Attachment
Attachment theory is almost unique among psychoanalytic theories in bridging the gap between general psychology and clinical psychodynamic theory. A gulf exists to this day between theories of the mind rooted in empirical social science (largely psychological research), and clinical theories that focus on the significance of individual experience in determining life course, including psychopathology. In psychoanalysis, giving meaning to experience is seen as the primary explanation of behaviour as well as the royal road to its therapeutic change. Experimental psychology emphasises parsimony, insists on reliable observation, and abhors rhetoric and speculative theory-building. Yet attachment theory straddles this gulf.
*Bowlby was among the first to recognise that the human infant enters the world predisposed to participate in social interaction. Children have the propensity to form a number of attachment relationships in early life and there appears to be a hierarchy of major caregivers with a preferred principal attachment figure. Bowlby thought that disruption of the early caregiver-child relationship should be seen as a key precursor of mental disorder. His critical contribution was his unwavering focus on the infant's need for an unbroken (secure) early attachment to the caregiver.
Like classical psychoanalysis, Bowlby's attachment theory has a biological focus. He emphasised the survival value of attachment in enhancing safety through proximity to the caregiver in addition to feeding, learning about the environment and social interaction as well as protection from predators (the biological function of attachment behaviour). Attachment behaviours were seen as part of a behavioural system. This is key to understanding the earlier controversy between psychoanalysis and attachment theory. A behavioural system involves inherent motivation. It is not reducible toanother drive. This explains why feeding is not causally linked to attachment and why attachment
occurs to abusive caretakers.
Bowlby's formulations and those of object relations theorists therefore differ importantly. The child's goal is not the object, but initially a physical state (maintenance of a desired degree of proximity), which is later supplanted by the more psychological goal of a feeling of closeness to the caregiver. In the first volume of his Attachment and Loss trilogy Bowlby was unclear about how attachment behaviour functioned beyond the termination of the system once physical proximity was ensured. In the 1970s Mary Ainsworth's work helped to refine the attachment concept. She recognised that infants' responses to separation can be explained by their appraisal or evaluation of the mother's departure in the context of her expected behaviour. The disruptions occasioned by separation from the primary caregiver are moderated by an increasingly complex set of (unconscious) evaluative processes.
Bowlby addresses the critical role of appraisal in the third volume of his trilogy, where he introduces the concept of the internal working models. The internal working model is a repository of representations of past interactions with the caregiver that helps to determine the pattern of their interaction in the present and the infant's expectations of future interactions. The caregiver's availability is central to the child's internal working model. Bowlby also envisioned a complementary working model of the child's self. The key determining factor of this is how acceptable or unacceptable the child feels in the eye of the attachment figure. A child whose internal working model of the caregiver is focused around rejection is expected to evolve a complementary working model of the self as unlovable, unworthy and flawed. Although Bowlby does not say so explicitly, these models of the attachment figure and the self are transactional, interactive models representing self-other relationships.
Positing a representational system underpinning attachment permitted a far more sophisticated consideration of individual differences. Attachment could now be understood as secure or insecure. Secure attachment implies representational systems where the attachment figure is seen as accessible and responsive when needed. Anxious attachment implies a representational system where the responsiveness of the caregiver is not assumed and the child adopts strategies for circumventing the caregiver's perceived unresponsiveness. The anxious-avoidant strategy embodies the denial of the emotional tie to the caregiver while the anxious-resistant strategy hints at the need to amplify signals of distress in order to ensure that they will be heard. There is considerable empirical support for Bowlby's assumption that caregiver responsiveness was critical in determining the security of the attachment system.
In the late 70s Alan Sroufe and Everet Waters redefined the set goal of the attachment system as 'felt security' rather than physical distance regulation. Thus internal cues such as mood, illness or even fantasy could be seen as relevant to the child's response to separation as well as external events and the social environmental context.
This substantially extends the Bowlbian notion because the range of experiences that could contribute to felt security is in no way restricted to caregiver behaviour. Felt security as a concept extended the applicability of the concept of attachment from early childhood to older children and even adults. Sroufe re-conceptualised attachment theory in terms of affect regulation. Securely attached individuals, who have internalised the capacities for selfregulation are contrasted with those who precociously either down-regulate or up-regulate affect. Such individuals are classified as having ‘avoidant’ or ‘resistant’ attachment in accordance with their respective dismissal of or preoccupation with their attachment figures.
During the late 70s and 80s, attachment research was increasingly concerned with child maltreatment, physical and sexual abuse. The child's entire attachment behavioural system can potentially be undermined if the attachment figure is at once the signal of safety and of danger. When this happens the child's attachment is said to be disorganised. In such cases reappearance of the caregiver after separation is often marked by fear, freezing and disorientation in the infant. Childhood maltreatment accounts for some but not all attachment disorganisation observed in infancy. The potential reasons for the disorganisation of the attachment system have therefore been extended to include experiences which were more subtle but nevertheless deeply unsettling from an infant's point of view, such as moments of dissociation in the caregiver. A number of longitudinal investigations link infant disorganisation to later psychopathology. Research and theory on attachment disorganisation offers a more satisfactory theoretical link between early attachment experience and personality disturbance than has thus far been available and is therefore the cutting edge of current clinical attachment research.
Animal studies have revealed that the evolutionary value of staying close to and interacting with the mother goes beyond protection, providing the caregiver with an opportunity to shape both the developing physiology and the behaviour of the infant through their patterned interactions. This suggests that attachment is not an end in itself but a system adapted by evolution to fulfil key ontogenetic physiological and psychological tasks. The traditional attachment model is clearly circular: the response to separation is attributed to the disruption of a social bond, the existence of which is inferred from the presence of the separation response. More recent research suggests that what is lost in 'loss' is not the bond but the opportunity to develop a higher order regulatory mechanism for appraisal and reorganisation of mental contents. In this context attachment is conceptualised as a process that brings complex mental life into being from a multi-faceted and adaptable behavioural system. Some, but by no means all, of such mental function is unique to humans. The mechanism that generates these (the attachment relationship) has evolutionary continuity across non-human species.
Rapprochement has become possible between attachment theory and psychoanalysis because of a number of concurrent historical changes. Attachment theory has shifted its focus from infant behaviour and its determinants in the child's physical environment to broader concerns with internal representations in the infant and the parent, and has begun to recognise the limitations of a purely cognitive science approach in clinical work and a need for alternative theoretical frames of reference to enrich research and theory building of relevance to clinicians. Psychoanalysts have become more interested in systematic observation and empirical research. The theoretical hegemony that governed psychoanalysis in the United States (and to a lesser extent in Europe) has broken down, leading to more openness to the possibility of plurality in theory, where clinical usefulness and intellectual appeal are the primary criteria for the acceptability of new ideas.
- Ainsworth, M. D. S., Blehar, M. C., Waters, E. and Wall, S. (1978) Patterns of Attachment:APsychological Study of the Strange Situation. Hillsdale,NJ: Erlbaum.
- Bowlby, J. (1988) A Secure Base: Clinical Applications of Attachment Theory. London: Routledge.
- Main, M. and Morgan, H. (1996) 'Disorganization and disorientation in infant strange situation behaviour: phenotypic resemblance to dissociative states' in L. K. Michelson and W. J. Ray (eds) Handbook of Dissociation: Theoretical, Empirical, and Clinical Perspectives. New York: Plenum Press.
- Polan, H. J. and Hofer, M. (1999) 'Psychobiological origins of infant attachment and separation responses' in J. Cassidy and P. R. Shaver (eds) Handbook of Attachment: Theory, Research and Clinical Applications. New York: Guilford.
- Solomon, J. and George, C. (1999) Attachment Disorganization. New York: Guilford.
- Sroufe, L. A. (1996) Emotional Development: The Organization of Emotional Life in the Early Years. New York: Cambridge University Press.
P. F.