Attachment Theory
The Foundations of Attachment Theory
John Bowlby (1907-1990) the founder of attachment theory, was a British psychoanalyst and child psychiatrist, working clinically not only with individuals in analysis, but also families and children. For Bowlby, the context in which the child develops is crucially important. The quality of the attachment bond established between the significant caretaker and child is a key factor in influencing mental health and determining emotional disturbance and psychopathology later in life. Open not only to psychoanalysis, but also to developmental psychology, evolutionary thinking, biology, ethology, cybernetics and information theory, Bowlby developed an understanding of attachment that in particular ways went beyond Freud´s original psychoanalytic theory. Bowlby worked in association with Mary Ainsworth’s (1913-1999) who studied attachment and child development in the context of naturalistic observations and laboratory experiments. Attachment theory is a basic framework for theoretical developments, clinical observations and empirical research.
Building Attachment: A Biological & Evolutionary Process
The basis of attachment is biological and evolutionary. The infant cries and this notifies the caretaker to respond both physically and emotionally. Optimally, the key caretaker ensures proximity with the infant and protects the newborn from adverse environmental circumstances. Attachment develops a complex bio-psycho-interactional perspective. Parental proximity and sensitive responsiveness are fundamental conditions that regulate the child emotionally and foster an inner sense of safety. Containing the infant’s distress and need for comfort, involves this ‘sensitive responsiveness’ (coined by Ainsworth) and what later developmental researchers refer to as ‘attunement’, affectively tuning into not only the baby’s physiological needs but also the subtlety of feeling states the baby experiences. With repeated optimal experiences, over time, the infant represents the experience and forms an ‘internal working model’ of their experience of the attachment figure as secure and their sense of themselves in relation to this figure. This is the basis of secure attachment, a capacity of selfhood validated by the other, an ‘all abiding confidence” and resilience as a capacity to effectively deal with adversity.
Security of Attachment & Separation
Secure attachment inevitably involves separation. Secure attachment gives the infant a safe platform to explore the environment and play for periods away from the parent, assured from within that when there is distress the parent will be readily available, setting the ground for a sense of personal autonomy and belief in future relationships. However, when the relationship goes wrong, due to the parents’ adverse attachment histories and trauma, insecure attachment develops and this can take different forms or patterns, according the characteristics of the parent-child interaction.
Attachment: A Life-long Process, not a Category
Although the early years are highly influential, attachment is not about determination or clear-cut predictions into the future. As attachment characterises all relationships, later relationships can influence earlier ones throughout the life cycle. Attachment theory is essential to understand psycho-social phenomena in later life, including reactions to loss and bereavement. It is also the case that we have multiple internal working models and these are formed in the course of experiences with other attachments figures (which are organised according to a hierarchical order). Increasingly, emphasis has been placed on the power of intergenerational transmission. More notorious where there has been relational trauma, when the same person who is supposed to regulate the child emotionally is the person who acts in a deregulatory manner, in such cases unprocessed trauma is passed down to future generations.
Contemporary Attachment Theory: From Trauma to Reflective Dialogue
Contemporary thinking in attachment theory (see for instance, Fonagy &Target, 1997; Marrone & Diamond, 2003) emphasizes not just the occurrence of difficult attachment traumas in early life in determining attachment security, but the particular ways in which we learned to deal with those experiences. The focus has shifted beyond the attachment-traumatic events, to the strategies we developed to seek safety in their wake, the methods available to us to enable optimal proximity to the caregiver, and the effectiveness of those strategies in managing the painful emotions. In other words, it is not just a matter of an adverse attachment history that must be considered, it is also how those experiences were processed emotionally and reflectively.
Beyond Psychological Health
Lastly, and most pertinently, attachment effects our entire being. It is not only mental health that is at stake but also physical health, our social and political behaviour, our parenting skills and a whole range of psycho-somatic disorders, which are all directly related to our attachment history. This point of view is supported by neurobiological studies. Attachment theory and research can thus be applied to general psychiatry, medicine, various forms of psychotherapy, sociology, education, social work, social policies and mental health promotion.
Fonagy, P & Target, M (1997) Attachment and reflective function: Their role in self-organization, in Development and Psychopathology 9(4):679-700
Diamond, N & Marrone, M (2003) Attachment and Intersubjectivity Whurrs Publishers
