Afterword: Cross-cultural Challenges to Attachment Theory

Abstract

When our colleagues and I (Morelli) wrote about the cultural nature of psychology’s most influential theory of relatedness in 2000, we did so in the hope of a rapprochement with theorists wedded to a more universalistic view of attachment (Rothbaum et al. 2000). We questioned the key tenets of sensitive parenting, secure base, and child competency and brought to bear what we knew about other community practices to make clear the ideological underpinnings of this theory—as others had done before us (e.g., Fiske et al. 1998; Harwood et al. 1995; LeVine and Miller 1990; Takahashi 1990). We spoke of the value of including communities with different traditions to learn what mattered to them about relationships to refine our thinking about attachment theory—not to dismantle it. We ended our essay noting:

Opening the door to human diversity could greatly enrich the understanding of the myriad ways in which human relationships take shape, go awry, and undergo repair in social contexts around the world. Expanding the research agenda in this way may, in fact, reveal what an intellectual treasure chest attachment theory truly is. (1102)