Well, welcome back, back to the intensive 3 on becoming attached.

You have been through quite a journey with me already.

The intensive 1 on making sense of kids, of course, the Intensive 2 on the Separation Complex.

Many of you will have taken other courses as well, Science of Emotion, the more recent trilogy of courses on Play, and of course, Some of you have taken many other of the courses as well.

This course, I think you'll find a bit different.

As we extend the focus to ourselves as well, I like to keep the focus on the children.

I'm always concerned that we'll forget the children when we become too focused on ourself.

All the material, of course, applies in all the courses across the ages.

And the questions for reflection will generally be questions that look for more personal integration within ourselves.

Now just a bit of history of this course.

after 2 years of actually presenting the content in faculty master classes.

And then I presented this course actually annually after that until

which is the last time it was presented live.

Now the material And the way I put the course together for

So the course you have before you, for the most part, will be that original course presented in

It was recorded through audio at that time and then recorded in video in

Now I decided to refresh this introductory session as well as the ending session, not so much because I wanted to revise the content as I wanted to improve the recording to make it a little bit easier for you.

For the most part, we have kept the original recordings intact in this course.

There are a few places where I have added a few slides through the years, so there will also be some updates to the recordings here and there.

Now, I thoroughly enjoyed putting this material together.

I hope you will enjoy it as much as I enjoy it.

It was certainly 1 of the highlights of my career as a theorist.

I had gathered so much material over the years, but I had no structure in which to share it.

So this is where I'm sharing more personally about my own journey and take you through a true circumnavigation, a true walking around the material.

Now the title, Becoming Attached, is partially a takeoff on Carl Rogers' book on becoming.

In this sense, getting to the heart of the developmental process, the spontaneous realization of human potential if conditions are conducive.

Carl Rogers spells out those 4 conditions in that book that he believes are the conducive conditions, and he's speaking to adults in this case.

Now, there's no more significant arena to apply this to, this idea of becoming the spontaneous realization, if conditions are conducive, than the potential of attachment.

This too has a development if conditions are conducive.

And this is hardly spoken about anywhere, even those who usually or who are quite familiar with attachment do not generally focus on the developmental aspect.

So before we go there, my objectives for this course.

Well, as I said, it's to give me an opportunity to share old material in the context of new insights on the 6 stages of attachment.

So this provides the structure of the course.

It's really to provide the backstory to my formulation of the 6 Roots of Attachment, not just to answer curiosity, how does this happen to be, but I truly think that in understanding this, in understanding it in the context of the literature that was available in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and so on, that it adds breadth and depth to the whole understanding of attachment and the developmental approach.

I'm excited about sharing that, actually, as I do think it makes a contribution to the full understanding.

Secondly, to expand on each of the 6 ways of attaching, exploring the dynamics of attachment in each modality.

What I had in mind is to take the alpha dependent dynamics, shyness, counter will, defensive detachment, all of those dynamics that you become familiar with in terms of attachment, the sexualization of attachment, and in my original preparation I took each of those dynamics and wanted to flesh them out, like the sexualization of the senses, counter will in terms of sameness, and what alpha-dependent looks like in belonging.

And so I wanted to do this circumnavigation all around and oh my goodness, I had to pick and choose.

So even though I had this whole new course, Intensive 3, I was excited about doing this, in the end it's only 15 sessions and I had to decide what am I going to cover, what's most important, what do I do.

So I had to edit significantly from the material available to do this because otherwise it would have simply been too much.

And it's so frustrating because in my book, for instance, Hold On To Your Kids, there's only a couple of pages, I actually think 3 paragraphs, on the 6 stages of attachment.

Even in the intensives, I only have 45 minutes at the most to talk about the 6 stages, so I've actually never had an opportunity before this course, again, first in 2011, to get to walk around these stages.

And then thirdly, to be able to make sense of these 6 stages from inside out, make sense of it and make sense of ourselves in the context of this material.

So to foster self-reflection and personal integration of the attachment material, I think this is absolutely necessary, unless 1 can make sense of it inside oneself, it's difficult to make sense of it in others.

Now the challenge to foster this is to find the words.

The words that can open the doors for consciousness, for self-reflection and personal integration.

Unfortunately, well, that's just the way it is.

We live inside these dynamics, inside the forest.

And so it's so difficult to see the forest for the trees.

Yet the words are necessary to become conscious.

So that has been my challenge, to find the words that can join us to something we all know, but we know at an intuitive level, it is us.

We live inside of this, but here, want to bring it to a conscious level as well.

So then as I said, hopefully the material that we share in this course, the intensive 3, will provide depth and breadth to what was covered in the intensive 1 and intensive 2, as well as the other courses.

So that brings me to the title slide, this overview of what we're going to be looking at.

And as I said, it is a back story of my formulation of the 6 stages of attachment.

This came together for me during my sabbatical with the family in Provence in 1998 and

It was incredibly exciting for that material to come together.

Like, again, attachment was just a singular kind of thing.

And I asked myself a question as I was getting into the material.

First of all, trying to write on the traffic circle of frustration, but then coming to shift it to the peer problem and so on.

But I said, well, what are all the different ways of attaching?

And that started an incredible reading process as I try to cover extensively the literature on this and how individuals looked at it and talked about it and gradually distilling this into these 6 or as really 7, but we'll go into that, 7 ways of attaching that then distilled even further into a sequential model, which I will talk But, so that was very exciting, to be able to have the time, you know, whole days where I would immerse myself in the cave, studying and putting these pieces together and coming out of it with this six-stage model of attachment.

And you notice in this analogy I actually got the layers here which I meant to get in the root diagram as well.

The different layers of penetration of soil and so on.

Well, the plant analogy is such a good analogy for attachment.

So many analogies are not alive, like sculpting, they're dead.

There's the idea of multiple roots, which many, many plants have.

Of course, there's the idea that there is no life without attachment.

If a plant was not attached, there would be no life.

It confronts the concept that 1 can be too attached.

The issue is whether it's too superficially attached, too insecurely attached, but never too attached.

The idea that it's what we don't see that tells the story.

It's what we don't see that tells the story, and oh my goodness, is that ever true of attachment?

It's what we don't see that tells a story.

And oh my goodness, is that ever true of attachment?

The idea that all the fruit, all the fruition, the flowering, the fruit comes from what happens in the roots.

The nurturance happens in the roots and as I said different levels of penetration and so there the analogy holds in so many ways.

Now I believe it was in the 2011 rendition, or version, the original version of this course, that I first told the story of the elephant in the 6 blind stages.

I'm not sure now but it's such a good story that I incorporated it into the intensive 1.

It's at the end of the session 1 if you'll remember as well as some other courses on attachment as well.

But this story fits particularly to attachment.

Why it was that I, again, just review this story here.

The story, as it's told, and I love the rendition of the story in the book Maps of the Mind, which it was required reading for my university students.

Again, I'm repeating it because you've heard this story before, but just for the sake of going on from here, 6 blind sages coming to experience an elephant for the very first time.

And so they have to take it in through touch.

And each sage takes in it through touch, and 1 touches the tail.

1 touches the tusk, and 1 touches the leg, and so on and so on.

And so the poem goes on, the story goes on about each one's experience of the 6 blind sages, all with a different story to tell.

And this is the favorite Gestalt story, which of course, if you know anything about Gestalt, is that the whole is more than the sum of its parts.

And there have been many blind sages, and we'll take a look at them through the years, with the attachment theory, who all had a piece, without even knowing that it was a piece of the elephant.

So they all had a piece, and they told a story with language that didn't seem related at all to the other piece, yet all of this comes together.

And this is the exciting part of me because I was part of that journey.

I was part, so to speak, of touching these various isolated areas of literature 1 after another without knowing that it was all part of the same story.

And so that lays the groundwork of Intensive 3 and why I was so excited to be able to share this with you I never really thought when I did intensive 1 and 2 that I'd get the opportunity.

It was like Oh, no, is this buried forever?

Like it was on top of it or do I get a chance to tell the back story?

And it's sat down relatively well in the last, I guess, 11 years now.

As I said, I wouldn't tell it any differently now intensive 3 in when I'm recording this in in 2022 then I did originally in

and so it's it's what I wanted to share So in this case, it's 2 it's 6 huge areas of literature, really, that had no idea of the big picture that they were part of.

And so I'm going to introduce you to some of the main theorists and the constructs.

And today's psychologists, it seems so long ago, the theorists of the 60s and 70s and 80s, that many of them will not know very much about this at all.

You'll get the idea of the journey through the material, and that's what I want you to get the idea of here.

And so we'll start with John Bowlby, really.

Those who have studied attachment theory, psychology and university will associate the name of John Bowlby with attachment theory.

I'll come back to him, but it's important to clarify here is he gave the name for the phenomena.

He's often called the father of attachment theory.

If anybody is the author of attachment theory, it's Aristotle.

But there are so many different versions, so many different ways, whether you look at it through particle physics, whether you look at it through biology, that there is no father of attachment theory, but there's certainly somebody who gave it a name that we could join all of these things, And that was important to be able to join all these isolated areas.

In brain science, we look more closely at what many refer to as the limbic system.

And the primary theme of the limbic system, many neuroscientists, including Alan Shore and others, have come to the idea that we are mainly moved to attach, to togetherness.

We are moved to, that is at the core of our emotivation, that we are moved to.

1 of those neuroscientists who's no longer with us now, perceived the primary emotion as that of seeking.

But because he was not informed by attachment theory, he didn't know what we were seeking.

But when you understand attachment theory, you know what we're seeking.

We're seeking togetherness, we're seeking connection, we're seeking contact, we're seeking continuity of this contact, We're seeking proximity.

He didn't see the elephant, as many neuroscientists don't.

They're looking specifically into it, but he said, whoo, this emotion is bigger than anything.

Of course, we have a brain chemistry of attachment.

We have the study of oxytocin, of neurotransmitters, of hormones, and some of it comes through the study of sex.

Again, when you think of it, sex is all about attachment.

It's all about the search for contact and closeness, for touch.

You add the construct of exclusivity and touch, and all of a sudden you've got attachment.

The intimacy that is there, It's like super glue, it's meant to bind us.

Not only meant to create a context for parenting, but it's quite clear when we look at it from this way, what's happening in the brain, that sex was meant to bind us because separation is too painful.

And so, it was meant, it was meant to last.

But when we understand it from this place, and we understand it as a piece of the theory, you see, there was this whole science of sex that had no idea that what they were studying is attachment.

And I was part of that, that huge Masters and Johnson, all of that, I was part of there, I was in that.

My background is as a natural scientist, chemistry, physics, biology, but mainly chemistry and physics, all about the attachment of elements.

Little did I know that when I was studying valences, when I was studying the molecule, when I was studying the elements and how they come together, we always called them bonds, but we didn't understand we were talking about attachment.

And then in physics, we were talking about the atom and fusion and we were talking about how it holds together.

And we would talk about the other aspects of gravity and all of these things.

Had no idea that we were talking about attachment.

Einstein had no idea that he was 1 of the preeminent theorists of attachment.

See, these were all isolated areas, But the atom is, it's all about attachment.

The elements, they're all about attachment to each other.

Then there was, well, as I said, we had all the natural gravity, fusion, magnetism.

Adding to this, we had in the 1950s and 60s, Lorenz's imprinting, Harlow's monkeys.

He called it, he was studying birds and he called it imprinting of how they get attached to each other in critical periods.

Harlow was looking to confront the idea that survival was most significant and food was a basic survival need.

He'd say, look, I put my little monkeys in the lab under stress.

And so he used that term for it, but he had no idea that he was talking about something much broader and in a Bowlby was coming off of this study as well and it's you know saying contact comfort that doesn't seem like the the right name for this phenomena in printing that doesn't seem like the right name for this phenomena.

Imprinting, that doesn't seem like the right name for this phenomena.

And we added to it object relations theory.

This came off of 1 of the branches of psychodynamic or psychoanalytic thought, psychodynamic there, and they have such esoteric language.

They call the relationship with mother, mother is the object here, mother is the object, so this was the study about the relationships of how they came to form.

So you'd never know it to call object relations theory, but that whole field was about attachment.

Winnicott was part of that, a place, if you recognize that name, of object relations theory.

Oh my goodness, books in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, wonderful books on identity formation.

Touching on attachment, almost using, never using the word, but all kinds of ideas of how it was there.

Again, no idea it was part of a larger phenomena, that to identify with is a form of attachment.

Did we have another 1 in this in terms of identity?

Then along came this literature, and now we're getting to more recent times, so you'll remember 60s and 70s and 80s now, of this whole idea of self-esteem.

That's 1 important, the quest for significance.

But had no idea it was related to attachment.

Then along came some research from Southern California around San Jose that said, hey guys, the most important factor in whether somebody sees themself as mattering, as being a significant, is what your peers think of you.

But they didn't realize that we'd already become hippies.

And San Jose was largely a center, and San Francisco of this.

So when they studied what is the most important factor in a sense of significance, they were only following the construct of peer orientation.

They had no idea that we see ourselves and our significance as a reflection in the eyes of those that we are attached to.

When those we are attached to relate to us in certain ways, we take our cues of how we matter from that.

There was huge flaws in self-esteem theory, huge flaws in it, but mostly because it was not informed from the bigger picture.

We go on, we go on to Sidney Gerard's, oh boy did I get into that as a young, I was

or so on and discovered this incredible literature on psychological intimacy.

How in sharing yourself, having those secrets that would divide in, oh it was heady stuff in graduate school, We would divide into what was called T groups or sensitivity groups.

And we would share things about ourself and then we would feel so close to each other, closer than we even felt with our family.

It led to divorces and disruptions and real attachments.

The thing was, is nobody knew that it was related to this phenomena of attachment.

Gerard, Sidney Gerard, was 1 of these incredible blind sages.

Now did I include, oh yes, Bandura's social learning theory here.

I was a behaviorist in graduate school before I became an attachment-based developmentalist.

I was a behaviorist and so Bandura was 1 of my heroes and he studied social learning theory and he was all about imitation and conformity.

And the story is told that when, he was so influential, The story is told on his retirement of anybody asking him any regrets, and he says, if I only would have known that we conform to those to whom we are attached.

We imitate those to whom we are attached.

I could have put my whole theory where it belonged in attachment theory, which is true.

You see, even Skinner, the 1 who brought us reward and reinforcement, he said, and we'll touch on this, it's just a fragmentation, a symbol of whether you matter to somebody.

It's a depersonalized kind of worth nugget, so to speak.

1 of the great blind sages, Heinz Werner's Orthogenetic Principle.

It goes from fusion, oneness, to differentiation and separation, to ultimately integration.

You know it well, because I teach it, right, I think from Intensive 1 is this, but he used the word fusion.

So it was never joined to attachment theory.

You had to know that fusion was about attachment to get the picture.

And Otto Rank's theory, wonderful theory of separation, where we have Otto Rank's theory, that it's the denial of death, the fear of separation, The denial of death is the most significant issue in making sense of us.

And Tokyo Doi, in his study of words, etymology, and he studied adult attachment, a Japanese psychiatrist.

I so wanted to get an appointment with him when I went to Japan to do a presentation for there.

I contacted him, but he didn't know me from anywhere.

He was in his late 80s by that time and didn't grant me an interview.

But the anatomy of dependence, and I talk about that elsewhere.

The point here is, you see, these are all the blind sages of attachment, but what was missing?

What was missing is what connects everything here.

A label, an understanding, the pursuit of proximity, of nearness, of niness, of contact and connection, in which the word attachment.

Now this didn't come initially to Bowlby, and I think I've told this story in other places.

I had accepted an invitation to keynote with Richard Bowlby in a European conference on attachment.

Richard Bowlby, Sir Richard Bowlby actually, or no, it was, yeah, Richard Bowlby, a son of John Bowlby, was trying to bring back into preeminence his father's theories.

And I accepted the invitation to do homage to John Bowlby and I had this wonderful opportunity to go out a number of times with Richard Bowlby and his wife.

And I gave him my book to read, hold on to your kids, he didn't read it, but I gave it to read.

But I got to ask him a question, and we had gone pubbing together, You can do that even in the morning in Germany.

I said, when do you remember when your father came up with this word attachment?

Well, he said, I was at the dinner table with a number of discussions that we were having it, and he was trying to find a name for this phenomenon, as well as a name for himself, because he wanted to do it.

So he announced what he would call this phenomenon, he would call it the Bowlby effect.

In fact, her response according to Richard was, oh my goodness, this is love.

You're gonna call the Bowlby effect love?

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Intensive III Session 1