On Attachment

The View from Developmental Psychology

Ian Rory Owen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781782204527
• eBook ISBN: 9780429916755
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Attachment theory occupies an integrative position between psychodynamic therapy and various perspectives within empirical psychology. Since therapy began, its way of thinking has been to interpret mental processes in relation to meaningful psychological objects between children and parents, partners, friends, and within individual therapy. This volume summarises the research literature relating to attachment theory in developmental psychology in order to clarify conclusions that support practice. Part 1 considers the received wisdom about attachment, and summarises the literature and what it means for understanding relationships and defences as part of development. Part 2 considers attachment in relation to emotional regulations, while part 3 applies the clarified understanding of attachment processes to inform assessment and therapy, and more broadly, mental health work in general. The ideas of Sigmund Freud and John Bowlby are used to reinvigorate psychodynamic practice.

Part I
The Received Wisdom about Attachment

Introduction to Part I

Attachment theory spans a wide range of phenomena concerning seeking care and providing it. On the positive side, there are experiences of love, connection, and belonging, plus the basic ability to trust and personally feel worthy of, and eager for, contact with others. On the negative side, there are the experiences of worry about being dependent on others, compulsive self-reliance, and a confused, uncertain approach to and fear of intimacy. Among mental health professionals, there is the expectation that attachment theory can deliver clear answers and provide direction. However, attachment theory is the interpretation of empirical data and replicated findings. If the perspective for interpreting the data is inaccurate with respect to what the phenomena actually are, there will be disarray in the research base. Consequently, inaccurate understanding would be taken to research and practice. If this were the case, practice and research would be rendered incoherent. In order to prevent such dis-coordination in the research base and its applications, this work aims to unite researchers and practitioners around a meaningful formulation of the key aspects of attachment as readily observable occurrences.

The history of psychotherapy has at its centre the postulating of mental processes in relation to their objects of psychological sense, which makes it important to maintain a focus on formulation as the contemporary version of interpretation in Freud’s sense (Alexander, 1963; Breuer & Freud, 1895d; French, 1933; Freud, 1894a, 1911b, 1915e, 1923b, 1926d). This first part defines attachment processes in such a way that psychological explanations can be made about attachment phenomena. Although the phenomena of attachment in children and adults are different, the hypothesis proposed is that definitive forms of mental processes are shared across the lifespan. A theme that ties these parts together considers the conditions of possibility for understanding and deciding between various aspects of attachment before working with persons in distress. Several brands of therapy believe that attachment theory has explanatory worth for understanding events in love, relationships with intimates, friendship, and for understanding the influence of parenting and health behaviour.

This first part makes definitions about attachment in relation to the qualitative and theoretical necessity of understanding attachment processes between people across the lifespan, regardless of the specific types of relationship between the persons involved. Chapters One to Three below set the scene for making a basic understanding of attachment in such a way that variability in strength, stability across time, and flexibility between their sorts is included. Because the first three chapters extend the standard interpretation of the Bowlby-Ainsworth model of attachment to focus on interactions between self and other, the first distinction to argue for is an emphasis on understanding attachment as psychological, to mentalise it and make it clear what it stands for, and not to get side tracked into details of the naturalistic approaches, even though these are popular perspectives. There are approaches to attachment that emphasise neuroscientific, evolutionary, and other aspects of what it is to be a person in a social world, but the first case to be made is for approaching attachment as a psychological process, because the study of mental processes between people requires its own type of explanation.

CHAPTER ONE
Attachment phenomena and their background

This chapter explains the issues that surround attachment theory. Attachment theory contemporarily comprises various schools of thought. Attachment theory is a map of relating in everyday life and caring relationships of all kinds. This chapter provides an overview of attachment in the context of child and adult development for understanding how the patterns begun in childhood continue into adult circumstances, where they might be limiting or inappropriate for a variety of reasons. Attachment is one part of human development, so below sections sketch the background of child development. The purpose of the chapter is to prepare the ground for the definitions of the patterns and processes of the following chapter. Below, there is a deepening of attention to the detail of how consciousness defends itself against the consequences of suboptimal care provision and creates its own solutions to psychological meanings of distress. It contributes to keeping clients in mind, in empathising, and understanding the pushes and pulls in any relationship between two or more people. According to the different roles of care-givers and receivers involved, there are specifically different sorts of provision and receipt. Through understanding the secure base phenomenon of the secure process, the key aspects for understanding attachment theory are explained.

Introduction to the psychology of attachment

The psychology of attachment is a complex area with many different perspectives vying for expression. Attachment is a complex set of interlocking awarenesses between self and other comprised of a number of contributing factors (Cassidy & Shaver, 1999, 2008). Attachment is ripe for a process interpretation because it is primarily psychosocial and refers to a number of psychological objects that are recognisable by common sense. Not just in infancy and childhood but throughout adulthood too, attachment phenomena are evident. Attachment as a felt experience begins with the first context of early childcare (DeWolff & van IJzendoorn, 1997; Goldsmith & Alansky, 1987). Attachment research shows that the quality and quantity of care creates long-lasting semi-permanent influences for adults in terms of how they relate with others and how, as individuals, they manage their emotions. Attachment patterns in childhood and adulthood processes are identified against the background of each other, comparatively. Attachment is socially learned and plays a bridging role in development across the lifespan. Not only does the receipt of sufficient care for infants promote their potential for later full bloom, the effects of such care have an ongoing semi-permanent effect on the mental and physical well-being of adults. At any later point in the lifespan, the type of care first received creates tendencies about how to relate to others in times of distress and relaxation. When under stress, there is variation in the responses that individuals make, not according to their intelligence or chronological age but according to the influences acquired much earlier. This learning varies according to the cumulative effect of the semi-permanent attachment processes that operate when adults are stressed.

Before explaining what attachment theory shows, a note on empirical methodology is required. This study does not make an in-depth appraisal of empirical methods and psychometrics to support confidence in some methodologies and expose the weaknesses of others. However, the original focus on attachment, between 1944 and 1987 approximately, was achieved by developmental psychologists who used observational experimental formats and rated phenomena between children and their adult carers. Since the 1980s, social psychologists began to explore attachment phenomena in adults with methodologies such as Experiences in Close Relationships (ECR) a self-report questionnaire that asks general questions rather than about specific attachment relationships of the participants (Brennan, Clark, & Shaver, 1998, pp. 69–70; Hazan & Shaver, 1987). However, ECR does not correlate with findings from either the SSP or the AAI (De Haas, Bakermans-Kranenburg, & van IJzendoorn, 1994).

Developmental psychologists also produced the AAI and versions of it such as the Current Relationship Inventory (CRI), a modified version of the AAI that enquires about a current relationship with a long-term partner, and these do correlate with SSP (Crowell & Owens, 1996). A newer version of Experiences in Close Relationships, Experiences in Close Relationships Revised (ECR-R), does not investigate specific attachment relationship either—only relationships in general (Fraley, Waller, & Brennan, 2000). So, the self-report measures of the social psychology of attachment do not correlate with AAI and SSP cannot be considered because ECR measures different phenomena altogether, namely generalised beliefs and expectations; not partner-specific ones. What this means is that the findings from the two different sorts of measures cannot be mixed. To be strict, it means that ECR and social psychology findings that do not correlate with SSP, and home observation, and are not about specific attachments should not be called attachment.

A word of caution needs to be stated about the forms of research design. The general readership does not realise that ECR and ECR-R do not tally with SSP and AAI and assess different phenomena. The empirical approach by social and personality psychologists may use priming experiments and self-rating questionnaires, but if the enquiry is not about specific attachment relationships between adults then the conclusions made are not about attachment. Everett Waters explains that when it comes to understanding adult attachment the “limitations are that there is relatively little research on whether a person establishes similar attachment with different people over time. The alternative is that the type that sets up in close adult relationships is greatly influenced by the characteristics of the partner. Thus one does not necessarily have a series of very similarly organised relationships when going from one primary partner to the next: no doubt, the inherent longitudinal nature of this question explains the lack of data” (personal communication, 2016).

The secure base phenomena are well-proven in children and developmental psychology has shown that the AAI correlates with SSP findings. However, there are then epistemological difficulties in showing how attachment appears for adults. Accordingly, quality assurance of the methods and manners of interpreting is demanded in order to ensure that all involved are facing in the same direction and involved in the same project. The remedy, described below, is to be clear about attachment phenomena for children and adults in different contexts. Attachment theory proceeds with caution and draws conclusions from cross-referenced and validated sources before applying empirical findings (Waters & Beauchaine, 2003).

Because attachment theory is a discourse drawn from developmental psychology, more of the context needs to be considered before passively accepting conclusions from different procedures. Like has to be compared with like, and experiments need to be replicated. This means that the same experiment that was carried out by one research team, when carried out by another, should show the same results within an acceptable band of error for the conclusions to have credibility. What dominates the understanding of adult attachment is the well-proven format of the AAI, a standardised interview procedure to investigate attachment memories and verbal accounts in adults (although other formats are available). Moreover, it is interesting to consider what is motivational for the four different attachment teleologies. A metaanalysis of American mothers who were given the AAI found that fifty-six per cent had the secure process, nine per cent the anxious process, sixteen per cent the avoidant, and eighteen per cent were disorganised (Bakermans-Kranenburg & van IJzendoorn, 2009). Each process works to deal with the emotional-relational territory in which it lives and in which it experiences any new occurrence. Yet because what are being discussed are semi-permanent processes, observable across varied relational contexts, each IWM control setting of the attachment thermostat produces a self-maintaining set of habits, beliefs, and conditioning, influenced by past and current interactions. In relation to the IWMs that a person has, and the quality of the connection that arises, Bowlby defined what could be called the automatic primary process of making sense and the emotions involved, as follows:

Both the nature of the representational models a person builds of his attachment figures and also the form in which his attachment behaviour becomes organized are regarded in this work as being the results of learning experiences that start during the first year of life and are repeated almost daily throughout childhood and adolescence. On the analogy of a physical skill that has been acquired in the same kind of way, both the cognitive and the action components of attachment are thought to become so engrained (in technical terms overlearned) that they come to operate automatically and outside awareness.

… the disadvantage [is] that, once cognition and action have been automated, they are not readily accessible to conscious processing and so are difficult to change.

(Bowlby, 1980, p. 55)

Attachment is due to unconscious processes of the connections between the many forms of mental process. Attachment is engrained in that it consists of lived experiences of the habits that are made and yet there is scope for change. Attachment is semi-permanent across the lifespan and shows change yet has inertia to change (Ammaniti, van IJzendoorn, Speranza, & Tambelli, 2000; Crowell, Treboux, & Waters, 2002; Crowell & Waters, 2005; Thompson, 2000; van IJzendoorn & Bakermans-Kranenburg, 2014). The view that Bowlby held was that there could be ways of detecting the accuracy between a map and life’s territory, so to update the map by influential relationships and experiences (Bowlby, 1969, pp. 82–83; 1988, p. 130). Yet the type of conditioning is open to enquiry: it is not the sort modelled by behavioural theory’s classical and operant conditioning because the strength of the bond can both increase and decrease according to the meaning of the events happening and the attachment tendencies of others (Waters, Weinfield, & Hamilton, 2000). Attachment is meaningfully motivated and operates according to the understanding that is achieved by the participants. Consequently, observable behaviours are considered meaningful motivational sequences and wholes of sense that have a form that can be interpreted according to how the processes compare with each other.

Even the smallest meaningful units have a beginning, middle, and end, and exist within greater temporal contexts of motivated and meaningful behaviour. Such processes around the self operate in different ways and have their distinctive forms and functions. The four processes are continua in their strength and frequency of occurrence, yet exhibit persistent motivations to act in ways that are born in infancy and have similar psychodynamic motivations that run throughout adulthood. Yet what happens in any relationship, minute to minute, is variable across the lifespan and differs between relationships and contexts. In babies the “instinctual responses” (Bowlby, 1958, p. 362) of sucking, clinging, visual following, crying, and smiling are observable patterns of interactions with carers that have the ultimate function of “safeguarding the individual and mediating reproduction” (Bowlby, 1958, p. 362). There is an evolutionary aspect of attachment in infancy that is linked to how attachment shapes the relationships in adults. Care-seekers can experience a secure base when anxious or needing comfort and the type of response provided forms the attachment pattern of the recipient. The influence is so powerful that the child pattern can remain stable for the first twenty years of life and may produce similar attachment processes throughout later life—for better or worse (Waters, Hamilton, & Weinfield, 2000; Waters, Merrick, Treboux, Crowell, & Albersheim, 2000).

Attachment conclusions refer to the set of phenomena that are common to intimate relationships. However, rather than there being one consensus on attachment theory, there are a number of perspectives. Some emphasise attachment as biological, a part of personality, or as social psychology, related to culturally acquired childcare practices, or emphasise the neuroscientific and physically developmental aspects (Insel & Young, 2001). Sroufe and Waters (1977) argued that attachment is an intervening variable or organisational construct in human development that is supportive of the normative aspects of social learning, and the cognitive-affective aspects of intimacy. It is also possible within the same conversation, or within the same relationship over a series of meetings, to experience different forces of attraction and repulsion leading to the inter-relation of the secure, anxious and avoidant processes (Kobak, Cole, Ferenz-Gillies, Fleming, & Gamble, 1993). For others, and particularly those who overuse the anxious process, there are transient phenomena that change according to the impressions gained of the intentions of others with respect to self.

The phenomenon called the secure base exists between adults too. There are attachment phenomena of the two insecure suboptimal types where the secure base is absent. The fourth categorisation of disorganised attachment is a mixture of the two insecure sorts. The problem to be solved is that if attachment phenomena are unrecognisable in the clinical situation, then theory concerning them cannot be used to understand the public nor facilitate their abilities to use the therapeutic relationship, the medium through which any health care is supplied. What is of crucial importance in attachment theorising is citing conscious evidence and stating how it has been interpreted.

A very brief history of attachment

The birth of attachment theory was John Bowlby’s work at the London Child Guidance Clinic where he began studying the after-effects of disruption and distress on children during the Second World War. He noted a number of recurring relational patterns that differ comparatively (Bowlby, 1944). Since then, the research literature has burgeoned. What attachment really means is the study of love and caring, and its vicissitudes across the lifespan. “Many of the most intense emotions arise during the formation, the maintenance, the disruption and the renewal of attachment relationships. The formation of a bond is described as falling in love, maintaining a bond as loving someone, and losing a partner as grieving over someone. Similarly, threat of loss arouses anxiety and actual loss gives rise to sorrow; while each of these situations is likely to arouse anger” (Bowlby, 1980, p. 40). Note the motivated responsiveness in this phrasing to both actuality and possibility, for merely the threat of loss, as well as actual loss, promotes distress. When consciousness acts in the intimate world its ways are meaningful, motivated, and temporally structured. Understanding from the past guides future restorative action. Bowlby defined attachment as mapping the intimate life: “Attachment behaviour is any form of behaviour that results in a person attaining or maintaining proximity to some other clearly identified individual who is conceived as better able to cope with the world” (Bowlby, 1988, pp. 26–27). For instance, small children call out at night for those who will help them when they are upset. To “say of a child (or older person) that he is attached to, or has an attachment in, someone means that he is strongly disposed to seek proximity to and contact with that individual and to do so especially in certain specified conditions … [Thus attachment] refers to any of the various forms of behaviour that the person engages in from time to time to obtain and/or maintain a desired proximity” to attachment figures (Bowlby, 1988, p. 28).

The means of testing mere intuitive observations is called falsificationism. Empirically though, attachment is shown as four discrete patterns of relating that can be identified from infancy right through to processes between adults in later life. They share meaningful and motivating causes of emotions, the empathies of others, and the interpretation of the sense of self in the here-and-now type of relationship that self has with others. Thus, attachment is influential across many aspects of relationships between self and others, and how selves self-reflexively see themselves (Fonagy, Moran, Steele, & Higgitt, 1991; Fonagy & Target, 1994; Waters & Cummings, 2000). The empirical way forwards is to cross-reference findings from the SSP with home observation and be careful in drawing conclusions about attachment in its myriad adult settings. However, there should be an awareness of the psychometrics and the metapsychology of how measures tally with the observable experiences of attachment itself (Crowell & Treboux, 1995; Waters, Crowell, Elliott, Corcoran, & Treboux, 2002). What is required for justification is an attention to exper...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• LIST OF FIGURES
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• PREFACE
• PART I: THE RECEIVED WISDOM ABOUT ATTACHMENT
• PART II: THE ROLE OF ATTACHMENT IN REDUCING DISTRESS
• PART III: INCREASING SECURITY AS A CONDITION OF SUCCESSFUL THERAPY
• REFERENCES
• INDEX