ATTACHMENT

-By DR. SOURAV DAS

 FREUD –Formulations On The Two
Principles Of Mental Functioning
• Early psychoanalytic theory far removed from both
Object Relations Theory and Attachment Theory.
• Freud’s early views(1911): Primary Process and
Secondary Process.
• Primary Process( Id)- mental functioning dominated
by needs and their hallucinatory wish fulfillment.
• E.g.- dreams, fantasies.
• Secondary Process (Ego)- more reliable means of
gratifying wishes, an adaptation to reality (a later
form of thought).
• E.g.- logic, reasoning, calculated goal directedness.
 FREUD’S OBJECTS IN RELATION TO THE
STRUCTURAL THEORY OF THE MIND
• Freud believed, infants at birth are not aware of
any objects outside themselves.
• Only aware of hunger and its gratification:
primary process (Id based).
• There is a gradual but deliberate transition in
mental functioning to an adaptation to reality
during early intrapsychic development (birth of
the Ego).
• For an infant, the object comes into existence at
the dawn of the secondary process (Ego based).
• 21yrs later, Freud(1926) recognized that the first
object-the mother-becomes identified with the
infant’s need for security.
 OBJECT RELATION THEORY
• The later Neo-Freudian theorists began to explore the
structure and function of objects and their meaning for
infants.
• Foremost among them was Melanie Klein, who
articulated the idea that the object is a constructed
outcome of intense anxiety engendered by the
inherent conflicts related to an infant’s aggressive
and sexual drives.
• She disagreed with Freud and stated that ego exists
from birth and engages in object relations from birth.
• She argued that formation of objects begin at birth,
first as primitive, affectively charged, unmodulated
part objects of the mother’s breast, & later as an
integrated, whole, modulated object roughly
corresponding to the mother.
 MELANIE KLEIN-OBJECT RELATIONS THEORY
• She also described the concepts of ‘Good breast’
and ‘Bad breast’ in what she called the
‘paranoid-schizoid position’ from birth to upto 6
months of age;
• And the ‘depressive position’ where the infant
begins to realize both the objects as a part of a
single mother, a unified whole.
• However, aware of role of environment, she
nevertheless conceded that unconscious
processes are strongly influenced by the infant’s
actual experiences at the hands of the mother.
 OTHER PROPONENTS

• The Object Relations Theory, like Protestantism,

had many variations, the other proponents
were Margaret Mahler (‘normal autistic
phase’, ‘normal symbiotic phase’, and
‘separation individuation’), Otto Kernberg( lack
of differentiation between self and object
representations, leading to development of
psychopathology- the borderline and
narcissistic personality disorder) etc. .
 BIRTH OF ATTACHMENT THEORY
• John Bowlby, an Object relations-trained
psychoanalyst, and a supervisee of Melanie Klein,
distanced himself from Klein in the mid 20th
century by disavowing drive theory and
incorporating the insights of ethology.
• He agreed with Klein that infants are oriented to
environment from birth, but because drives do
not exist, an infant’s perception of environment
under normal circumstances is not distorted.
• The infant communicates with the caregiver using
a genetically programmed behavioral system.
• He called his creation, “Attachment Theory”.
• Mary Ainsworth, Bowlby's Canadian student, later
empirically tested his theory and documented-
a) individual differences in infant’s quality of
attachment to the mother and
b)individual differences in maternal care giving to
attachment quality.

• Mary Main examined the intrapsychic

components of attachment in addition to its
behavioral correlate, heralded the empirical study
of psychoanalytic aspect of Bowlby’s theory,
namely, the ‘internal working model’.
 COURSE AFTER BOWLBY
• By the 1960’s, Object Relation Theory and
Attachment Theory took diverging paths, in
spite of their common origins.

• Object Relation Theory remained in the

Consulting rooms, nurtured by the
Psychiatrists and the Clinical Psychologists,
and used case studies as retrospective
evidence to support theoretical speculation,
following footsteps of Sigmund Freud.
• The Attachment theorists, on the other
hand, moved into the laboratory, practiced by the
Developmental and Experimental Psychologists,
and employed the more scientifically rigorous, but
arguably less ecologically valid experimental
methods like prospective longitudinal research
designs with comparison groups and large sample
sizes.
• The drift was so much so, that they came from different
academic backgrounds(Clinical vs Developmental
psychology), published their findings in different vs empirical),
attended different conferences(psychoanalytic vs child
development), and took different career paths(clinician vs
academician), so much so, that the proponents of the two
theories seldom engaged in a dialogue with each other.

• Only in the last 2 decades this mutual isolation has began

to change, and researchers from both theoretical
perspectives are beginning to conduct empirically based
studies to measure the theoretical overlap between key
constructs like ‘object representation’ and ‘internal working
model’.
 THEORY OF ATTACHMENT
• Attachment definition:
• Emotional tone between children and their
caregivers and is evidenced by an infant’s
seeking and clinging to the caregiving person,
usually the mother.

• Acc. To Bowlby, it is the central motivational

force in future life & personality.

• Phases Of Attachment:
PREATTACHMEPHASES
BIRTH OF
Babies follow their mother with
ATTACHMENT
NT STAGE – their eyes over 180 degree range
3MON and turn toward their voice.
THS
ATTACHMENT 3m – Infant becomes attached to one
IN THE MAKING 6m or more persons in the
environment.

CLEAR CUT 6m – Children cry and show other

ATTACHMENT 24m signs of distress when separated
from the caregivers.
FOURTH PHASE >24m Able to tolerate separation from
mother without distress when
gets reassurance of mother’s
return.
 JOHN BOWLBY: From Attachment And
Exploration To The Internal Working Model
• Created his own theory of psychological
development borrowing from the studies of
ethologists Harlow and Zimmerman (1959) and
Lorenz (1935) resulting in an explicitly
evolutionary theory of infant’s development of
attachment to his or her mother.
• He maintained, infants are genetically
programmed with certain behaviors to insure
their survival.
• Five instinctual classes of attachment behavior-
crying, smiling, sucking, following and clinging.
• Crying and smiling function to elicit maternal
caregiving, whereas sucking, following and clinging
function to seek proximity and maintain contact,
thereby protecting the child from predators and
other environmental dangers.
• These behaviors suggest innate sociability to
others begin at birth.
• These 5 classes of behavior eventually become
integrated as a behavioral system and are directed
toward one person, the mother or primary
caregiver.
• The infants also make a direct impact on their
mothers immediately after birth, which
dramatically increases in efficiency with the
coordination of these 5 classes of behavior.
• Initially reflexive and instinctual, these classes of
behavior gradually become organized templates
using previous interpersonal experiences to
forecast maternal behavior in response to the
coordinated infant behavioral system.
• This organisation becomes activated in response
to primary caregiver, usually between 9-24
months of age.
• After an infant becomes attached, it is nearly
impossible to reprogram the system ..(similar to
Lorenz ‘s Imprinting model with geeselings).
• Increased locomotion of the infant activates a
second behavioral system- exploration.
• The exploratory system also carries survival
promoting value by helping infants to develop
cognitive skills and obtain worldly experiences
necessary to survive for later independent
existence.
• When attachment system becomes activated,
exploratory system becomes deactivated and
vice versa.
• The degree to which the parent provides a
secure base from which the infant can explore
the environment and to which he can return in
times of perceived danger determines how
securely attached the infant behaves towards
the caregiver.
• Episodic memories of the caregiver responses are
consolidated into semantic memory, a
generalized, abstract memory that permits
expectations to form, which actually forms the
foundation of the ‘internal working model’, the
first mental representation.
• The internal working model, rather than gratifying
an infant’s needs during the mother’s absence,
represents a set of expectations that help infant
to predict the mother’s behavior.
• Storing in memory how the mother behaves
during moments when the attachment is activated
will assist infants in adapting their behavior to
maximize feelings of security and insure survival.
• As the infant develops, the goals of attachment
system evolve into a goal-corrected partnership,
in which infant and caregiver negotiate with each
other the caregiver’s availability to the infant.
• The partnership is ‘elastic’, but attachment
security nevertheless remains a lifelong concern
“from the cradle to the grave”.
• Bowlby also discussed defensive processes within
the infant-’the defensive exclusion’.
• Extended separations from the caregiver require
that the infant exclude attachment relevant
information from the awareness.
• Thus, unlike Freud, Bowlby’s unconscious was not
a “cauldron of seething excitations”, but rather a
‘repository for any painful aspects of
interpersonal experience’ in external reality like
rejection, loss, separation or death.
• Bolwby’s theory implied that infants are accurate
interpreters of external reality, and only later
distort their perceptions of it, which in turn
produces psychopathology.
 BONDING

• The term bonding, is often erraneously used

synonymously with attachment.
• Bonding concerns the mother’s feelings
towards her infant, and differs from
attachment in that it’s not associated with the
sense of security that comes with attachment.
 BOWLBY AND THE ETHOLOGISTS
• Bowlby was profoundly influenced throughout
the course of his work by ethologists, most
influential among them being-
• Harry Harlow: who demonstrated the emotional
and behavioral effects of isolating monkeys from
birth and keeping them from forming
attachments.
• Konrad Lorenz: (The geeseling experiment)the
phenomenon of imprinting, and how certain
stimuli can elicit innate behavior patterns during
the first few hours of an animal’s behavioral
development.
 MARY AINSWORTH
• Mary Ainsworth, a Canadian student of
Bowlby’s, conducted naturalistic observational
studies of attachment patterns of infants with
their mothers and noticed individual
differences in the ways in which the infants
organised their attachment relationships.
• For that purpose, she performed a laboratory
procedure, which she called “The Strange
Situation “.
 THE STRANGE SITUATION
• In the experiment, the infant and the mother
participate in a series of 8 three minute episodes that
enact-
1. Presence of mother and an observer,
2. Presence of mother,
3. Presence of mother and a stranger,
4. Separation from mother and presence of stranger,
5. Reunion with mother,
6. Second separation from mother,
7. Reunion with stranger,
8. Second reunion with mother.
 PATTERNS OF ATTACHMENT
ORGANISATION
• On the basis of individual differences in the
infant’s organisation of attachment behaviors
in response to these anxiety provoking
episodes Ainsworth classified the infants into
3 categories:
A.Anxious - avoidant,
B.Secure,
C.Anxious- resistant.
 DIFFERENT PATTERNS OF ATTACHMENT
ORGANISATION
A. ANXIOUS B. SECURE C. ANXIOUS-RESISTANT
-AVOIDANT
SELDOM CRY CRY WHEN DISPLAY INTENSE
WHEN SEPARATED, DISTRESS WHEN
SEPARATED VIGOROUSLY SEPARATED, AND
SEEK BEHAVE ANGRILY AND
FROM THEIR ARE INCONSOLABLE
MOTHER PROXIMITY
AND PHYSICAL UPON REUNION; THEY
AND AVOID SEEK PHYSICAL
CONTACT
HER UPON CONTACT, YET RESIST
UPON WHEN MOTHER OFFERS
REUNION
REUNION IT
 EXTRAPOLATION OF THE STRANGE SITUATION
EXPERIMENT
• Main and Cassidy (1988) later validated a
modified Strange situation for six year olds and
found the same three attachment categories.
• Other assessment procedures used for pre-school
and latency aged children yielded the same
results.
• Van Ijzendoorn and Kroonenberg (1988)
conducted a meta analysis of 18 strange situation
studies and concluded that world wide
distribution of the three traditional patterns of
attachment are-
• 21% a, 65% B and 14% C.
• This was identical to what Ainsworth and her
colleagues have originally found in 1978 study.
 OTHER OUTCOMES OF THE STRANGE
EXPERIMENT
• Specific maternal behaviors assessed during
the first 12 months predicted each of the three
original attachment patterns.
• Maternal sensitivity, emotional availability,
responsiveness to infant cues and attachment
behaviors, predicted infant attachment
security at 12 months.
• Maternal rejection of attachment cues
predicted infant avoidance, while
• Maternal inconsistency in responding to
attachment cues predicted infant resistance.
 LONG TERM STABILITY OF ATTACHMENT PATTERNS
• Waters, Merik, et al(1995) established 64%
stability of attachment patterns after 20 yrs, and
70% stability among those with no major negative
life events.
• De Wolff and Ijzendoorn (1997) established that
sensitivity moderately predicts attachment
security.
• Thus, overt manifestation of patterns might
change, but their underlying organisation
becomes increasingly resistant to change as past
interactional experiences become: habitual,
expected, and reliable forecasters of future
caregiver behavior(Bowlby, 1980; main et al,
1985).
 THE SECURE BASE EFFECT
• Ainsworth also confirmed that attachment
serves to reduce anxiety.
• What she called the secure base effect enables
children to move away from attachment figures
and to explore the environment.

• Inanimate objects(what Donald Winnicot called

the Transitional object) can also serve as a
secure base, one that often accompanies them
as they investigate the world.
 MARY MAIN: and the Fourth Attachment
Category
• Mary main extended the attachment theory and
research in two important ways:
1. She discovered a fourth pattern of
attachment(along with Solomon), later showed to
be related to psychopathology;
• The infants lacked both organization and
coherence to separation response and reunion
distress and there were wide diversity of
behaviors in that category ranging from shrieking
with head averted to falling prone on floor upon
mother’s return.
• Main named this category-
Disorganised/Disoriented.
• Inspite of thorough searching, they found no new
categories of attachment.
2. Main assessed the quality of attachment
patterns at the level of representation-the
internal working model.
• She also stated, increasingly abstract
assessments of language replace concrete
behavioral observations as indices of the
structure and function of internal working
model beyond infancy.
 CHANGES IN ATTACHMENT DURING
CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE
• Age, cognitive growth and continued social experience
advance the development and complexity of the internal
working model.
• In early childhood, parental figures remain the centre of
a child's social world, even if they spend substantial
periods of time in alternative care.
• There appear to be limitations in their thinking that
restrict their ability to integrate relationship
experiences into a single general model.
• Peers become important in middle childhood and have
an influence distinct from that of parents. Attachment
model shifts from ‘contact maintenance’ to ‘secure base
model’ to ‘goal corrected partnerships’ in adolescents.
 ATTACHMENT IN CHILDREN & ADOLESCENTS
• In mid childhood, relationships with peers have
an influence on the child that is distinct (they do
not form attachment figures, unless parents are
unavailable) from that of parent-child
relationships, though the latter can influence the
peer relationships children form.
• Attachments to peers tend to emerge in
adolescence, although parents continue to be
attachment figures.. With adolescents, the role of
the parental figures is to be available when
needed while the adolescent makes excursions
into the outside world.
• A single general model of attachment
relationships is developed during adolescence.
ADULT ATTACHMENT STYLES: FOUR CATEGORY
MODEL
• Bartholomew and Horowitz (1991):
• Extrapolating from Bowlby’s parent infant
attachment, this model examines both the
person’s internalised self image as well as how
the person imagines other people.
• One dimension is- self image:
worthwhile/treasureable vs self doubts;
• Other dimension is- belief in others:
trustworthy vs unreliable/rejecting.
 FOUR CATEGORY CLASSIFICATION
SECURE DISMISSING PREOCCUPIED FEARFUL

•Seek out & •Avoids close •Seek self •Avoid getting

are relationships, acceptance by close to
comfortable •Value self becoming others,
with intimate independence close to •Fear pain of
relationships •Reluctant to others, rejection.
trust others, •Vulnerable to
•Fearful of heart break
being hurt. on failure of
partner to
meet strong
intimacy
needs.
 ADULT ATTACHMENT STYLE AND ROMANTIC
RELATIONSHIPS
• Klohnen and Bera (1998) examined the
connection between attachment style and
relationship happiness in a longitudinal study of
participants when each of them were 21, 27, 43,
and 52 yrs old.
• By age 52yrs, 95% of secure adults had been
married, and only 24% had ever been divorced.
• While only 72% of avoidant adults had ever been
married, and 50% of them had experienced a
divorce.
 ROMANTIC RELATIONSHIPS DEPENDING ON
ATTACHMENT STYLES
SECURE (B.) AVOIDANT (A.) ANXIOUS-
RESISTANT (C.)
•Great deal of •Of intimacy, •Fall in love many
love, •Problems with times,
•Strong jealousy, •Difficulty finding
commitment, •Doesn’t believe long term
•Large amount of in falling in love. happiness,
trust • ‘head over •Afraid of losing
•Able to accept heels’ or ‘forever their partner,
and support ‘ love is taken as •Quick to give in
partners despite a joke. to partner’s
personal faults demands.
ROMEO
OTHELLO
 HOPE FOR THOSE WITH AVOIDANT OR
AMBIVALENT ATTACHMENT STYLES
• It may be possible for people to change their
attachment style when they enter a secure, long
lasting adult relationship.
• That relationship may specifically provide the
secure working model some people were denied
as children.
• 30% of young women in one study (Davila, Burge,
1997)changed their attachment style classification
over a two-year span.
• It also makes it difficult to assess if secure
attachment style was the cause or the effect.
 METHODS TO ASSESS ATTACHMENT IN
ADULTS
• The most common interview method is the Adult
Attachment Interview (AAI) developed by Mary
Main and her colleagues at the University of
California at Berkeley (Main and Goldwyn, 1993).
• The Adult Attachment Interview contains 20-questions that asks the subject about
his/her experiences with parents and other attachment figures, significant losses
and trauma and if relevant, experiences with their own children. The interview
takes approximately 60-90 minutes. It is then transcribed and scored by a trained
person
• Another method of assessing adult attachment is
the Adult Attachment Projective (AAP) developed
by Carol George of Mills College, and Malcolm West
of the University of Calgary (George and West, 2001).
• The test consists of eight drawings (one neutral scene and seven scenes of
attachment situations). The AAP drawings depict events that, according to theory,
activate attachment, for example, illness, solitude, separation, and abuse. The
characters depicted in the drawings are culturally and gender representative.
 RECENT DEVELOPMENTS
• Whereas Bowlby was inspired by Piaget's
insights into children's thinking, current
attachment scholars utilise insights from
contemporary literature on implicit
knowledge, theory of mind, autobiographical
memory and social representation.
• Psychoanalyst/psychologists Peter Fonagy
and Mary Target have attempted to bring
attachment theory and psychoanalysis into a
closer relationship through cognitive science
as mentalization.
 NEWER HURDLES FOR ATTACHMENT
THEORY
•Nowadays, increased the numbers of children live
with their unmarried or working mothers or same
sex couples,

•Also, there is increase in the number of older-child

adoptions and adoptions from third-world sources
in first-world countries.

•These complexities were not present in Bowlby’s

time, and are now giving rise to more research in
this field.
 ATTACHMENT THEORY IN EXPLAINING ADULT
BEHAVIOR & PLANNING SOCIAL STRATEGIES
• Principles of attachment theory have been
used to explain adult social behaviours,
including mating, social dominance and
hierarchical power structures, group
coalitions, and negotiation of reciprocity and
justice.
• Those explanations have been used to design
parental care training, and have been
particularly successful in the design of child
abuse prevention programmes.
 ATTACHMENT THEORY AND ROBOTICS
• Bischof (1975): simulation of attachment behaviour
with a software simulation of infant approach and
avoidance behaviours. This work didn't closely follow
Bowlby's ideas on a control system formed of
independent behaviours. Its control mechanisms were
instead based upon more abstract cybernetic control
circuits.
• More recently, several research groups working with
robots have created control systems that re-create
patterns of attachment behaviour, to exploit the use of
'comfort zones' in the exploration of their
surroundings.
 CRITICISM
• a lot of personality traits come from their genes,
not their parents nurturing, as this can be seen in
the separated twin studies (Harris, 1998).
• The first limitation is "model attachment is based
on behaviors that occur during momentary
separations (stressful situations) rather than
during nonstressful situations. A broader
understanding of attachment requires
observation of how the mother and infant
interact and what they provide for each other
during natural, nonstressful situations" (Field,
1996, p. 543).
 CRITICISM..
• Another problem with the attachment model is
that "the list of attachment behaviors is limited
to those that occur with the primary attachment
figure, typically the mother. However, other
attachments are not necessarily characterized by
those same behaviors" (Field, 1996).

• The last limitations to the attachment model is

that the mother is viewed as the primary
attachment figure, when in fact, a father or
sibling can have the same type of attachment
with the infant at the same time. This relates to
adults having more than one primary
attachment, such as to their spouse and child.
THANK YOU !!!