By Paul Renn
Attachment theory describes several behavioural systems, the function of which
is to regulate human attachment, fear, exploration, care-giving,
peer-affiliation and sex. Attachment is defined as any form of behaviour that
results in a person attaining and retaining proximity to a differentiated other.
The primary caregiver is the source of the infant’s stress regulation and,
therefore, sense of safety and security. Attachment theory emphasises the role
of the parent as mediator, reflector and moderator of the child’s mind and the
child’s reliance on the parent to respond to their affective states in ways that
are contingent to their internal experience, a process often referred to as
secure base/safe haven functioning. Within the close parent-child relationship
neural networks dedicated to feelings of safety and danger, attachment and the
core sense of self are sculpted and shaped. These networks are conceptualised as
internal working models of attachment.
Characteristic patterns of interaction operating within the family’s caregiving-attachment
system give rise to secure, insecure and disorganized patterns of attachment.
These discrete patterns have been categorized using the Strange Situation
research procedure, which observes the young child’s behaviour when separated
and reunited with his or her primary caregiver. Attachment patterns are
represented in the child’s internal working models of self-other relationships.
Secure attachment is promoted by the interactive regulation of affect, which
facilitates the recognition, labelling and evaluation of emotional and
intentional states in the self and in others, a capacity known as reflective
function or mentalization. The recognition of affects as having dynamic,
transactional properties is the key to understanding behaviour in oneself and in
another. The child comes to recognize his or her mental states as meaningful
self-states via a process of parental affect mirroring and marking. Secure
children are able to use sophisticated cognitive strategies to integrate and
resolve their fear of separation and loss.
When the parent is unavailable, inconsistent or unpredictable, the infant
develops one of two organized insecure patterns of attachment: avoidant or
ambivalent-resistant. These defensive strategies involve either the deactivation
or hyper-activation of the attachment system. Deactivation is characterized by
avoidance of the caregiver and by emotional detachment. In effect, the avoidant
child immobilizes the attachment system by excluding thoughts and feelings that
normally activate the system. Hyper-activation is manifested by an enmeshed
ambivalent preoccupation with the caregiver and with negative emotions,
particularly anger. However, in common with the avoidant child, the ambivalent
child appears to cognitively disconnect feelings from the situation that
elicited the distress. Disorganised-disoriented attachment is discussed below.
Attachment research, then, demonstrates that discrete patterns of secure,
insecure, and disorganized attachment have as their precursor a specific pattern
of caregiver-infant interaction and their own behavioural sequelae. Repeated
patterns of interpersonal experience are encoded in implicit-procedural memory
and conceptualized as self-other working models of attachment. These mental
models consist of generalized beliefs and expectations about relationships
between the self and key attachment figures, not the least of which concerns
one’s worthiness to receive love and care from others.
In sum, the care-giving environment generally, and the infant-caregiver
attachment relationship particularly, initiate the child along one of an array
of potential developmental pathways. Disturbance of attachment is the outcome of
a series of deviations that take the child increasingly further from adaptive
functioning. Child abuse and cumulative developmental trauma violate the child’s
sense of trust, identity and agency and have pernicious and seminal influences
on the developing personality. In essence, internal working models of early
attachment relationships provide the templates for psychopathology in later
life, which may include violent, destructive and self-destructive forms of
behaviour. In attachment theory, the main purpose of defence is the regulation
of emotions. The primary mechanisms for achieving this are distance regulation
and the defensive exclusion of thoughts and feelings associated with attachment
trauma.
Early trauma in the form of abuse, loss, neglect and severe parent-child
misattunement compromises brain-mediated functions such as attachment, empathy
and affect regulation. From an attachment theory perspective, patterns of
attachment are encoded and stored as generalized relational patterns in the
systems of implicit memory. These are conceptualized as cognitive-affective
internal working models which are seen as mediating how we think and feel about
ourselves, others and the relationships we develop. Although open to change and
modification in the light of new attachment experiences, whether positive or
negative, these non-conscious procedural models, scripts or schemas within which
early stress and trauma are retained, tend to persevere and guide, appraise and
predict attachment-related thoughts, feelings and behaviours throughout the life
cycle via the implicit memory system. Psychopathology is seen as deriving from
an accumulation of maladaptive interactional patterns that result in character
traits and personality types and disorders.
Disorganised attachment may occur when the child’s parent is both the source of
fear and the only protective figure to whom to turn to resolve stress and
anxiety. In such instances, neither proximity seeking nor proximity avoiding is
a solution to the activation of the child’s attachment and fear behavioural
systems. If the trauma remains unresolved and is carried into adulthood, it
leaves the individual vulnerable to affect dysregulation in interpersonal
conflict situations that induce fear, hate, shame and rage. In such cases,
alcohol and illicit drugs are often resorted to as a maladaptive means of
suppressing dreaded psychobiological states and restoring a semblance of
affective equilibrium.
Findings show that disorganised attachment developed in infancy shifts to
controlling behaviour in the older child and adult, reflecting an internalized
mental model of the self as unlovable, unworthy of care and support, and fearful
of rejection, betrayal and abandonment. Disorganised attachment is associated
with a predisposition to relational violence, to dissociative states and conduct
disorders in children and adolescents, and to personality disorders in adults.
This state of mind constitutes a primary risk factor for the development of
borderline, anti-social and sociopathic personality disorders. The rate of such
disorders in forensic settings is particularly high. Clinically, dissociated
traumatic experience is unsymbolized by thought and language, being encapsulated
within the personality as a separate, non-reflective reality which is cut off
from authentic human relatedness. The information contained in implicit memory
may be retrieved by state-dependent moods and situations. Dissociated archaic
internal working models are then activated, influencing and distorting
expectations of current events and relationships outside of conscious awareness,
particularly in situations involving intense interpersonal stress. In such
situations, the self is felt to be endangered, thereby increasing the risk of an
angry and potentially violent reaction.
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