"Attachment theory" began fifty or sixty years ago with the English doctor and psychoanalyst, John Bowlby. After qualifying as a doctor and a psychoanalyst he became seriously involved in early childhood development in the 1950's while working with the United Nations. He became convinced, after many years of close observation, that the early childhood relationship between baby and mother formed the child for all future human relationships and most of the child's later emotional life. He published a seminal trilogy of works on attachment theory in 1969 and the 1970's. His work was controversial at the time. But unlike the writings and theorizings of all other psychoanalysts, Bowlby's theories were capable of being tested in a scientific manner. And they were so tested over the following decades.

Today attachment theory is pretty much accepted as standard by many people in the mental health field. Its conclusions have been verified over and over. Good attachment and bad attachment are pretty well understood. People who've had good attachment relations with their early life caregivers usually have positive future mental health, though for all kinds of reasons, genetic and environmental, even people with good early attachment may develop later pathology. Those with bad early attachment follow specific patterns in their later development. Some T's are sufficiently trained in attachment theory as to be able to discern in their patients whether their early attachment experience was positive or negative.

If negative, adult attachment relations may be affected, for example as between T and patient. T may be able, by observing a patient's attachment behavior with T, to understand something of what may have gone wrong early in the patient's life. I'm not entirely clear as to whether or not it matters very much if a patient him or herself knows or understands their own attachment history. There are a number of new therapies that have been propounded over the past ten years based on what is being discovered with regard to both attachment theory and physical, neurological aspects of behavior. If you'd like to know more about it, you might Google "Dan Siegel," "Allan Schore" and "David Karen." Take care.