Attachment and intimacy - professional background

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I have written in another blog about attachement and intimacy in general terms without references. This post gives some background to my choice of terminology, and references to sources of others who have discussed the same matter.

Intimate relationships

In my writings on this website I have centred on the term "intimate relationships" for the major widely-ranging relationship that there is, especially for adults, but starting with adolescents, between people in one or several of the major deepest and closest relationships in their life.

There is no uniformity at all about the choice of words for this. Others describe similar ideas with the words "love", "love relationships", "romantic love", "pair-bonds", "close relationships", "romantic attachment", and even "marriage" or "couple relationships". I think in the current state of thinking, any choice is arbitrary. I believe mine is a helpful one in terms of the associations it produces.

Bowlby

John Bowlby himself used the word "love" a number of times throughout his life, considerably more than "intimacy", and never, as far as I am aware, as a synonym for "attachment". One important quote perhaps is from his 1988 book, A secure base : "Attachment theory regards the propensity to make intimate emotional bonds to particular individuals as a basic component of human nature, already present in germinal form in the neonate and continuing through adult life into old age."

Other sources in the literature

Apart from this work of Bowlby's, I list below a few other major sources that have developed alternative formulations of the distinction between intimacy and attachment I am making, and that link the discussion with the wider professional literature.

At a minimum most people will agree that adult intimacy or romantic attachment does tend to include sexual feelings, which Bowlby distinguishes as a behavioural system different from attachment. In addition, the comparison between adult-to-adult love and parent-infant relationships needs to take into account that in attachment theory the latter involves the attachment system of the infant, and the caregiving system of the parent. And there probably are even more other elements to distinguish.

In my view there is some clarity in the literature. E.g., the continued importance in adult life of attachment style, and its impact on relationship dynamics, is fairly well established. But the total picture of what takes place in adult intimate relationships remains one of the most complex there are in any theory of psychology or psychotherapy.

  • Bowlby, J. (1988). A Secure Base: Clinical applications of attachment theory. London: Routledge.
  • Collins, N.L. & Feeney, B.C. (2004). An Attachment Theory Perspective on Closeness and Intimacy. In Mashek, D.J. & Aron, A. (Eds.), Handbook of Closeness and Intimacy, pp. 163–188. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
  • Feeney, B.C. & Collins, N.L. (2004). Interpersonal safe haven and secure base caregiving processes in adulthood. In Rholes, W.S. & Simpson, J.A. (Eds.), Adult attachment: Theory, Research, and Clinical Implications. New York: Guilford Press.
  • Feeney, J.A. (2008). Adult romantic attachment: Developments inthe study of couple relationships. In Cassidy, J. & Shaver, P.R. (Eds.), Handbook of Attachment: Theory, Research, and Clinical Applications. New York: The Guilford Press.
  • Mikulincer, M. & Shaver, P.R. (2007). Attachment in Adulthood: Structure, Dynamics and Change. New York: The Guilford Press.