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another case in point. In April 2000, a ten-year-old girl named Candace Newmaker began treatment for something called attachment disorder (AD). Candace’s adoptive mother of four years, Jeane Newmaker, was having trouble handling what she considered to be Candace’s disciplinary problems. When Jeane sought help from a therapist affiliated with the so-called Association for Treatment and Training in the Attachment of Children,34 she was told Candace needed attachment therapy (AT), based on the theory that if a normal attachment is not formed during the critical first two years, then reattachment can be done later. This is a little like arguing that if imprinting in a baby duckling does not happen in the early critical period it can be done at a later time (it can’t).

According to the theory behind AT, in order for this later attachment process to be successful, the child must first be subjected to physical “confrontation” and “restraint” in order to release supposedly repressed abandonment anger. The process repeats for as long as is necessary—hours, days, even weeks—until the child is physically exhausted and emotionally reduced to an “infantile” state. Then the parents cradle, rock, and bottle-feed the child, implementing a “reattachment.” This would be like taking a full-grown duck and attempting to reduce it back to its duckling stage through physical and emotional constraints, and then seeing if it will attach to its mother. That’s the theory anyway. The practice resulted in something rather different … and deadly.

Candace was taken to Evergreen, Colorado, where she was treated by Connell Watkins, a nationally prominent attachment therapist and past clinical director for the Attachment Center at Evergreen, along with her associate Julie Ponder, a recently licensed family counselor from California. The treatment was conducted in Watkins’s home and videotaped. According to trial transcripts, Watkins and Ponder conducted more than four days of “holding therapies,” in which they grabbed or covered Candace’s face 138 times, shook or bounced her head 392 times, and shouted into her face 133 times. When this failed to break her, they put the tiny sixty-eight-pound Candace inside a flannel sheet and covered her with sofa pillows, while several adults (with a combined weight of nearly seven hundred pounds) lay on top of her so that she could be “reborn.” Ponder told Candace that she was “a teeny little baby” in the womb, commanding her to “come out head first” and “push with your feet.” In response, Candace screamed, “I can’t breathe, I can’t do it! Somebody’s on top of me. I want to die now! Please! Air!”

According to AT theory, Candace’s reaction was a sign of her emotional resistance; she needed more confrontation to reach the rage necessary to “break through” the wall and achieve emotional healing. Putting theory into practice, Ponder admonished her: “You’re gonna die.” Candace begged, “Please, please, I can’t breathe.” Ponder instructed the others to “press more on top,” on the premise that AD children exaggerate their distress. Candace vomited, then cried “I gotta poop.” Her mother entreated, “I know it’s hard but I’m waiting for you.”

After forty minutes of this torture Candace went silent. Ponder rebuked her “Quitter, quitter!” Someone joked about performing a C-section, while Ponder patted a dog that meandered by. After thirty more minutes of silence, Watkins sarcastically remarked, “Let’s look at this twerp and see what’s going on—is there a kid in there somewhere? There you are lying in your own vomit—aren’t you tired?”

Candace Newmaker was not tired; she was dead. “This ten-year-old child died of cerebral edema and herniation caused by hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy,” the autopsy report clinically stated. The proximate cause of Candace’s death was suffocation, and her therapists received the minimum sentence of sixteen years for “reckless child abuse resulting in death.” The ultimate cause was pseudoscientific quackery masquerading as psychological science. In their penetrating analysis of the case, Attachment