Boarding school syndrome: reconsidered in social context and through the lens of attachment theory

Abstract

I argue the time has come to expand the now recognised clinical diagnosis of boarding school syndrome to take account of its invisible precursors in the avoidant attachment patterns of British upper-class culture. This elite, comprising less than 1% of the population, has sustained fee-paying boarding “public” schools, and is sustained by them, in a remarkably effective nexus of power and influence. I propose to call this avoidant culture with its severe affective limits and entitled assumptions, “British upper-class complex trauma condition”. Until we can recognise it and understand it as a form of group trauma, we will not be able to deal with its grave incapacity when it comes to empathy with the lives of others. Like Bowlby1, I advocate the abolition of early boarding as a key part of transforming the condition’s psychosocial limitations, which profoundly impact us all.