Is meant to describe and explain people's enduring patterns of relationships from birth to death. This domain overlaps considerably with that of Interpersonal Theory. Because attachment is thought to have an evolutionary basis, attachment theory is also related to Evolutionary Psychology.
Attachment Styles: An Evolving Taxonomy of Evolutionarily Adaptive and Maladaptive Affectional Bonds
The above model (taken from Bartholomew, 1990) is one representation of attachment styles, or ways of dealing with attachment, separation, and loss in close personal relationships. The attachment was first studied in non-human animals, then in human infants, and later in human adults.
When a human or non-human primate infant is separated from its parent, the infant goes through a series of three stages of emotional reactions. First is a protest, in which the infant cries and refuses to be consoled by others. Second is despair, in which the infant is sad and passive. The third is detachment, in which the infant actively disregards and avoids the parent if the parent returns (Hazan & Shaver, 1987).
The fundamental assumption in attachment research on human infants is that sensitive responding by the parent to the infant's needs results in an infant who demonstrates secure attachment while lacking of such sensitive responding results in insecure attachment (Lamb, Thompson, Gardner, Charnov, & Estes, 1984). Theorists have postulated several varieties of insecure attachment. Ainsworth originally proposed two: avoidant, and resistant also called ambivalently. This triarchic taxonomy of secure, avoidant, and resistant attachment was developed as a way of classifying infant behavior in the "strange situation."
Secure infants either seek proximity or contact or else greet the parent at a distance with a smile or wave.
Avoidant infants avoid the parent.
Resistant / ambivalent infants either passively or actively show hostility toward the parent.
Avoidant infants avoid the parent.
Resistant / ambivalent infants either passively or actively show hostility toward the parent.
Attachment theory provides not only a framework for understanding emotional reactions in infants, but also a framework for understanding love, loneliness, and grief in adults. Attachment styles in adults are thought to stem directly from the working models (or mental models) of oneself and others that were developed during infancy and childhood. Ainsworth's three-fold taxonomy of attachment styles has been translated into terms of adult romantic relationships as follows (Hazan & Shaver, 1987).
Secure adults find it relatively easy to get close to others and are comfortable depending on others and having others depend on them. Secure adults don't often worry about being abandoned or about someone getting too close to them.
Avoidant adults are somewhat uncomfortable being close to others; they find it difficult to trust others completely, difficult to allow themselves to depend on others. Avoidant adults are nervous when anyone gets too close, and often, love partners want them to be more intimate than they feel comfortable being.
Anxious / ambivalent adults find that others are reluctant to get as close as they would like. Anxious / ambivalent adults often worry that their partner doesn't really love them or won't want to stay with them. Anxious / ambivalent adults want to merge completely with another person, and this desire sometimes scares people away.
Avoidant adults are somewhat uncomfortable being close to others; they find it difficult to trust others completely, difficult to allow themselves to depend on others. Avoidant adults are nervous when anyone gets too close, and often, love partners want them to be more intimate than they feel comfortable being.
Anxious / ambivalent adults find that others are reluctant to get as close as they would like. Anxious / ambivalent adults often worry that their partner doesn't really love them or won't want to stay with them. Anxious / ambivalent adults want to merge completely with another person, and this desire sometimes scares people away.
*ATTACHMENT DISORDER* Theory, Parenting, and Therapy.
By Mark Henningsen, M.A., L.P.C., a psychotherapist in Evergreen,
CO., who specializes in treating children and adults who suffer from
attachment strain.
When talking about attachment, it is important to have some knowledge of its
Theory in order to understand why attachment disordered (AD) children or
adults respond to our love in such distorted ways.
Early Bonding Patterns
Bonding has to do with the evidence of mutuality between the Mother and child. If the attachment behaviour is negative it may come from distorted child-rearing ideas or distorted perception of the infant’s behavior. This occurs when the Mother is developmentally unready to relate to the infant. The Mother is unable to understand the child’s needs and therefore unable to validate them causing invalidation within the child. Bonding is often seen from the interactionist perspective that is the individual – environment.
DEFINITIONS
*Attachment* = Being strongly disposed to seek proximity to and contact with
A specific figure when frightened, tired or ill. Is a biological drive that
Has a hierarchy of preference for its attachment figure that changes little
Over time.
*Attachment Behavior* = various forms of behavior (eye contact, smiles,
Crying, clinging, etc.); usually activated by pain, fatigue or anything
Frightening; that the person engages in to obtain and maintain a desired
Proximity.
*Parenting Behavior* = the way in which the primary caregiver responds to
The child. This will largely determine the type of attachment the child
Develops; secure, ambivalent, or avoidant attachment.
John Bowlby, the father of attachment theory, felt that separations from the
Birth mother was disastrous developmentally because they thwart the
Instinctual needs of the child and create distorted attachment behavior.
FIRST YEAR OF LIFE CYCLE
The first year is a year of needs. When the infant has a need, it initiates attachment behavior in order to summon a nurturing response from its attachment figure. The need/gratifying response usually includes touch, eye contact, movement, smiles, and lactose. When gratification occurs, trust is built. This cycle occurs hundreds of times a week, and thousands of times in the first year. From this relationship, synchronicity develops between parent and child. The caregiver develops a greater awareness of their child and learns just how to respond. The child develops good cause/effect thinking, feels powerful, trusts others, shows exploratory behavior, and develops empathy and a conscience.
When the first year of the life cycle is undermined, and the needs of the child are not met, mistrust begins to define the perspective of the child and anxious attachment results. The cycle can become undermined or broken for many reasons:
* Multiple disruptions in care giving.
* Post-partum depression.
* Hospitalization of the child causing separation from the parent and/or unrelieved pain.
* Parents who are attachment disordered, leading to neglect, abuse (physical/sexual/verbal), or inappropriate parental responses not leading to a secure/predictable relationship.
* Genetic factors.
* Pervasive developmental disorders.
* Caregivers whose attachment needs aren't met, leading to overload and lack of awareness of the infant's needs.
The child naturally develops mistrust and shuts down effective attachment behavior. The developmental stages following the first year continue to be distorted and retarded, and common symptoms emerge:
* Superficially engaging and charming. [Phoniness]
* Lack of eye contact.
* Indiscriminately affectionate with strangers.
* Not affectionate on parental terms.
* Destructive to self, others, and material things.
* Cruelty to animals.
* Primary process lying (lying in the face of the obvious*).
* Low impulse control.
* Learning lags.
* Lack of cause/effect thinking.
* Lack of conscience.
* Abnormal eating patterns.
* Poor peer relationships.
* Preoccupation with fire and/or gore.
* Persistent nonsense questions and chatter.
* Inappropriately demanding and clingy.
* Abnormal speech patterns.
* Sexually inappropriate.
PARENTING children with attachment difficulties is a job that requires a great deal of patience, understanding, courage, solid support systems and personal fortitude. Children with attachment difficulties rarely and only superficially return love. Therapists, teachers, child protective services, and even spouses often don't understand the challenge and deception an AD child displays toward an adoptive/foster parent in charge of primary care. often the child will project the greatest amount of pathology towards the mother-figure in [an] attempt [to] make the world believe that if the mother weren't so harsh and controlling, the child would be as lovable as it
Superficially displays.
Therapists often are introduced to AD cases witnessing a burned-out parent in their office who is angry, resentful, and full of blame toward their child. The child, however, is engaging, full of energy, innocent and displays confusion by the parent's anger. Unfortunately the therapist reacts by thinking (and sometimes saying) "God, if this mom would just lighten up on this kid, she wouldn't have so many problems!" This can lead the therapist to scolding the parent much in the same way the therapist experiences the parent scolding the child. Many well-intentioned, but naive, health care workers believe that "all this kid needs is love" and end up creating an alliance with the child against the parents that furthers the family getting the help they desperately need.
THERAPY
The basic purpose of attachment therapy is to help the child resolve a dysfunctional attachment. The goal is to help the child bond to the parents and to resolve their fear of loving and being loved. A high percentage of the children that I see are foster or adopted children who have lived in one or more foster homes and have suffered from loss, neglect and/or abuse. often times the children come with a diagnosis of Oppositional Defiant disorder [ODD] or Conduct Disorder [CD]. Many have a secondary diagnosis of attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. The child's symptoms could also be understood as a Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or Depression stemming from a delayed grief reaction in response to one or more significant losses early in childhood. Whatever the diagnosis is, it is important that the developmental history receives the consideration required to provide the appropriate treatment.
Because attachment is developed in the first year of life, often times the trauma driving the child's pathology is pre-verbal. The child needs a solid educational component of treatment for he/she to understand what force is driving the feelings that controls their behavior. The parents also need the education and understanding that the child's behavior is not caused from their parenting, but from past traumas. From this base then, new parenting interventions can be designed from a cooperative relationship to fit a child with special needs.
A major dynamic in the treatment, is the affective regressive work needed to heal the emotional wounds that drive these children's behavior. Therapeutic holding work allows the child to access deep, genuine, and intense emotions needed to work through the feelings, not simply get over them. a corrective emotional experience is orchestrated allowing the child to express these feelings recognize and recall them and identify the events and the people involved. In essence, the child going through this experience with there parents allows for resolution of old pathological emotions while simultaneously creating powerful new bonds.
Psychodynamic and holding work based on attachment theory has proven successful with children, adolescents and adults who are striving to recover from early trauma. Obtaining a good contract between all parties involved in treatment is essential, for this is treatment that is done with families, not to families.
One needs only a glance at the daily news, to realize the devastation being caused by attachment problems going undiagnosed and untreated. None of the answers are simple, however a productive dialogue without blame or shame can be started in order to discover new ways to support and heal.
(c) Copyright, Mark Henningsen, 1996
Director, Evergreen Family Counseling Center
Reprinted with Permission.
Early Development
Empathic Failure – Inability to understand another’s subjective experience, defective mirroring. Self-Psychology affirms that the repeated empathic failure by the parents, coupled with the child’s responses to them is the basis for all psychopathology.
Mahler observed that the failure to be appropriately empathic, to support emphatically her child’s contrasting strivings for autonomy and fusion might lead to the collapse of the child’s omnipotence.
Borderline Mother’s depersonalizes her child by giving him the message that any attempt to separate or individuate will provoke a withdrawal of maternal nurturance. This produces a lifelong failure script at any moment towards succeeding provokes severe separation anxiety. In the narcissistic personality, depersonalization by the Mother demands that the child’s achieving but only about her.
Existential Anguish – a defective sense of being, pre-occupation with the meaning of life, feeling as having no place in the world and identity confusion. Winnicott ascribes this condition to disturbances of holding and handling in the early stages of infancy
False Self
Winnicott’s term for an external, compliant aspect of the person, contrasted with the True Self, an internal, authentic and incompliant aspects. Organized reactions to maternal failures, such as empathy or not relating to the child as he really is, form the False Self. The Analytic setting provides a place to resume suspended True Self-activity. Laing stresses the False Self of the schizoid (narcissistic) client, the compulsivity compliance appearance that presented to the world devoid of hatred and other negative feelings. He splits himself from the world and tries to do everything by himself, oscillating between merger with objects and isolation. The False self-system is a defense against ontological insecurity in a person who true self in childhood was not adequately confirmed, or mirrored.
The ambivalence of the Will and Intellect is often on the basis as to what is considered obsessional doubting in schizophrenic clients.
Classical psychoanalytic psychology suggests that ambivalence first makes its appearance in the oral sadistic stage when introjection and incorporation are important methods of forming object relations. Object relations at this stage represents the earliest and most extreme form of ambivalence.
Ambivalence - Bipolarity of the antithetic of emotions, attitudes, ideas or wishes towards a given object or situation.
Bleuler differentiated among 1. Affective 2. Intellectual 3. Will ambivalence
Super Ego – Heteronomous – a special type of super ego that demands that the ego behaves according to what is expected at the moment. Thought due to inconsistent handling by the parent, which makes its impossible for him to foresee what particular conduct might ensure, continued affection from the parents. Consequently renounces attempts to differentiate between good and bad, instead responses to demands of the moment.
Super Ego
Contains the conscience and also the Ego Ideal
Functions 1. Approval and disapproval of the ego’s actions
2. Critical self- observing
3. Self-punishment
4. Demands that the ego report or make reparation for wrong-doing
5. Self-love or self-esteem as the ego rewards for having done right
It is a split off parts of the identification of certain aspects of the introjected parent.
Introjection and Identification are two of the earliest defenses to occur. It is the image of the hated and feared objects of the ego ideal, which is an image of the loved objects in the libido. I.e. “Good and Bad parent.”
Notes on early Ego development
At birth, the person is all Id, the biological storehouse of primitive impulses. These include Love and Hate – Seduction/Aggression. The Id is “all want”. Since it is pure desire, it has no concept of reality, others don’t exist, reality doesn’t exist, and time doesn’t exist. The only thing that does exist is the desire for pure gratification. The child doesn’t have any concept of itself as a separate person, of other human beings, of itself in the world as human beings, of itself and the world as separate of time, or of the different between reality and fantasy A concept of reality develops when the young child realizes that it needs are not automatically met. Whenever it wants. So begins the development of the child’s concept of a separate reality from itself, a concept that there are external objects that will help gain gratification. Fantasies must be separated from realities early in life. The Ego can be seen as the executive part of the personality. It is the part the learns to perceive reality accurately in order to help the Id get its demands met as effectively as possible. Oral Fixations (Freud), zero to 2 years, leads to dependency, alcoholism, overeating, a constant need to be loved and “nourished” by others.
“Anal Retentive” is when there are high levels of repressed rage, and the person becomes rigid, orderly, a rule following person, concerned with cleanliness. Underneath there is a great deal of “dirty” anger. For this type of person, rules and rituals become a defense mechanism for binding and controlling unconscious hostility. This individual usual engages in “undoing” rituals to overcome unconscious guilt. These Undoing rituals are like atonement. This ritualistic nature of defenses that are developed at an early stage of development lays the basis for obsessive-compulsive neurosis. The opposite of Anal Retentive is anal Expulsive. This is where the anger is not repressed but expressed. In effect he is “defecating “all over everyone. The person is repetitively acting out his anger constantly trying to prove his independence.
The Superego is formed out of the internalized (introjected) values of the parent. It consists of both the parent’s moral values (essentially the “conscious”) and the perfectionist standard of what a good person should be like (the ego ideal). If the values of the superego are harsh or unrealistic, the individual will be constantly plagued with feelings of guilt/shame and failure. The individual may need to punish himself and may set up situations where others are rejecting or punitive. A particularly harsh superego may lead to extreme and debilitating repression. On the other hand, a particularly weak superego may lead to antisocial behaviour.
Henry Stack Sullivan - He saw psychopathology as simply excessive anxiety that arrests development of the self-system and thereby limits both opportunities for interpersonal satisfaction and available security operations. The struggle within is to maintain their self-esteem with limited means.
Sullivan defined the self-system (self) as the dynamism that is responsible for avoiding anxiety or reducing anxiety. Self-Ego-Identity as the persons developed patterns for avoiding the discomforts that arise from the failure of others to meet one's fundamental needs-exists within the interpersonal framework. Develops a set of mechanism, called security operations (same as defense mechanisms) that reduce anxiety.
Self-system is divided into 3 parts: "Good Me", "Bad Me" and "Not Me". The "Not Me" are the parts that evoke such intense anxiety that they are totality disavowed and disowned.
He abhorred diagnostic labeling as unhelpful. Overly restrictive, dehumanizing and used primary to impress patients and colleagues.
Erikson - Identity (Wholeness) is achieved with a revisit to the separation-individualization of early childhood. The 2nd Individualization and its successful outcome is an appropriate disengagement from the parents as both real and internalized limit-setting and direction giving figures and the establishment of a sense of identity with substantial degree of autonomy and the capacity for self-regulation.
Alfred Alder
1929-1964
The system he developed was called “individual psychology”. Like later analysts, Alder believed that the striving of a rather rational, organized self-accounted for much of our behaviour. He is best known for his concepts of the “inferiority complex” and the various compensations from that in the various striving for superiority. This he felt as a basic dynamic motivating force within the personality. This is the striving for self-esteem and perfection. Disturbed individuals may express these strivings such as being tyrannical at home or being viciously completive.
Masochistic Character
Self-depreciate themselves in ways that provoke and torture others. For Wilhelm Riech thought that pleasure for them brought own excessive quilt and therefore a very low tolerance for love and pleasure.
Psychosocial Theories of Gender Identity D/O
Boys with excessive mother-son symbiosis with excessive Mother-Son skin to skin contact due to inability to differentiate from the Mother.
Females who are male-identified often had Mother's, who were removed in affect from their children, frequently by depression and a distant father.
To resolve separation anxiety during the separation-individualization phase of infantile development, to cope they resort to a reparative fantasy of symbiotic fusion with Mother.
Eric Berne………..
The business of human life is carrying out one's script according to the transactions learned as a child. The entire basis for psychological change lies in the personal capacity, having once accepted the script, to change his or her mind; otherwise, the person carries out only the original script throughout life.
Erich Fromm - a new authenticity can be found by those willing to confront the truth about themselves with all its terror of aloneness.
His four unproductive orientation or characters of 20 century:
1. Receptive - often appears to be cooperative and open. However, their primary objective is to establish a passive relationship with a leader who can solve problems magically.
2. Exploitive
3. Hoarders
4. Marketers
What is beyond the pleasure principle? As pleasure is a core position in the central concepts of pleasure-pain in psychodynamic theory. What are the darker passions? Derivatives of an underlying aggressive instincts such power, aggression, and rage. Freud emphasis on this key dialectic pair: love and hate. Eros and Thanatos, libido and aggression.
Affection vs. Control in parental bonding Scale
The higher the affection, the higher the bonding
The higher the control, the lower the bonding
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