Changes within the field of politics from the 1970s onwards began to re-evaluate the professions within the public sector (Power, 1997; Munro, 2004). Economic ideas about the need for efficiency, effectiveness and value for money in public services achieved dominance within government thinking and, consequently, social work practice came under increasing scrutiny and regulation (Mayer and Timms, 1970; Fischer, 1976; Brewer and Lait, 1980; Parton, 1991; Humphries, 1997; Munro, 2004; Featherstone et al, 2014, 2018a). At the heart of these changes was a belief that the government needed greater control over what social workers, and indeed all public sector employees, did (Power, 1997; Munro, 2004). Rather than social workers performing therapeutic work or engaging in political activity, as was the case into the 1960s and 1970s, a view was formed in government that social workers needed to focus on individual cases, identify the needs of families, refer to other services to meet those needs, or take decisive action to prevent harm (Parton, 1996). In refashioning the role of social workers, the increasing social acceptance of attachment theory, and its concomitant discourse, influenced and guided the UK government's attempt to define and restructure what social work practice was. There is some irony that, read differently, attachment theory has the potential to provide a powerful antidote to such managerialism.

The attachment story in use offered explanations for how children become harmed by insensitive, unresponsive and inconsistent parenting. Such ideas fed into the government's agenda for social work practice: namely to assess (needs) and refer (to services) or remove (to prevent harm) (Parton, 1996). Social workers were, therefore, directed to assess parents’ capacity to meet the needs of their children from the perspective of attachment theory. For example, in 1988, the UK Department of Health produced Protecting children: A guide for social workers undertaking a comprehensive assessment, known at the time as the ‘Orange Book’.

In this chapter, we briefly summarise the origins of attachment theory. There are many other works to which the reader may refer for a more comprehensive view. The account we give here is necessarily brief and intended primarily to give a sense of the intellectual and conceptual affiliations of the major players. We attend to the assumptive base of the theory and its intellectual origins, and in so doing we raise some questions. The theory has always brought controversy; we will go on to summarise some of the debates of the latter half of the 20th century and what has become of them. We can see in these discussions enduring tensions and fissures, which are both scientific and moral.

Attachment theory as used in child welfare is generally attributed to the work of John Bowlby, James Robertson and Mary Ainsworth. For all of them, psychodynamic thought had been a major influence. Duschinsky et al (2015b, p 175) note the lineage: ‘ “Attachment” was the English word used … in translating Freud's genitive Anlehnungs, deployed in the Three Essays on Sexuality to refer to a kind of love which emerged on the back of (literally, “leaning-on”) the need of the infant for his or her caregiver for their self-preservation.’ ‘Object relations theory’ – most often associated with the work of Melanie Klein (for example, Klein, 1952) and Donald Winnicott (for example, Winnicott, 1964) – in which emphasis is placed on the early relations between the infant and the ‘primary object’ (mother), was a pivotal influence. Within Freudian psychoanalytic theory, neurosis had been accepted as an inescapable part of human existence, exemplified in Freud's quip in Studies in hysteria (Freud and Breuer, [1898]2004) about transforming hysterical misery into common unhappiness. In object relations theory, a psychologically secure and healthy adult life becomes theoretically achievable, through the idealised mother–infant relationship in which the mother becomes lost in her infant, in maternal reverie (Bion, 1962).

In the previous chapter we discussed the origins of attachment theory and its unique synthesis of apparently disparate ideas. We noted that the observations by social worker James Robertson of distressed children admitted to hospital and separated from their parents were foundational to Bowlby's search for a more sophisticated theoretical explanation for the effect on children of the experience of living. We charted the extraordinary rise and durability of this heterogeneous artefact. Its ascent is attributable to a range of actors and contexts and to the ‘united front’ presented by its principal supporters. Attachment research remains a disparate field but the theory, in popular use, has, we shall argue, come to function as a myth. By myth we do not refer to a false belief, but rather, after Barthes (1973), to the linguistic trick of presenting as wholly natural a set of cultural values or concepts. Myth is a system of ‘signs’, linguistic or visual, which have a meaning beyond their literal significance, conveying fundamental ‘truths’ about the nature of the world, its origins, composition and ordering. ‘Myth is constituted by the loss of historical quality of things … the quality that they were once made … what is got rid is their contingent, historical, fabricated quality’ (Barthes, 1973, p 142). Myth thus converts History (the concrete event, its description, the messy realities of life) to Nature (a priori, complete, incorrigible). Myth mystifies, endowing a natural and eternal justification for the historical and political. Myth ingeniously moves from ‘ought’ to ‘is’, performing its ‘cultural work’ of naturalising the status quo (Wastell, 2007): myth is experienced as ‘innocent speech: not because its intentions are hidden – if they were hidden, they could not be efficacious – but because they are naturalized’ (Barthes, 1973, p 131).

The above quote is taken from a satirical novel about psychiatry by Will Self, an English journalist and novelist. Like all satire, it exaggerates and amplifies, but for its power it relies on the recognisability of its subject matter. If it is too far removed from what we think we know, satire ceases to be funny. Thus, the author makes a serious point about the effect that theory has on our perception of reality and about theory's capacity to feed itself. Child welfare professions are concerned with human relationships and emotion and thus they must rely to a large extent on exoteric, practical-moral reasoning. However, we must consider the effect of theory on such reasoning.

The following two extracts from a family law case illustrate the impact of an expert psychological assessment of the mother, based, it would seem, on one episode of observation and a single diagnostic interview.

Extract 1

Biology is currently big news. The quotations above are taken from interviews with two primary researchers in the epigenetics and neuroscience of parenting and child development. The first exemplifies a pragmatic approach, aimed at making a more potent case to policy makers; the second has transparently transformational aspirations. People can be fixed, but does this fixing have a dark side? Do we want government policies to alter how genes work and ‘override’ genetic differences? Who decides who is doomed?

We noted in the last chapter that concerns about the modest effect sizes associated with much primary work on disorganised attachment has led to the search for genetic and epigenetic factors that might explain variation in outcomes and susceptibilities. Alongside this, attachment scholars and researchers have sought new alignments with developments in evolutionary biology and developmental neuroscience.

In August 2015, the press in the UK reported that scientists in Cambridge had created a robot ‘mother’ capable of building ‘babies’ from mechanised blocks. Analogies with biological evolution were drawn. The robot mother is able to identify the best traits in her children and use these to improve the design of subsequent generations of robots (Griffin, 2015). It is the survival of the fittest.

The mother–infant dyad and stories about the effects of one party on the other underpin some of our most potent and durable myths. Marga Vicedo (2013) begins her compelling review of 20th-century ideas about maternal care, with another robot – this time an adopted, android ‘child’, David, who can be made sentient and ‘human’ through maternal love. The capacity is activated when the human mother, Monica, binds David to her, triggering an imprinting protocol, which irreversibly hardwires the robot child's love for the mother.

The Cambridge robot mother and David, the android child, represent poles of the nature–nurture debate. The Cambridge offspring are perfectible by natural selection – getting the right ‘genes’ and culling the deficient ones, in which their mother is complicit – whereas David is perfected through perfect love. We shall see in due course that these different explanations continue to play out in the contemporary ‘science’ of love and in the attempts of our species to realise aspirations for its own improvement.

In this book, we enter this debate, focusing particularly on the success of another cultural artefact: attachment theory. In the mindset of modern child welfare, ‘secure attachment’ – a strong bond between offspring and their mother – has come to be considered one of the child's most basic needs. It joins a range of ideas about the importance of infancy that have come to dominate professional, and indeed lay, ideas about childhood. As Kagan (1998, p 83) notes:

In this chapter, we examine the category ‘disorganised attachment’, recently subject, as we have glimpsed, to a good deal of critical debate. As Duschinsky (2015) notes, this classification has come to prominence because of its alleged relationship with child abuse and abusive parenting, vividly invoked in a contribution to a debate on early intervention in the UK's House of Commons from Andrea Leadsom, a Member of Parliament:

[I]f a baby has what is known as disorganised attachment— where one or both parents are frightening or chaotic— they cannot form a secure bond precisely because the person who is so frightening and chaotic is also the person whom the baby should be turning to for comfort. The baby's brain is confused and they experience disorganised attachment, which leads to very significant problems for that baby. If we look into the babyhood of children who brutalise other children, of violent criminals or of paedophiles, we can often see plenty of evidence that sociopaths are not born; rather they are made by their earliest experiences when they are less than two years old. (Leadsom, 2010)

Yet, there is some considerable debate in the primary literature about what the classification really means (Rutter et al, 2009; Duschinsky, 2015). Indeed, it is suggested that it might be possible that the Strange Situation Procedure (SSP) itself – which is, after all, a ‘strange situation’ – elicits disorganised behaviours. For example, Mesman et al (2018, p 857) ponder whether the unusually high numbers of disorganised infants (23%) in a Dogon subsistence farming community in Mali subject to the SSP may have been due to the infants finding the procedure ‘highly’ instead of ‘mildly’ stressful. Yet we can see that this degree of uncertainty has not dampened enthusiasm for the classification in policy and practice. Increased transparency in the family courts with more cases being reported provides evidence that the classification is being invoked in expert reports to the family courts as the following extracts from four different cases show.

Extract 1