Attention seeking is a superficial reading of what writers do (sorry for the terrible pun). My 5 year old niece is an attention seeker, and yet I find myself supremely uninterested in her whining for the most part. Haruki Murakami (for example, since he's one of my fav's), may or may not be an attention seeker, but he can hold my interest for hours.

I think the main thing that writers do is to reflect on the world as they see it, and then to put their thoughts out there in order to illicit response from their readers. I'm not sure I would qualify that as attention seeking, so to speak. I do professional science writing, and although I do love it when people contact me with questions about my work, I wouldn't say that my motivation is to get attention specifically. But then, science isn't typically what we're talking about when we talk about writers.

I've done a tiny bit of blog writing, and I can say that my main motivation was to make a public critique of what I thought were misconceptions about the way the mind and brain work. Again, loved getting feedback and discussing the work, but wouldn't say that I was attention seeking.

On Hubski, I often write long comments that I hope get discussions started, and I'm usually disappointed when I don't receive any replies to a controversial comment, as I like being challenged by other educated people. In some sense, i suppose that is attention seeking, since I really do want people to notice, to agree or disagree, and to tell me why.

If one's primary motivation for writing is personal therapy, then I suppose finding a spouse to confide in probably would make one less prolific. However, I think writers write for many reasons, among them personal growth, making a contribution to the world's body of knowledge (or art), affecting change, etc. On the spectrum of artists, the writers I've known rank well above pretty much every other group in the humility category.