Amir Levine and Rachel Heller: Attached, the book that put attachment on everyone’s lips

Who are Amir Levine and Rachel Heller?

Amir Levine is a psychiatrist and neuroscientist. He did his residency in adult and child psychiatry at Columbia University in New York, where he teaches clinical psychiatry, and then specialized in molecular neuroscience. Rachel Heller is a psychologist trained in social psychology at Columbia, who sees couples and families in private practice. Neither of them is an attachment researcher: they are go-betweens, and that is both the strength and the limit of their book.

“Attached” came out in the United States in 2010. Its subtitle promises a new science of adult attachment to help you find and keep love. The book became a phenomenon: several million copies sold and more than forty languages, according to its publisher. In French, it was published in 2015 by Ixelles as “Êtes-vous faits l’un pour l’autre ? Les clés de l’attachement,” and a new translation, “Attaché,” is being published by Guy Trédaniel in 2026.

Why a page on a popular book in a section devoted to research? Because it is how most people discover their attachment style, and because the vocabulary it created is everywhere, including in the MyLoveLab program. So it helps to know what it translates faithfully, what it adds and what it simplifies.

The central idea

The book starts from a simple thesis: your attachment style is the best predictor of how you will experience a relationship, better than shared tastes or personality. Levine and Heller describe three styles, drawing on the model of Hazan and Shaver: the anxious style, which craves closeness and worries about the other person’s love; the avoidant style, which sees intimacy as a threat to independence; and the secure style, comfortable with closeness, warm and reliable.

Their second thesis goes against the grain of the surrounding culture: needing someone is not an emotional dependency to be fixed, it is how a healthy adult normally works. They call it the dependency paradox and draw a practical moral from it: know your style, recognize the other person’s, state your needs clearly, and choose someone who can meet them.

The key concepts

Protest behavior

The term comes from Bowlby: a child who is separated protests. Levine and Heller apply it to anxious adults whose alarm system has gone off. Calling or texting in a burst, counting the minutes before replying so as not to “seem too available,” sulking, threatening to leave, making the other person jealous, acting cold so they will come after you. The authors’ reading is charitable, and accurate: these are not tantrums, they are attempts to restore contact by means that damage it. MyLoveLab calls them love questions asked the wrong way.

Deactivating strategies

On the avoidant side, the book takes the concept from Mikulincer and Shaver and makes it concrete. Endlessly rethinking an idealized ex, focusing on the other person’s flaws right after a close moment, avoiding saying “I love you,” keeping secrets for no reason, flirting elsewhere, choosing people who are unavailable. All ways of keeping the bond at a safe distance. Here again, the reading is useful: these behaviors don’t prove an absence of attachment, they show an attachment that protects itself.

The anxious-avoidant trap

This is the book’s most-read chapter. Levine and Heller argue that anxious and avoidant people attract each other and confirm each other’s beliefs: one person’s protest triggers the other’s withdrawal, which sets off more protest, and so on. The roller coaster that results is often mistaken for passion. Clinical research describes the same mechanism as the pursue-withdraw cycle, which is the heart of Sue Johnson’s work. What the book adds is a memorable name and a warning, sometimes excessive, which we come back to below.

The dependency paradox

The more you can count on someone, the more capable of autonomy you become. The book draws on research on the adult secure base, and cites among others the experiment in which holding your partner’s hand measurably calms the brain’s response to a threat. Its practical conclusion reverses the usual advice: instead of working to need the other person less, work to make sure that need gets reliable responses.

Effective communication

The book’s last tool is the simplest. State your needs directly, early and without apologizing: “I need to know where we stand,” “I need an evening to myself this week.” The authors add a valuable idea: how the other person responds to a clear request is the best test of what they can give. Someone who mocks, dodges or punishes an honest request teaches you more in one sentence than three months of guessing games.

What the research says

Attached contains no original study. Its scientific value lies in how faithfully it translates other people’s work. Here is what its main claims rest on, and what holds up.

• The styles and how common they are. The book says that a little over half of people are secure, about 20% anxious, about 25% avoidant, and 3 to 5% both anxious and avoidant. These rough figures come from Hazan and Shaver’s 1987 study (56%, 19%, 25% among 620 people) and the studies that followed; they vary from one sample to the next.
• Protest and deactivation. Both strategies are well documented in Mikulincer and Shaver’s review, including in the lab: avoidant deactivation can be measured, and it gives way when people are under mental load.
• The adult secure base. The hand-holding experiment, published in 2006, shows under brain imaging that a partner’s touch reduces the brain’s response to threat. A 2007 study on the dependency paradox also shows that a partner who accepts being depended on helps the other person become more autonomous over time.
• The anxious-avoidant trap. That the two styles combine into a self-sustaining cycle is well established, it is the pursue-withdraw cycle of emotionally focused therapy. Whether anxious and avoidant people attract each other more than chance would predict is more debated.

What the research does not say: that the book’s advice, taken as a method, has been tested. No study has measured the effect of reading Attached on the quality of a relationship. It is an honest popularization, not a validated program.

Limits and criticisms

The first simplification is the number of styles. The book keeps three and reduces the fourth, disorganized or fearful, to a rare combination mentioned in passing. It thinks in categories where the research, since 1998, measures two continuous axes: most people are neither “anxious” nor “avoidant,” they sit somewhere in the middle. The questionnaire in the book is also not a validated scale like the ECR-R.

The second criticism concerns how avoidant people are treated. The book is noticeably gentler with anxious people, and it essentially advises an anxious person to avoid avoidant ones. That is dating advice, not couples advice: for two people who are already together, it closes the door instead of showing the way out of the cycle, which clinical research knows well. The book also tends to confuse what a person prefers with what they do, and it cites few sources: the figure of 50% secure people, for example, arrives without a reference.

Finally, the book says styles can change, but its whole practical slant pushes you to treat them as fixed: identify, sort, choose. It is the use the book has produced in the culture that is the problem more than the book itself: “he’s avoidant” has become a verdict you pass on someone else. MyLoveLab takes the opposite position: a style is a magnifying glass, not a stamp, and it is never pronounced out loud about someone else.

How MyLoveLab uses it

The program for the Attachment and security dimension owes part of its concrete vocabulary to Attached: protest behavior and the fire extinguisher in level 2, the two-volume dictionary in level 3, the spotlight on the anxious-avoidant trap in level 4. But it keeps the four styles and the two axes from the research, it measures your style from concrete situations inspired by the ECR-R scale, and it works on getting out of the cycle rather than sorting partners. For the cycle itself, read the anxious-avoidant couple and the page on Sue Johnson, whose therapy has shown how two people get out of it together.

Further reading

• Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find, and Keep, Love (in French: Êtes-vous faits l’un pour l’autre ? Les clés de l’attachement (Ixelles, 2015) ; nouvelle traduction : Attaché (Guy Trédaniel, 2026)) · Book, 2010The book itself: quick to read, very concrete, best taken with the caveats on this page.
• Romantic love conceptualized as an attachment process · Article, 1987By Hazan and Shaver: the paper Attached takes its three styles and their proportions from.
• Attachment in Adulthood: Structure, Dynamics, and Change · Book, 2007By Mikulincer and Shaver: the scientific source for protest and deactivating strategies, to go further than the book.
• Hold Me Tight (in French: Serre-moi fort) · Book, 2008By Sue Johnson: the essential companion, because it shows how a couple gets out of the anxious-avoidant cycle instead of avoiding it.

Frequently asked questions

References

1. Levine, A. & Heller, R. (2010). Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find, and Keep, Love. TarcherPerigee.
2. Levine, A. & Heller, R. (2015). Êtes-vous faits l’un pour l’autre ? Les clés de l’attachement. Ixelles.
3. Hazan, C. & Shaver, P. (1987). Romantic love conceptualized as an attachment process. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52(3), 511-524.
4. Mikulincer, M. & Shaver, P. R. (2007). Attachment in Adulthood: Structure, Dynamics, and Change. Guilford.
5. Coan, J. A., Schaefer, H. S. & Davidson, R. J. (2006). Lending a hand: Social regulation of the neural response to threat. Psychological Science, 17(12), 1032-1039.
6. Feeney, B. C. (2007). The dependency paradox in close relationships: Accepting dependence promotes independence. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92(2), 268-285.
7. Fraley, R. C., Waller, N. G. & Brennan, K. A. (2000). An item response theory analysis of self-report measures of adult attachment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78(2), 350-365.
8. Johnson, S. M. (2008). Hold Me Tight. Little, Brown.

See the full bibliography