to expand an academic field. The motives were also sociopolitical. Throughout the book I almost exclusively made reference to instances of collective attachment insecurity in the Western world. I emphasised the collective insecurity underlying the US-led response to the 9/11 attacks and traced it back to the long European tradition of social subjugation and violence. I chose Western society as the main example of a society significantly informed by insecure attachment representations not because others in Asia or Africa are necessarily more secure. Neither did I make that choice because Western society has not been able at all to generate thought and social institutions that promote openness, reflection, and a deeper understanding of the human world. A number of societies in Asia, Africa, and the rest of the non-Western world are more collectively insecure than the West, and Western thought and social arrangements have often revealed a strong trend for intellectual and emotional honesty, critical discussion, and liberating action.

Epilogue

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I chose to focus on Western collective insecurity and its violent past (and present) because these are social forces currently dominating not only Western society itself but also the world as a whole. Western society continues to rapture the collective attachment objects of social groups around the globe, claiming a psycho-social superiority that it does not possess. As Western governments attempt to impose “democracy” across the continents, they show a profound lack of concern about what people think and what people feel, both in the West and abroad as those governments try to impose a new world order based on “collaboration” and “mutual respect”, they make lucrative business deals with ruthless and inhumane regimes. As Western countries attempt to export human rights to the developing world, they have large parts of their own population unemployed, under-paid, or focusing primarily on the acquisition of yet more material goods. The Western collective attachment objects are flooded by incoherence. What seems to be particularly notable is that Western society bases its inter-cultural arrogance on superior psycho-social knowledge – a kind of knowledge it does not posses. To say that Western societies attempt to dominate the world on the basis of their technical and technological expertise is only half the truth. Western societies attempt to dominate the world by trying to convince it that advanced technology and maximum economic profitability are the most appropriate foundations for the human social world. This is not a claim of superior technological or technical knowledge – this is a claim of superior psycho-social knowledge. It seems that Western society pretends to know the human mind better than anybody else. This book has argued that insecure representations of collective attachment are a major force behind that collective self-deception of the West. Haunted by its long oppressive and violent past, and despite its successes, Western society still finds it considerably difficult to freely access, fully reflect on, and truly leave that past behind. Its self-knowledge and the knowledge of others are therefore significantly constrained. Compelled to repeat its coercive and traumatic historical experiences, either as an aggressor or as a victim, the West engages defensively with other parts of the planet with a limited vision: it can only conceive of two dichotomous options – dominate or be dominated. It is this restricted understanding of the collective self and the collective other that at present underpins much of international relations, but also the management of internal western affairs. Western societies seem to be held hostages of their own short-sightedness. In the UK the

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economic crisis of 2008 and the near collapse of its banking system that sunk the country into a deep recession was primarily driven by investment bankers and their supporting politicians. To afford to bail out the bankrupt banks and generally address the recession, the UK government cut public spending, hurting the most disadvantaged in the society who also bore the least responsibility for the crisis. It also sustained an economic climate that resulted in a wave of job losses and increased unemployment (not to mention the gradual and steady transformation of the country’s renowned higher education institutions into corporations). Moreover, in the post-2008 era, about 800 bankers at the big four UK-based banks continued to earn more than £1 million a year (Bowers et al., 2013). Despite all that, when in 2011, mid-recession, the British public was asked for the first time in history to decide what type of electoral system it preferred, it chose the non-proportional option – the winner-takes-it-all, first-past-the-post system. On the opposite side of Europe (opposite both geographically and in many respects culturally), in Greece, a different type of economic crisis also hit that country. After decades of staggeringly corrupt and incompetent governing, the economy collapsed and a heavy austerity programme was imposed. Austerity measures have involved cuts of 40% or over in salaries, pensions, and public spending including spending on health and social care. As the population has had little money to spend, businesses started closing down and unemployment has rocketed to 28% for the whole country, and 57% among those under 24. Yet, only a handful of the astoundingly large number of corrupt and tax-evading politicians and entrepreneurs who kept stripping the country of its resources for decades have been sent to jail. The country’s huge debt is being paid back mainly by the public and private sector employees and pensioners who never evaded tax, as that was technically impossible to do. Interestingly, in the past three decades the level of corruption and incompetence of the governing parties was evident to the majority of the country’s electorate, as one could easily find out by talking to Greeks in the street. Yet, 85% of that electorate consistently for over 30 years kept voting for those two parties who ultimately ruined the country as they alternated in government. In the recent parliamentary elections, on the one hand, the public voted down those two parties but dramatically increased its support for the obviously populist and self-contradictory coalition of the left, also giving 7% of the vote to the Greek neo-Nazis (recent opinion polls show the neo-Nazis to be third behind the two leading parties).

Epilogue

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Western societies appear trapped in conflicted feelings about democracy. On the one hand, they have established systems of government based on some democratic principles, assuming some transparency and some accountability, and attempting to ensure some degree of social justice. On the other hand, they either passively consent to or actively construct ideological formations and social institutions that maintain centralised and non-transparent decision-making, large socio-economic inequalities and social exclusion. Being informed by insecure collective attachment representations, democracy and its intrinsically related concepts of economic fairness and social justice, as they are currently constructed in the West, appear to be collective attachment objects permeated by incoherence. The concept of collective attachment may increase our understanding of why and how social groups maintain social conditions that either actively harm them or simply fail to promote their interests. It may also help us understand why social groups become locked in long and unrelenting antagonism, antagonism that typically results in devastation and disadvantage for both parties involved. Realising the importance of human security needs as they are manifested at the collective level may also help us promote more responsive collaborative initiatives and institutions across the globe, creating at an international scale a genuinely supportive group tent (Volkan, 1999). The concept of collective attachment may also join in the discussion on the society of risk and reflexive modernisation that has in recent years engaged a number of social theorists (Beck, 1992; Giddens, 1990) – that is, the idea that in a process of dynamic and automatic social change driven by Western society, for the first time in history, humanity faces the risk of destruction of its own making. These theorists argue that the unprecedented technological development of Western society in the past century and its global expansion has created serious threats to the whole world (e.g. nuclear disaster), threats that current social institutions cannot provide protection from. The concept of collective attachment could illuminate the socio-cultural processes by which, driven by a misguided need for security, social groups can expose themselves further and further to danger.

Notes 2


1. Priming is a technique often used in psychological experiments. Priming aims to induce thinking about a certain subject which, according to the experimenter’s hypothesis, is expected to have an effect on the dependent variable. Priming is conducted in such a way so that participants remain unaware of its effects. 2. Throughout this book I will use the word “group” to refer to all social formations, including complex social systems, as the phenomena discussed refer to all. If required on a particular occasion, I will make the distinction. 3. Perhaps gender and other demographic groupings need to be thought as social categories rather than as groups, as they do not necessarily imply shared views.

3


1. In this book the term ideology is defined as the set of beliefs and values that individuals and social groups construct to make sense of the world and themselves and to organise social life. 2. The term earned secure refers to individuals who, although they had experienced non-optimal caregiving in childhood and in all probability were initially insecurely attached, managed to change their security status later in life perhaps through some supportive relationship (e.g. therapy). Those individuals are thought to have earned their security.

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1. Although before the consequences of the invasions had been fully felt by the American people. 2. For example, an avoidant strategy may become adaptive among social groups living on scarce resources as adults spend long hours on obtaining the essentials, interacting little with children. 3. The Democracy Index is a widely used classification of 167 countries. 4. The remaining 10% involved terrorist groups that were self-dissolved after attaining their goals. 5. Part of the American ultimatum were also demands that the Taliban closed down all religious schools and provided American officials free access for inspection all around the country (BBC News, 2001).

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Notes

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6 Collective Attachment and the Western Tradition of Coercion and Violence 1. Here I do not suggest that interactions with Europeans have been the only source of collective attachment insecurity for the conquered non-Europeans. Non-European societies had their own socio-cultural and historical processes that could lead into the construction of insecure collective attachment objects. The point I am emphasising is that European expansionism and the inter-cultural exchange it informed put their very distinctive stamp on those processes. 2. Perhaps the most characteristic example was the refusal of the US government to allow many hundreds of Jews prosecuted by the Nazi regime to land on US soil in June 1939. S.S. St. Louis, the ship that was carrying the refugees, had to return to Europe where many of the passengers were later tortured and killed by the Nazis.

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Index Adult Attachment Interview (AAI), 11–13, 24, 54–56, 99 anxiety, 2, 14, 19, 26–28, 30, 32, 38, 41–42, 47, 50–51, 54, 59–61, 63–64, 74, 77, 79, 82–84, 89–91, 109–110, 120, 126, 131–133, 138, 143, 150, 155–156, 159 anxious, 6, 27–30, 32, 38–39, 41–42, 52, 54, 59–61, 66–67, 86, 91 avoidance, 14, 26–29, 32, 38, 41–43, 59–63, 65, 74, 77, 90–91, 141, 155 avoidant, 3–4, 6, 11, 14, 27–29, 40–43, 54, 60–61, 64–66, 81, 86, 90–91, 168 charismatic leader, 39 Christian, 48–50, 65, 81, 126–131, 133–134, 136, 145–152, 162 Christianity, 50, 81, 126–131, 133–134, 136, 145–150, 152 coercion, 79, 108, 122, 124–135, 140–141, 143, 145, 149–151, 155, 157–159, 161–163, 169 cohesion, 27–29, 33, 42, 61, 68, 71, 75, 87, 89, 94, 128, 163 collective/social unconscious, 84 conversion, 53–54, 56, 133

Holocaust, 83–84, 142, 158–159 in-group, 31–32, 36 Islam, 110, 113, 158–159 Islamic, 96–97, 104, 110–111, 114, 121, 160–162 materialism, 61–63, 123, 140–141, 155–158 mentalisation, 72, 86 Muslim, 49, 104, 110–113, 145–146, 149, 158–161 out-group, 30–33, 35, 120, 146 post-traumatic stress (PTSD), 91, 112, 125, 128, 148 preoccupied, 11, 14, 19–20, 55, 66 proximity-seeking, 49, 51 religion, 34, 44–45, 47–50, 52–56, 67–68, 94, 119, 126–127, 129, 133, 146–147, 151–152

dehumanisation, 79, 131–132 dismissing, 11, 14, 20, 59–60, 64–65 dismissive, 19–20, 55 disorganisation, 90, 92–94 disorganised, 3–4, 6, 11, 14, 56, 91–92, 129 domination, 78, 80, 82–84, 87, 89, 93, 95, 124–127, 131–133, 135, 138, 145–147, 151–154, 157–159, 162, 164 fundamentalism, 104, 111, 162 fundamentalist, 65, 104, 113–114, 121, 161

God, 45–55, 69, 128–129, 133–134, 144, 146–147, 152

secure base, 20, 22, 32, 46, 48–49, 51, 92 separation distress, 46, 50–51 social memory, 87–89, 122, 149 transformational leader, 39–40 unresolved, 11, 47, 55–56 violence, 79–81, 91–92, 94, 108, 110–111, 117–118, 121–130, 132–135, 142, 144, 146, 149, 151, 155–156, 161–164, 169

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Attachment Security and the Social World by Antigonos Sochos[Dr.soc]

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