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The book starts in Chapter One with an exploration of attachment theory history and covers what social work readers might initially think of as familiar ground: Bowlby and Ainsworth. However, unlike many more typical formulations of the history of attachment theory, White and colleagues clearly show where some of the tensions and disagreements in the initial framings of attachment were. They note the limitations of the “Strange Situation” experiment (it was not random, staged, and the population studied was non-clinical), and emphasise how, from the beginning, there was a focus on parental behaviour (versus environment or even temperament of the child), particularly that of the mother. They end the chapter by noting that three key things made the theory ideally placed as a flexible tool for social work: an invocation of biology (appeal of the “natural”), key founders seeming impervious to critique, and being uniquely interdisciplinary—allowing adherents to pick and choose from separate disciplines to avoid critique.

Building from the previous chapter, the authors explain in Chapter Two how the relationship with social work came to be. Perhaps somewhat controversially, they suggest that the theory has come to function as a “myth”(p. 23)—not meaning that it is untrue—instead (drawing from Barthes) they suggest that it serves as a means of justification, a way of normalising and moralising. Indeed, recent work by Bjerre et al.(2021) evidenced the moralising function of attachment theory in social work case discussions where they observed that it had become less about using scientific concepts (although this is the surface-level justification) and …