ABSTRACT
The tendency in Vicedo’s writings to assume uncomplicated continuity from attachment research from the mid-1950s to the present has been criticized by both historians and psychologists. In her paper on ‘Putting attachment in its place’, as well as in her other work that we have seen, Vicedo excludes mention of subsequent developments in attachment theory by Ainsworth’s students, or their students. In ‘Putting attachment in its place’, Vicedo argues that ‘contrary to what attachment theory considers normative, parents in many communities try to avoid attaching to their infants right away.’ Parental avoidance of emotional connection with their infant is certainly contrary to the normative picture of Child Care and the Growth of Love, and in the 1950s Bowlby sometimes, confusingly, used the term ‘attachment' to refer to what he would later distinguish as the caregiving system.
