Kylo Ren (Ben Solo): The son who felt abandoned

Ben Solo was the son of Han Solo and Princess Leia, nephew of Luke Skywalker: the royalty of the galaxy. And yet he grew up feeling like a stranger in his own family —sent away to train, feared by his own uncle, unable to find his place—. From that wound of abandonment Kylo Ren was born, a young man who kills his father seeking, paradoxically, to belong to something. Attachment theory explains that tragedy.

// The theoryHaving parents is not enough

The attachment theory of John Bowlby holds that the secure emotional bond with caregivers is the foundation on which identity, trust and the capacity to belong are built. But Ben Solo adds a crucial nuance: the attachment wound does not depend only on the material absence of parents —his exist, and they are heroes—, but on the feeling of not belonging. Famous but absent parents, forever saving the galaxy; an uncle who, in an instant of fear, considered killing him; the sense of being a dangerous burden, not a beloved son. Bowlby would call it an insecure attachment: the child who never internalized a "secure base" and therefore grows up without the certainty of having a place in the world.

From there, Ben's drift toward Kylo Ren reads as a desperate search for a bond. Snoke, the villain who manipulates him, offers precisely what he lacked: attention, a purpose, the promise of belonging to something great. The cult of his grandfather Darth Vader is another form of the same thing — the need for a lineage, for a figure who accepts him and tells him who he is—. Even his most terrible act, killing Han Solo, is a twisted attempt to resolve the wound: to destroy the bond that hurt him in order to "free himself" and prove his loyalty to his new dark family. Attachment theory excuses none of this; it explains its emotional logic: a boy who never felt at home searching, in the worst possible place, for a home.

// The subjectThe adult trapped in the child's wound

What makes Kylo Ren such a rich case —and so different from the icy Sephiroth— is his permanent conflict: he is not a villain sure of himself, but a torn, unstable adult, trapped in the wound of the child who felt abandoned. His famous tantrum of slashing rooms to pieces is pure theater of the emotional dysregulation of insecure attachment: he does not know how to govern what he feels. And his empathy is still there (it is high, a 30), pulling him toward the light — that is why he hesitates, suffers, contradicts himself—. Kylo Ren is not a frozen heart, but a wounded one at war with itself. That is also why his story admits repair: unlike someone who never had a bond, Ben had one (a mother who never stopped loving him, the memory of his father), and that thread, however thin, is what finally brings him back. The attachment wound did not wholly condemn him — because, in some corner, there was love to return to.

// The crackThe parents' fault?

The risk of the attachment reading is to turn it into a judgment of the parents: "Han and Leia abandoned him, that is why he is evil." It is too simple. Millions of people with imperfect or absent parents do not kill anyone, and most children of broken families find other paths — insecure attachment is a risk factor, not a sentence—. Besides, Ben had agency: he chose, again and again, and his crimes are his own, not his parents'. The theory also runs the risk of over-psychologizing, ignoring Snoke's deliberate manipulation (an external factor, not internal) or the subject's own responsibility. The honest version does not say "his parents did it," but that a wound of belonging made him vulnerable to whoever knew how to exploit it — without removing from him the weight of what he did with that vulnerability.

The saga that George Lucas imagined in 1977 revolved around the fall and redemption of Anakin Skywalker; the sequel trilogy that begins in The Force Awakens (2015) inverts the mirror and places the grandson in the grandfather's position. Ben Solo does not inherit from Darth Vader genes of evil, but a myth: he idealizes the villain Anakin became and not the man who died saving his son. That is the heart of the tragedy — to venerate the mask without understanding the person—. Attachment theory illuminates why: a young man without a secure base clings to the only figure who promises him greatness and identity. To explain that idolatry is not to excuse it; it is to understand how a family legacy can be perverted into an alibi for one's own cruelty.

The fractured identity between Ben Solo and Kylo Ren is the axis that Adam Driver turned into flesh: an actor who plays the tremor, the voice that breaks, the mask that hides less than it reveals. That new name —Kylo Ren— is, literally, an attempt to kill the child who felt abandoned by Han Solo and Leia Organa and to be reborn as someone who does belong. Bowlby would say that whoever did not internalize a secure bond also does not consolidate a stable self; hence the split. Ben does not cease to exist under the hood: he struggles, sabotages, pulls toward the light. The saga makes visible what the clinic describes in the abstract — that the dysregulation of insecure attachment can split a person into two, neither of whom feels wholly at home.

And there is youth radicalization, the most disturbing thread for criminology. Snoke and the First Order do not recruit Ben with doctrine, but with what no family of heroes knew how to give him: constant attention, a purpose and the sense of mattering. It is the real pattern studied by those who research cults and extremisms — they recruit the uprooted, not fanatics—, and that is why the Star Wars portrait resonates beyond fiction. The manipulator occupies the void left by broken attachment and fills it with poisoned belonging. But the saga refuses determinism: the same young man who murders his father to "free himself" keeps a thread of true bond, and that thread returns him to being Ben. Understanding the door through which radicalization entered erases not a single crime he committed in crossing it.