What's your ATTACHMENT STYLE?

According to psychologists, your bond with your primary caregivers in childhood might be impacting your life as an adult, the patterns in your relationships, and even your career.

- By Liesl Robertson

Attachment theory is having a major resurgence on social media, but the roots of it can actually be traced all the way back to the mid-1900s.

British psychiatrist and psychoanalyst John Bowlby (together with psychologist Mary Ainsworth, who is rarely credited for her contribution), first introduced the concept in 1969, informed, in part, by psychologist Harry Harlow's experiments with rhesus monkeys back in the 1950s. During his now-controversial experiments, baby monkeys were separated from their mothers and put in cages with two figurines: a wire surrogate 'mother' that supplied milk, and a soft cloth surrogate 'mother', which could offer them a crumb of comfort. The monkeys unanimously opted for the warm, cuddly option, and would only reach for the cold, hard wire figure when they were desperately hungry, revealing that comfort and emotional closeness were more fundamental to developing attachment than merely satisfying basic physiological needs like hunger.

Harlow's experiments grew increasingly questionable over the years (he tried to induce depression and study the effects of 'evil' mothers — we won't get into that), but what those early studies did do is provide a basis for what would later become attachment theory.

Bowlby studied these experiments, noting how the monkeys attached to their caregiver. 'They attach to the one who provides safety and comfort,' says couples therapist Anne Power in her TEDx Talk on the subject. 'And he stressed that this attachment to a supportive other is not just for babies. We all need someone to whom we can turn, whose presence soothes us when we're troubled. This bonding behaviour is deeply embedded in us, because it supports survival of the species.'

Bowlby theorised that the quality of our attachments affects our early development, as well as how we navigate future relationships and cope with stress, and our overall quality of life.