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Pseudoscience
Posted by Errant on 2024-September-18 03:36:13, WednesdayIn reply to I Made a Video About MAPs and Attachment Theory posted by finlay on 2024-September-17 05:34:53, Tuesday
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Attachment Theory is really just repackaged Freud and not based on any solid research. Research instead shows that one's attachment style to one's mother is not even predictive of attachment styles to other members of the family, let alone future romantic partners decades later, not to mention that heritable traits like temperament are confounding variables that would need to be ruled out as explanations for the kind of attachments one forms with others throughout life. I couldn't bear to watch more than a few minutes of the video, but I saw enough to see the use of overgeneralization about strategies people use depending on their attachment style. But if it's possible to have different kinds of relationships with different people, then the way you handle those relationships have more to do with the individual context of those relationships than because of some underlying trait or "style" you have. That's not to say that attachment theorists haven't made some superficially true claims about healthy and unhealthy relationships, but it says very little about how much insight it provides. Ultimately, the therapeutic value of such an approach seems little different from a placebo: it works if you believe it works, but then maybe it would be better to use a method that does not rely on the spurious notion that early experiences can have massive long-lasting effects that take "months or years" to correct. This makes it a problematic cousin of the the trauma myth which we should be opposed to rather than adopt psychiatric beliefs which lend credence to it. Interestingly, in an article on Fatherly.com, psychologist Jerome Kagan speaking on the subject of the pseudoscientific nature of Attachment Theory elaborates further on the subjectivity of the effects of abuse by saying, Abuse and neglect in the first years are bad, but they’re associated with class. Children who are abused and neglected are far more likely to come from poor families than wealthy families. If you’re raised in a poor, single-parent family, you’re more likely to be abused. If you’re abused, you’re more likely to have problems when you’re 20. Now we’re quick to say it must be the abuse, but if you’ve been raised in poverty, you can’t dismiss that. And in an article from Psychology Today: Finally and most perniciously, the use of attachment theory has often been used to pathologize non-normative sexualities. Under the guise of relational "normality" established by a social construction of what a secure relationship looks like, folks have been labeled as insecurely attached simply for desiring sexual variety or displaying an interest in fetishistic activities. Hence, attachment-based therapists, especially those influenced by Freudian concepts, will often take on the stance that the security of their stable, long-term therapeutic relationship will not only change the client's attachment style, but in this way also transform the "sexual deviant" into a stable, sexually conforming member of society.  |
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