So today I want to talk about attachment, why we need attachment to other people. And I'm going to be

quoting the book, Hold Me Tight, Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love. And let me take you back to

the 1700s of all places to start. Clues to Love's true purpose, according to Sue Johnson,

have been circulating for a long time.

And we're talking back in 1760. There was a Spanish bishop writing to his superiors in Rome,

and he noted that children in what he called foundling homes, though they were sheltered and they were fed, that they regularly died from sadness. So fast forward to the 1930s and the 1940s in the halls of American hospitals.

Orphan children deprived only of touch and emotional contact were dying in droves. Psychiatrists also

began identifying children who were physically healthy, but who seemed indifferent or calloused

or unable to relate to others. And David Levy, reporting his observations in a 1937 article in the American

Journal of Psychiatry, attributed such youngsters' behavior to what he called emotional

starvation. Now, 1940s, American analyst Renee Spitz coined the term failure to thrive for children

separated from their parents and caught in this debilitating grief.

And Sue Johnson goes on to talk about that it remained there for John Bolby. And he was a British

psychiatrist, and it was his job then. He felt like to figure out exactly what was going on.

And she says, let me be honest as a psychologist and a human being, she said, if I had to give an award

for the single best set of ideas anybody ever had, Sue Johnson says she would give it to John Bolby,

hands down over Freud or anybody else in the business of understanding people. Because she said he

grabbed the threads of observations and reports and wove them into this coherent and masterful

theory of attachment.

So today we're going to get into a little bit of what that theory of attachment is.

We're going to touch a little bit on the history.

We're going to go a little bit more into Bulby.

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