On being attached

Abstract

We often use the term ''attachment'' to describe our emotional connectedness to objects in the world. We become attached to our careers, to our homes, to certain ideas, and perhaps most importantly, to other people. Interestingly, despite its import and ubiquity in our everyday lives, the topic of attachment per se has been largely ignored in the philosophy literature. I address this lacuna by identifying (a type of) attachment as a rich ''mode of mattering'' that can help to inform certain aspects of agency and emotion. First, drawing on insights from Ancient stoicism and developmental and clinical psychology, I suggest that the relevant form of attachment involves a felt need for its object and a particular relationship between the object and the attached agent's sense of security. I then argue that these features serve to distinguish the attitude from the more philosophically familiar notion of caring. Finally, I show that recognizing this form of attachment as a distinct mode of mattering has important implications for understanding grief.

Responsibility without Blame for Addiction

“… 13 How precisely to characterise the ideal form of this relationship is a difficult question. One possibility is to draw on the distinction between care and attachment as clarified by Wonderly [ 45 ]: clinicians must care for patients without becoming attached to them; or, perhaps, by developing a form of partial or ‘quasi’ attachment only. For further discussion of the nature and efficacy of Therapeutic Communities, see Pearce and Pickard [ 46 ].…”

PHILOSOPHY AND THE GOOD LIFE IN THEZHUANGZI

“…The problem arises when we are preoccupied with the thought that it is our loss: that is, when we can see the death only in light of what we want or need. This frequently happens when we are attached to our loved ones in a self-indulgent way: that is, we value them as the basis for our sense of security in the world, so that we need them for our own sake, not theirs (Wonderly 2016). Interestingly, this Zhuangist diagnosis gains some support from recent psychological studies of grief and resilience, which suggest that most people are in fact quite adaptive to the death of their loved ones.…”

Mereological Composition in Analytic and Buddhist Perspective

“…This argument for the connection between soteriological safety and truth is not decisive. For example, one might reject the cognitive account of soteriological danger, locating the source of dangerous attachments in certain felt needs for security while permitting such needs to obtain in the absence of illusion and deception (see Wonderly 2016). Insofar as Buddhaghosa's account of truth entails that all truths are knowable, one also might infer, from Fitch's paradox, that Buddhaghosa's account of truth is incorrect (see Perrett 1999).…”