I don’t think in terms of ‘attachment theory’. I prefer ‘intensity thinking’. There are many reasons for this but perhaps the most immediate one is that I don’t trust any theory that seems to unify a way of thinking about how people live. Attachment does this, with its ‘avoidant’ and ‘anxious’ types. We are pathologised as soon as we take any notice of it.

I trust Derrida’s différance and Lyotard’s differend – ways of thinking not about connection as much as disturbance. Throughout our lives each of us is always being disturbed by what we need that we don’t have, or what we believe to be the case like that. Solms and Friston’s Homeostatic Context provides a way for psychotherapists to think about this, with its strangely realistic ways of considering the effects history, desire, presence and absence.

Attachment theory has its limits and peculiar, phantasmatic drive to connect: one more complex than Bowlby imagined.