Joumal of Analytical Psychology 1993, 38, 45-55 ATTACHMENT- DETACHMENT AND NON- ATTACHMENT PATRICK PIETRONI, London There are three conditions which often look alike Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow: Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference Which resembles the others as death resembles life, Being between two lives — unflowering, between The live and the dead nettle. (T. S. Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’) The man who moves among the objects, free from either attachment or repulsion finds peace. In this peace the burden of all his previous sorrows and miseries falls from him. Let the Yogi Unceasingly exercise control over his mind, hoping for nothing desiring nothing. (Bhagavad Ghita 1962) He [the Indian] wishes to free himself from nature . . . I want to be freed neither from human beings, nor from myself, nor from nature. (C. G. Jung 1963) INTRODUCTION These three introductory quotes help to introduce the concepts explored in this paper. The hypothesis to be explored is that the pursuit of Eastern spiritual practices by many Westerners is often driven by a disturbance in their attachments (to self, to things, and to persons). In the pursuit of these spiritual practices, whose stated aim is the cultivation of non-attachment, many individuals intensify their state of detachment, which perpetuates their distress and (0021-8774/93/3801/045/$3.0011 © 1993 The Society of Analytical Psychology46 P. Pietroni dilemma and produces both false solutions and a continuation of the vicious circles they often find themselves in. The three patients I shall describe below, to help elucidate the themes addressed in the title of this paper, were all involved in Eastern spiritual practices. One had been a follower of Gurdjieff, the second was a Buddhist, the third practised Yoga and was, at the time of analysis, ‘about to leave for India’. All these patients were familiar with and in their own way secking, through their spiritual practices, the state of non-attachment as defined by the Bhagavad Ghita - ‘hoping for nothing — desiring nothing’. Yet during the analysis it became apparent that there was a hopeless muddle between their yearning for this state and the first two — attachment and detachment. CLINICAL MATERIAL Ronald is a 35-year-old married man with three children, who has a degree in history, briefly worked as a social worker, but now works as a master craftsman in a design company. He has always seen himself as isolated and aloof, and entered analysis because of increas- ing difficulties with his relationship with his wife and working col- leagues. His father supervised his bottle feeding and at six months Ronald is said to have refused his feeds persistently. This was accompanied by projectile vomiting. At his father’s instigation, he was strapped on a wooden cross and forcibly fed for several weeks a literal form of attachment. Not surprisingly Ronald has had problems with authority and adopted a fairly passive attitude towards himself, his body, and his relationships. He was bullied at school, felt inadequate at university and in his late twenties found himself in a Gurdjieff community in France. He lived there on and off for three years and found the leader of the group, a woman, particularly important. By all accounts she was a powerful and dominant leader, frequently chastising as well as encouraging individual members. His dreams were full of symbolic material: I was with my father in our drawing room at home and my father was holding a long staff. My father threw this staff at me and asked me to catch it, I just managed to hold it but then stumbled and dropped it. The staff turned into a snake which then splintered into a spider and finally to small insects. I picked up my shoe to kill the insects. Such rich material was often reported in a flat accent with little or no affect; and he seemed disconnected from all the excitement, energy, and fear that seemed to be conveyed by the images. The one occasion he recalled when he really got angry was when he was robbed in the streets of Paris by two vendors who took his walletAttachment-detachment and non-attachment AT which ‘I was very attached to’. He completely lost control and attacked both like some ‘demented animal’. The rest of the time he exhibited very little anger or assertion and all his ‘protest’, as he put it, ‘had been expended at the age of six months’. Alan is a 40-year-old teacher who, two years before commencing analysis, had started his own consultancy organization. His life had been in crisis at several points and on one occasion he had attempted suicide and also been arrested for physical violence. He had been a heavy drinker but had ceased for at least ten years. He was the only son of a Service parent and had had sixteen homes and eighteen schools in his first eighteen years of life. His father was a stern sergeant-major figure and his mother was very much the shrinking violet. The only time in his life that he felt some form of security and peace was when he met an Indian Swami and attended, relatively regularly, meditation classes. He was someone who was rootless and felt attached to nobody and indeed had not had the opportunity to become attached to a home, a school, or a friend, He had both an interest in, and detailed knowledge of, astrology and at first he was reluctant to share this aspect of his life as he felt I would be scornful. He then related a dream which made me feel that he was highly unlikely to continue analysis, He dreamt that he was sitting on the couch and that he was reading a book on astrology — the planet Uranus figured strongly - and that his body gradually began to shrivel, his head began to grow bigger and took on the configuration of the planet Uranus. The planet/head then gradually rose off the chair to join the other planets. His sleep was routinely disturbed and on this occasion he woke up with a feeling of dread. However, he described the dream very posi- tively and he had sought explanations in astrological texts, which he explained to me in depth. I interpreted the dream in the transference and said something along the lines that ‘his astrological explanations ‘were superior to my analytic ones’. However, I felt the die was cast and indeed two weeks later he appeared with a computer print-out of all his expenses and debts, totalling £18,000, and said he would no longer come and that he could not pay my bill, but would send me monthly cheques when he could. Mary is a 54-year-old Irish woman, divorced, with one daughter who lives with her. She had been brought up a strict Catholic and initially had wanted to become a nun. At 16, she left her very controlling mother, promptly got pregnant, and had a termination. She married in her early twenties. Her husband was German and had been in the Hitler Youth. She had been a wife and mother for twenty-five years,48 P. Pietroni and separated from her husband following several years of violence and sexual infidelity on his part. Three years before seeking analysis and soon after her separation, she had joined a Buddhist sect and was meditating regularly and ‘seeking God’, as she put it. She had recently started a fabric business and was having great success with her ven- ture, much to her delight. A major episode in her life occurred when she was 3, when her elder sister, aged 5, had to go to hospital for a prolonged time with tuberculosis. Not only did this mean she was separated from her sister to whom she was very close, but also her mother was away for much of the time and a family myth developed that somehow her boisterousness had made her elder sister sick. Thereafter she became very guilty whenever she was ‘uppish’ and turned to the nuns as a way of containing her natural liveliness, in the same way as she had now espoused Buddhism. The break-up of her marriage had shattered her self-confidence and she suffered from bouts of depression and despair. During the analysis it became appar- ent that she ‘adored her father’, but he was often away (he was a music hall artiste), and one day, aged 9, she returned from school to find her father’s suitcases packed and on the doorstep — her mother had thrown him out following the discovery of an affair. This fear of being thrown out was present throughout the first three years of analysis and she confessed to being sure I would tire of her, ‘not find her interesting’, and tell her to go. DISCUSSION Before discussing each case in detail I would like to elaborate on John Bowlby’s work on attachment behaviour and say a little more about the Eastern concept of non-attachment. Bowlby was born in 1907 and died in 1990. He started his life work before the Second World War and a 1940 paper, “The influence of early environment in the development of neurosis and neurotic character’, already pointed to his later conclusions. He joined the staff of the Tavistock Clinic after the war and held various senior posts there, where he latterly forged links with many workers in anthro~ pology and ethology. He published his main work in the three- volume work Attachment, Separation and Loss, and his later books included The Making and Breaking of Affectional Bonds (1979) and A Secure Base: Clinical Application of Attachment Theory (1988). Just before he died, he finished a biography of Charles Darwin, which is an essay in applied Bowlbyism. A 1968 quote illustrates the simplicity and common-sense nature of the man: There are few blows to the human spirit so great as the loss of someone nearAttachment-detachment and non-attachment 49 and dear. Traditional wisdom knows that we can be crushed by grief and die of a broken heart, and also that a jilted lover is apt to do things that are foolish and dangerous to himself and others. It knows too that neither love nor grief is felt for just any other human being, but only for one or a few particular and individual human beings. The core of what I term ‘affectional bond’ is the attraction that one individual has for another individual’. (Bowlby 1979) Essentially, he challenged the idea prevalent in most analytic theor- ies that the early infant’s relationship with his mother could be explained solely as a result of the gratification or otherwise of the feeding and/or sexual instinct. He believed that the human child’s tie to its mother, or mother substitute, could be better understood using the data drawn from ethologists, primarily Lorenz’s classic experi- ment on imprinting and bonding, and Harlow’s work with Rhesus monkeys (which demonstrated that a young chimp’s need for contact and comfort from a mother-figure were greater than his need for food). In brief, Bowlby argues: Attachment behaviour . . . is a form of instinctive behaviour that develops in humans, as in other mammals, during infancy, and has as its aim or goal/ proximity to a mother-figure. The function of attachment behaviour, it is sug- gested, is protection from predators. Whilst attachment behaviour is shown especially strongly during childhood when it is directed towards parent figures, it none the less continues to be active during adult life when it is usually directed towards some active and dominant figure, often a relative but sometimes an employer or some elder of the community. Attachment behaviour, the theory emphasizes, is elicited when a person (child or adult) is sick or in trouble, and is clicited at high intensity when he is frightened or when the attachment-figure cannot be found. Because, in the light of this theory, attachment behaviour is regarded as a normal and healthy part of man’s instinctive makeup, it is held to be most misleading to term it ‘regressive’ or childish when seen in an older child or adult. For this reason, too, the term ‘dependency’ is regarded as leading to a seriously mistaken perspective, for in everyday speech to describe someone as dependent cannot help carrying with it overtones of criticism. By contrast, to describe someone as attached carries with it a positive evaluation. (Bowlby 1979) Bowlby’s view of the nature of anxiety challenges both Freud’s, that ‘whenever anxiety is about “a known danger”... it can be regarded as “realistic anxiety”; whereas whenever it is “about an unknown danger”’ it is to be regarded as “neurotic anxiety” ’ (Freud 1926) and Klein’s ‘I hold that anxiety arises from the operation of the death instinct within the organism, is felt as fear of annihilation (death) and takes the form of fear of persecution’ (Klein 1946). Bowlby takes a far more cognitive, biological, and evolutionary approach and accepts that anxiety and fear ‘are readily intelligible in terms of survival value’, He insisted that careful clinical work will reveal that much of the symptoms and distress presented can be attributed either to a failure of attachment or to a series or indeed a single50 P. Pietroni episode of separation or to the pathological variants of the mourning process once a loss has been experienced. Bowlby’s second and third volumes plot these occurrences in great detail and I will mention some of them during the clinical discussion, BOWLBY ON DETACHMENT Bowlby and others observed that when a child was separated from his mother-figure after about the age of six months and that separ- ation lasted for more than a few hours there appeared to be three main phases of observable behaviour: 1) protest — crying, shouting, running to the door, kicking, etc., 2) despair - active physical move~ ments diminish, monotonous crying may ensue and the child becomes withdrawn and inactive, and 3) that of detachment. In this stage of detachment: The child no longer rejects the nurses, he accepts the care and food and toys they bring. So far from greeting his mother he may become remote and apathetic. He will appear cheerful and adapted to his unusual situation and apparently easy and unafraid of anyone, but this sociability is superficial: he appears no longer to care for anyone. (Bowlby 1980) Bowlby linked the first stage, protest, to separation anxiety, the second, despair, to grief and mourning, and the third, detachment, to the development of defence mechanism. This defensive process of detachment and the form it takes Bowlby likened to the physical process of ‘inflammation’ and the consequences of this patho-physiological process could, in late life, lead to severe dysfunction. Crucial to his argument is that Bowlby saw the healthy mourning process as a gradual withdrawal of emotional investment in the object lost and not, as in the case of detachment, a splitting, repression, denial, or any other manifestation of defence mechanisms. NON-ATTACHMENT Finally, non-attachment — this is not a concept dealt with by Bowlby and my frame of reference will be the two major works of Hindu thought, the Bhagavad Ghita and the Sutras of Pantanjali. Similar concepts of non-attachment are found in Buddhist writings (letting go) and Chinese writings but my comments relate solely to the Yogic models of human development. The Sutras, meaning ‘thread’, are a collection of aphorisms which Patanjali is thought to have collated as a way of bringing togetherAttachment-detachment and non-attachment st the voluminous works that existed at the time. They are a brief exposition of Yoga and its aims. He writes: Non-attachment is self-mastery; it is freedom from desire for what is seen or heard. (Patanjali 1969) and conversely, he writes: ‘Attachment is that which dwells on pleasure. (Patanjali 1969) In Patanjali’s system, all human misery arises from one of five causes of which attachment (raga) is one, the other four being (avidya-ignor- ance, asmita — loss of awareness, duvesha — aversion or fear, abinvesa = fear of death. The Bhagavad Gita puts it thus: When one renounces all desire and his spirit is content in itself then he has indeed found peace. (Bhagavad Gita 1962) For the aspiring Yogi the ‘withdrawal of emotional investment’ in objects, people, and thought process leads to the state of non-attach- ment and peace. ‘As mentioned earlier, Jung was familiar with these writings and the concepts. He wrote: ‘Whenever we are attached we are still possessed and when we are possessed there is one stronger than us who possesses us. (Jung 1929) However, he does make his position quite clear where he stands on non-attachment. Like the alchemical end product, which always betrays its essential duality, the united personality will never quite lose the painful sense of innate discord. Com- plete redemption from the sufferings of this world is and must remain an illusion. (Jung 1946) Let me now return to a more detailed discussion of the case material which I believe illustrates some of the consequences of the failure of ‘secure attachment’ in infancy. Ronald This is probably the most difficult case to formulate using Bowlby’s work because it is hypothesized that the incident occurring between six months and a year was the initial dysfunction in his attachment process. During this time, we can postulate with a degree of certainty that his father took over the feeding process from his depressed mother and that he was treated as if he were in hospital, tied down to a cross to be fed and unable to protest, at the trauma as well as the lack of comfort. Bowlby writes about this period:$2 P. Pietroni The younger an infant the more difficult it is to know how his responses to loss of mother should best be conceptualized. Review of evidence suggests the following, Before six months the responses are so different to what they are later that the concept of mourning seems certainly inappropriate. Between seven months and about sixteen months responses take forms that have sufficient resemblance to responses of older children for their relation to mourning to call for careful discussion. From about seventeen months onwards the responses conform even more closely to those described in later life so that tentative conclusions reached in them begin to apply. (Bowlby 1978) Ronald’s despair and passivity were present throughout the analysis, evoking in me a mixture of boredom, frustration, and a wish to stuff him with interpretations. At such times he would compare me to his father and his Gurdjieff teacher. Therapeutically it was only when his despair and hopelessness were shared and experienced between us that he was able to start grieving for his early loss. He was then able to make tentative steps towards more healthy attachments, initially with his body that he rejected and denied - ‘I can’t stand to look at it’, and later to his creative work and his intimate relationships. Ronald’s dreams were full of insects, spiders and snakes and his fear of fragmentation was never far away. Ledermann writes: [This fear of] terror of dissolution which presumably a baby experiences when through lack of good enough maternal care he cannot separate out from the mother and feel that he exists in his own right. (Lederman 1979) Ronald, in attachment theory terms, was stuck in the stage of mourn- ful despair. Bowlby writes: The mourning responses that are commonly seen in infancy and early childhood bear many of the features which are the hallmark of pathological mourning in the adult. (Bowiby 1980) The four variants he describes are: — unconscious yearning for the lost person — unconscious reproach against the lost person combined with conscious and often unremitting self-reproach — compulsive caring for other persons — persistent disbelief that the loss is permanent. (Bowlby 1980) I believe that Ronald exhibited the second of these variants. His experiments with meditation and attempts at non-attachment during his time with Gurdjieff only helped to deepen his isolation and dis- tance him from his rage.Attachment-detachment and non-attachment 53 Mary Mary’s two episodes of traumatic separation and loss occurred at the ages of 3 and 9, and in both she felt she was in part responsible. Her behaviour subsequently became what in judgemental or lay parlance would be called dependent and immature. Bowlby writes: There are, however, persons of all ages who are prone to show unusually frequent and urgent attachment behaviour... When this propensity is present beyond a certain degree it is usually regarded as neurotic. .. A better way to describe this condition is to term it ‘anxious attachment’. (Bowlby 1978) Drawing on many studies, Bowlby then illustrates how ‘anxious attachment’ occurs in children after a separation from mother or mother-figure and as a result of parental desertion and divorce, both present in Mary’s case. He links anxious attachment to the develop- ment of anxiety, phobias, and insecurity in childhood and adult life. Mary had a number of phobic symptoms as related earlier. Bowlby contrasted ‘anxious attachment’ with ‘secure attachment’, and believed, as quoted earlier: There is a strong case for believing that an unthinking confidence in the unfailing accessibility and support of attachment figure is the bedrock on which stable and self-reliant personality is built. (Bowlby 1979) The development of ‘exploratory behaviour’ — her painting — is a sign that increasing self-reliance has developed that will enable Mary to finish analysis shortly. It is interesting to note that her espousal of Buddhism was for her a way of controlling ‘her panic symptoms’ and ‘uncontrollable urges’. She went through a time when she stopped meditating, and cried the tears of despair. She has now returned to meditation and as she says is ‘able to be alone — without having to give everything up’. Alan Alan, the most disturbed of all three patients, exhibited many charac- teristics of the anal personality with narcissistic behaviour patterns. In Bowlby’s schema, he would fit the child who, after a series of tepeated separations, threats of abandonment (Alan reported how he would often feel abandoned when his father left for another posting), remains in the state of ‘dysfunctional anger’. Bowlby described protest and anger as a ‘normal’ consequence of separation, the anger serving two functions — ‘It may assist in overcoming such obstacles as there may be to reunion and secondly it may discourage the loved person from going away again’. This anger can be and is often displaced against anyone félt to be responsible for the loss.54 P. Pietroni Bowlby goes on to illustrate how angry coercive behaviour can act in the service of an affectional bond. However, ‘dysfunctional anger’ occurs when a person, child or adult, becomes so intensely and/or persistently angry with his partner that the bond between them is weakened, instead of strengthened, and the partner is alienated. Anger with a partner becomes dysfia tional also whenever aggressive thoughts or acts cross the narrow boundary between being deterrent and being revengeful. It is at this point, too, that feeling ceases to be the ‘hot displeasure’ of anger and may become, instead, the ‘malice* of hatred. (Bowlby 1978) Bowlby reports on research conducted among boys in an approved school who showed signs of repeated delinquencies and hostile behaviour. The study identified repeated separations in many of the children’s background, but an added feature was the frequent use of threats of abandonment by the parents as a means of discipline. We know that Alan’s father was a strict disciplinarian and that on occasions, Alan reported, his father would leave in order to avoid beating him. Alan’s subsequent hostility or dysfunctional anger was the cause of much damage both to himself and to others. Not surpris- ingly, he found Eastern meditational disciplines attractive and he became attached to a powerful Indian Swami. However, his periods of detachment were followed by bouts of aggressive, sadistic, and sexually perverse behaviour. The dream he reported was an example of his unexpressed omnipotent rage which literally propelled him to the stars. CONCLUSION Jung was the first Western psychiatrist to interpret Eastern thinking ‘to the West, yet even a brief perusal of his writings shows that he ‘was not in favour of Western man adopting Eastern methods. Three quotes will be sufficient to illustrate how entrenched his opposition was: There could be no greater mistake than for the Westemer to take up the direct practice of Yoga, for that would merely strengthen his will. The split in the Western mind therefore makes it impossible at the outset for the intentions of Yoga to be realized in any adequate way. It becomes either a strictly religious matter or else a kind of training like Pelmanism, breath control, eurythmics — and not a trace to be found of the unity and wholeness of nature which is characteristic of Yoga. Study Yoga you will learn an infinite amount from it, but do not try to apply it for we Europeans are not so constituted that we apply these methods correctly just like that. (Jung 1929)Attachment-detachment and non-attachment 5S Jung, it would seem, chose attachment ‘to self and to things and to persons’. The three patients I describe at some point in their lives chose to pursue a different path. In the choice of attachments there is however a price to pay for, as Eliot himself concluded: Who then devised the torment? Love. Love is the unfamiliar Name Behind the hands that wove ‘The intolerable shirt of flame Which human power cannot remove. We only live, only suspire Consumed by either fire or fire (T. S. Eliot ‘Little Gidding’) ACKNOWLEDGMENT The quotations from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets are reproduced by kind permission of Faber and Faber Limited. REFERENCES Bhagavad Gita (1962). Trans. Juan Mascar6. Harmondsworth. Pen- uin. Bowlby, J. (1978). Separation. Harmondsworth. Penguin. —— (1979). The Making and Breaking of Affectional Bonds. London. Tavistock. —— (1980). Loss. Harmondsworth. Penguin. Eliot, T. $. (1969) The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot. London. Faber. Freud, S. (1926) Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety. Standard Edition, 20. Jung, C. G. (1929) Alchemical Studies. 13,55. —— (1946) The Practice of Psycotherapy. 16,400. —— (1963) Memories, Dreams, Reflections. London. Collins/Routledge & Kegan Paul. Klein, M. (1946). ‘Notes on some schizoid mechanisms’. In Klein, M. et al. (1952) Developments in Psychoanalysis. London. Hogarth. Ledermann R. (1979). “The infantile roots of narcissistic personality disorders’. Journal of Analytical Psychology, 24,2,107. Patanjali (1969) How to know God — the Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali. Trans. Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood. New York. New American Library Mentor Books.