Essential elements of love, personhood and attachment: From metaphysics to psychological theory and psychotherapy

Abstract

Attachment theory has been extensively researched in empirical psychology since the initial publication of John Bowlby's (1969) three-volume work on this phenomenon. The field of psychotherapy, however, has yet to tap sufficiently into this resource, as evidenced in the relative dearth of treatment modalities targeting attachment disorders directly. Concurrently, psychology as a field has had difficulties reconciling the definition of the human person as an individual self to that of a relational being (Sollod, Wilson, &&& Monte, 2009). This lack of unification has less to do with discrepant empirical findings and more with the unanswered need for a holistic theory of the personhood. Given this state of affairs, this dissertation defends a philosophical and theological basis of the nature of persons as gifts. This basis both accounts for persons as individual selves and relational beings, as well as pinpoints the metaphysical foundation for attachment disorders. In the process, we shall discover the mechanisms at work in securing “earned security” through the use of a mainstream attachment therapy (Wallin, 2007) which works with the “unthought known.” The reason for choosing this particular modality arises from its flexibility in incorporating both varying techniques as well as granting room for utilising the person of the therapist as a tool of sorts. From there, this dissertation proceeds to postulate an improvement on attachment therapies in general through the use of the posture of caritas—a posture that derives from the nature of person as defended here.