Attachment Security and the Social World

A. Sochos

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137398697
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Personnalité en psychologie

With an overview of the existing attachment theory literature and new contributions to the field, this book proposes that social groups seek protection and security as they collectively construct their ideologies and social institutions. In doing so, the book extends attachment theory to show how it can inform wider socio-cultural phenomena.

1

Introduction to Attachment Research

This chapter will present a brief summary of the basic concepts and empirical findings of attachment research, as they have emerged in the past decades. This chapter is designed to refresh the memory of the reader with a background in psychology but no expertise in attachment theory and also to introduce other social scientists to the field. It is hoped that this will enable non-specialists to follow the arguments that unfold in the subsequent chapters.

The idea that the human mind is structured around internalised interactions between self and non-self has been proposed by a number of theorists. First, despite their differences in conceptualisation, a variety of psychoanalytic approaches share the understanding that the human psyche develops on the basis of interactions, initially, between parent and child and later between the adult and intimate others. Some authors have been interested in the manner in which parent-child interactions can structure the id, ego, and superego (Loewald, 1971; Winnicott, 1971; Sandler and Sandler, 1978; Kernberg, 1966), while others view them as developing on the basis of the child’s need for a relationship (Fairbairn, 1952; Bowlby, 1982).

On the other hand, the idea that the contents of the mind are defined by actions, rather than consisting of perceived external objects, has also been popular among cognitive theorists since the early days of the cognitive approach (Werner, 1948; Piaget, 1973). Moreover, as research in social cognition indicates, interest in the cognitive structures organising interpersonal interactions has also grown. Baldwin (1992, 1995) understands those structures, or relational schemas, as being composed of three elements – a schema organising information about the self, a schema organising information about another, and a schema guiding the relationship between the two. Also researchers have argued for the importance of schemas of self and other in the processing of social information (Kihlstrom et al., 1988; Cantor and Zirkel, 1990) and for the role of scripts (Schank and Abelson, 1977; Abelson, 1981) in understanding and conducting social interaction.

A number of authors have attempted to integrate object relations theories with social cognition research in order to investigate the relational nature of the mind. Horowitz (1988a, 1988b) conceives of the self and other configurations as being related to various states of mind, or recurring patterns of experience consisting of conscious and unconscious, verbal and non-verbal, cognitive-affective and behavioural elements. Westen (1991, 1994) emphasises that such an integration may inform the understanding and treatment of clinical phenomena, like depression, anxiety, poor social functioning, and personality disorder, while Westen and Gabbard (1999) suggest that the assimilation cognitive research developments in psychoanalytic thought would inform personality theory, particularly the nature of motivation and the mechanisms involved in understanding a person.

Finally, the integration of concepts of object relations with cognitive ideas has been also attempted by attachment research. Influenced by ethology, cognitive psychology and systems theory, as well as by psychoanalytic ideas, Bowlby maintained that the fundamental dispositions of the human psyche have their roots in a number of behavioural systems, the aim of which is to guarantee survival (Bowlby, 1973, 1980, 1982). Those systems are the attachment, the fear/wariness, the exploratory, the affiliative, the caregiving, and the sexual. While Bowlby and a number of researchers after him focused mainly on the child’s attachment to the mother, interest in the approach has grown over the years also inspiring the more systematic study of adult attachment.

Attachment in children

According to attachment theory, like the young of most other species (Harlow, 1974), the human young are born with an innate, philogenetically determined tendency to seek physical proximity to their caregivers. Such a propensity links the child primarily with one preferred adult, and secondarily with a limited number of others, as the best strategy to protect himself/herself from the various dangers he/she might be exposed to. In the presence of such dangers, or when the caregiver is beyond what the child perceives as a safe distance, the attachment system is activated, all other activity ceases, and closeness to the caregiver is sought. The child can calm down again, deactivate his/her attachment system, and resume his/her endeavours only when proximity with the caregiver is restored and safety is perceived once more.

However, as Bowlby’s theory continued, children’s attempts to increase proximity to the attachment figure are not always responded to by the latter in a way that restores the feeling of safety. When the failure from the part of the caregiver to re-establish physical and psychological closeness is systematic, the child can never fully acquire a sense of security. While the caregiver is experienced as untrustworthy in providing safety and the self as unable to elicit that safety, this unfavourable interaction becomes a mental structure indicating insecurity of attachment. As the role of that structure is to guide expectations, perceptions, and behaviour in all similar subsequent exchanges, an insecurely attached child would tend to expect unsupportive responses from others and would doubt particular abilities in the self. On the other hand, when the response of the parent is appropriate and systematic positive and realistic representations of self and other are constructed in the child’s mind, indicating attachment security, or the expectation that important others will be responsive at a time of need and that the self will be worthy of their attention.

According to Bowlby, exploratory and affiliative activity are also part of the human evolutionary heritage. When human beings do not feel threatened, they tend to explore their environments so that their understanding becomes more comprehensive and their mastery more efficient. They also engage in mainly non-intimate, or affiliative, interactions with other members of the community, in order to strengthen their ties, expand their understanding of the social and physical worlds, and define their place in the group. Moreover, when the attachment system is activated, engagement with activity and non-intimate individuals either ceases, or is seriously compromised, and it can only resume as appropriate when the individual feels safe again.

Influenced by Bowlby’s original formulations, a number of researchers have attempted to empirically assess and conceptually refine the main premises of attachment theory. Ainsworth et al. (1978) provided the first empirical breakthrough by devising the Strange Situation (SS) – an experimental procedure assessing children’s security based on a series of brief separations from and reunion with their mothers. At first, in addition to the secure, two types of insecure attachment were identified, the avoidant and the ambivalent/resistant, while a third one, the disorganised/disorientated, later emerged out of initially unclassifiable cases (Main and Solomon, 1990). While secure children became somewhat but not excessively worried during the brief separations from their mothers, confidently approached her and quickly calmed down when she returned, insecure children reacted differently. Avoidant children pretended they did not notice the mother’s absence while actually they did and seemed to ignore her return; ambivalent children were extremely upset during separation, approached the mother aggressively in reunion, resisting to be picked up and failing to calm down; disorganised children seemed to exhibit “odd” behaviours both during separation and reunion – they would cry very loudly, try to approach the parent and then freeze, or raise hand to mouth upon seeing her. A series of empirical studies showed a strong relationship between the SS attachment patterns, aspects of parent-infant communication, and children’s psycho-social functioning, providing support for the validity of the procedure (Belsky and Cassidy, 1994). These studies suggest that a secure attachment pattern in the child is linked with responsive and supportive caregiving, an avoidant pattern with under-responsive caregiving, an ambivalent pattern with inconsistent responsiveness, and a disorganised pattern with child abuse, neglect, or other frightening parental behaviour.

While in non-clinical middle-class samples in the USA and the UK about 60% of children have been classified as secure, 15% as avoidant, 10% as ambivalent, and 15% as disorganised, in the face of empirical findings suggesting the presence of different pattern distributions in different cultures (Grossman et al., 1981; Sagi et al. 1995; Van Ijzendoorn and Sagi, 1999), the validity of SS has been questioned. Is the meaning of parent-infant separations and reunions different in different cultures, therefore rendering the SS susceptible to cultural biases, or is it that different cultures favour the development of different attachment patterns as part of their particular adaptive strategy in their particular circumstances? Moreover, different pattern distributions in different socio-economic groups within the same culture have further stimulated the debate about the importance of the socio-economic and cultural context in conceptualising and assessing attachment (Van Ijzendoorn and Sagi, 1999).

Most attachment theorists argue that SS is a valid procedure that identifies cross-and inter-cultural variations in the distribution of attachment patterns. According to Bowlby, the attachment system has an adaptive evolutionary value: the infant is biologically programmed to maintain proximity to the parent and the parent is biologically programmed to respond to such signals as that would maximise the child’s chances of survival. Secure children, that is children of well-responsive parents, have the best chance of survival as they would adequately and accurately alert the caregiver in the face of danger, while releasing him/ her and the self after the danger is gone. This claim, however, has been moderated by researchers who maintain that evolutionary theory cannot prove the responsiveness-competence hypothesis, but rather provides the most satisfactory of all existing explanatory frameworks (Hinde and Stevenson-Hinde, 1990). These authors discriminate between biological, cultural, and psychological adaptation and suggest that each realm has its own selection criteria that may well differ, or even be in conflict with, those of another.

Advocating the evolutionary character of the attachment system, Main (1990) argues that secure child responses have been the product of the primary human adaptive strategy, defined by sensitivity to the activators and deactivators of the system. According to Main, all insecure patterns should be viewed as secondary strategies, second-best choices imposed by circumstances. Such sub-optimal ways of dealing with attachment demands can only partially override the authentic, primary state of the attachment system and can be adopted even by entire socio-cultural groups living under particularly demanding conditions.

Nonetheless, a number of authors have argued that cross-cultural research on the validity of attachment theory should go beyond accounting for the SS distributions. Grossmann and colleagues (1999) regard such a focus as reflecting a narrow definition of attachment and opposed it to a more appropriate, wider concept that should examine the general quality of communication in attachment relationships and inform future research. Also supporting a more comprehensive cross-cultural orientation in attachment research, Van Injzerdoon and Sagi (1999) suggest that its focus should be shifted to testing the same theory-derived predictions in different cultures. The confirmation or refutation of such hypotheses, the authors suggest, would be the most appropriate strategy for establishing the ecological validity of the attachment theory and its proposed methodologies. More recent work has followed that general framework (Erdman and Ng, 2010).

In addition, researchers have taken attachment theory beyond an ethological-behavioural orientation suggesting how the theory could account for the complexity of parent-child communication and interpersonal relating in general. As the child grows and his/her cognitive capacities become more sophisticated, the focus on physical proximity that dominates care in the early months is gradually replaced by emotional closeness and the linguistic representations of such care. The human young is gradually introduced to a system of cultural signs that connect the progressively more complex experience of the older child, adolescent, and eventually adult with the most archaic and biologically situated human needs (Bretherton, 1993). It is at that level, the level of representation, that the needs for attachment would be mainly expressed, responded to, and understood throughout development. Fonagy and colleagues (Fonagy et al., 1991; Fonagy and Target, 1997) maintain that attachment security is very closely related to the child’s ability to accurately represent mental states in self and others and that such an ability is determined by how well his/her psychological needs have been “read” by the parent, how accurately they have been represented in the parent’s mind.

A number of studies provide strong evidence for a link between an insecure parent-child relationship and both internalising and externalising child behavioural problems. According to the available evidence, mother-child and father-child attachments have a comparable impact on internalising problems although studies involving fathers are relatively few (Brumariu and Kerns, 2010). Moreover, research suggests that it is children’s disorganised attachment rather than the other two insecure patterns (anxious, avoidant) to be linked with aggression while family adversity, parental hostility, and parental depression are major additional risk factors (Lyons-Ruth, 1996). Research on psychotherapeutic interventions also notes the usefulness of an attachment-focused approach and emphasises the importance of a trusting therapeutic alliance, empathy, and sensitive responsiveness to emotional signals in therapeutic interventions for children (Lieberman and Zeanah, 1999).

Attachment in adults

In agreement with Bowlby’s assertion that interpersonal attachment is a life-long phenomenon, a number of researchers have taken attachment theory beyond the boundaries of child development and into the domain of adult relationships. Weiss (1991) identifies three attachment characteristics that are present in all developmental phases across the lifespan and three that are specific to attachment in the adult years. Following Bowlby’s formulations, Weiss suggests that regardless of his/her child or adult status, when an individual is in distress and the attachment system is activated, that individual will seek proximity to the attachment figure, feel comfort and security when that proximity is attained, and protest when it is not.

While proximity seeking, felt security, and protest characterise attachment thought the life span, Weiss continues, three other elements discriminate between childhood and adulthood attachments. First, attachments in childhood are formed mainly between children and adults, that is between individuals in different phases of development, while in adulthood they are usually formed between peers. Second, unlike attachment in adulthood, disruptions of the attachment system in childhood greatly affect other behavioural systems, such as the exploratory and the affiliative, and, third, unlike attachments of childhood, a main attachment of adulthood, the couple relationship, also involves a sexual relationship.

Commenting further on its peer to peer nature, West and Sheldon (1994) emphasise the reciprocal nature of adult attachment. These authors suggest that adults in attachment relationships are expected to play two roles: that of the attached, which seems to resemble the role of the child, and that of the attachment figure, which seems to resemble that of the parent. Healthy adult attachment requires that both partners alternate between the two roles, depending on the demands of a particular situation. Crowell and Treboux (2001) have noted an additional characteristic of attachment between adults – the fact that for both partners, their attachment relationship is not prototypical. In other words, contrary to the parent-child attachment, that is the first one for the child, both partners in any adult to adult bond have a history of attachment experiences which are expected to inform their relationship.

Particular significance has been assigned by attachment researchers to the couple relationship. Bowlby ascribes particular importance to that relationship, as it is a major source of adult support and intimacy and involves three behavioural systems – attachment, caregiving, and sexual. Based on empirical studies with married couples, Weiss (1976) claims that marriages and committed love relationships, and in special circumstances very close companionships or kin ties, should be discriminated by what we usually call friendships, on the basis of the different function they serve. Although the author does not deny that friendships or other close adult relationships may have attachment components, he points out that what sets apart an attachment relationship is its primary function. The primary function of attachment relationships is to provide security, as opposed to the primary function of a friendship, which is to promote social integration.

A functional definition of adult attachment– that is, based on the identification of its specific aim – rather than a structural one – that is, based on the identification of its specific elements – has also been supported by West and Sheldon (1994, 1989). On the basis of empirical data obtained from a sample of undergraduates, these authors identified ten variables which, in addition to the obvious “sexual intimacy”, discriminated between love relationships and best friendships. These findings appeared consistent with the distinction between the attachment and the affiliative systems proposed by Bowlby and Weiss. On the other hand, authors have argued that attachment needs are fulfilled by a number of close relationships – couples friendships, kin – which are not discriminated qualitatively in terms of the different functions they serve, but rather quantitatively, in terms of the degree to which they fulfil those functions (Heard and Lake, 1986; Rutter, 1995).

Nonetheless, it seems that attachment in the pair-bond acquires a somewhat different flavour, perhaps due to its co-existence with sexuality. It seems that in couple relationships, emotion is “allowed” by cultural prescriptions to be communicated by extended physical contact between the partners, a privilege not given to other relationships with attachment components. At least in Western societies, types of non-sexual physical contact such as prolonged and systematic holding or stroking are usual interactions between pair-bond partners, but they are not prescribed for close friendships or kin ties. In the latter, bodily contact can be somewhat increased only in circumstances of great distress and for a limited time of duration.

Perhaps, such restrictions in bodily contact accompany restrictions in sexual contact, as an originally non-sexual, attachment-based bodily communication may eventually activate the sexual system. As touch, the most archaic of the attachment system’s de-activators, is routinely possible in couple relationships to an extent that seems comparable only to the parent-child bond, the deeper layers of the attachment representation seem to be set in motion and the relationship becomes heavily invested. The couple relationship is also linked with child-rearing, implicating further the care...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction to Attachment Research
• 2  Attachment and Social Groups
• 3  Attachment and Systems of Meaning
• 4  Beyond Dyadic Relationships: The Collective Manifestation of Attachment
• 5  Collective Attachment and the Response to 9/11
• 6  Collective Attachment and the Western Tradition of Coercion and Violence
• Epilogue
• Notes
• References
• Index