In the past decade or so I’ve been fascinated over the immense growth in popularity of all things “attachment.” Don’t get me wrong, I believe attachment concepts are robust, interesting, and sometimes useful. I guess I’m not on the attachment bandwagon . . . but I’m not altogether off the bandwagon either.

Here’s an excerpt from our Counseling and Psychotherapy Theories text on Attachment-Informed Psychotherapy. I wonder, before you read this do you know the MAIN difference between attachment-informed psychotherapy and psychoanalytic psychotherapy? I ask this because mostly psychoanalytic psychotherapy is in disfavor, but attachment approaches are all the rage. Do you know the difference?

Attachment-Informed Psychotherapy

Attachment, both as a model for healthy child development and as a template for understanding human behavior is immensely popular within the United States (Cassidy & Shaver, 2008; Wallin, 2007). This is especially ironic because attachment theory’s rise to glory parallels decreasing interest in psychoanalytic models. If you were to ask a sample of mental health professionals their thoughts on attachment theory, you’d elicit primarily positive responses—despite the fact that attachment theory is a psychoanalytically oriented approach.

John Bowlby, who was raised primarily by a nanny and sent to boarding school at age seven, began writing about the importance of parent-child interactions in the 1950s. He was a psychoanalyst. Similar to other neo-Freudians, Bowlby’s thinking deviated from Freud’s. Instead of focusing on infant or child parental fantasies, Bowlby emphasized real and observable interactions between parent and child. He believed actual caretaker-infant interactions were foundational to personality formation (aka the internal working model).

In 1970, Mary Ainsworth, a student of Bowlby’s and scholar in her own right, published a study focusing on children’s attachment styles using a research paradigm called the strange situation (Ainsworth & Bell, 1970). Ainsworth brought individual mother-child (6 to 18 months) pairs into her lab and observed them in a series of seven 3-minute episodes or interactions.

1. Parent and infant spending time alone.
2. A stranger joins parent and infant.
3. The parent leaves infant and stranger alone.
4. Parent returns and stranger leaves.
5. Parent leaves; infant left completely alone.
6. Stranger returns.
7. Parent returns and stranger leaves.

During this event sequence, Ainsworth observed the infant’s:

• Exploration behavior.
• Behavioral reaction to being separated from parent.
• Behavioral reaction to the stranger.
• Behavior when reunited with parent.

Based on this experimental paradigm, Ainsworth identified three primary attachment styles. These styles included:

1. Secure attachment.
2. Anxious-resistant insecure attachment.
3. Anxious-avoidant insecure attachment.

In 1986, Ainsworth’s student and colleague Mary Main (1986, 1990), identified a fourth attachment style labeled, disorganized/disoriented attachment.

Many contemporary therapists view attachment theory in general, and Ainsworth and Main’s attachment style formulations in particular, as having powerful implications for human relationships and the therapy process (Eagle, 2003; Wallin, 2007). For example, one of the most popular approaches to couple counseling relies heavily on attachment theory principles (Johnson, 2010). In addition, attachment theory has profoundly influenced child development and parent training programs (J. Sommers-Flanagan & R. Sommers-Flanagan, 2011).

At its core, attachment theory involves an effort to understand how early child-caretaker interactions have been internalized and subsequently serve as a model for interpersonal relationships. This is, of course, the internal working model—with an emphasis on how real (and not fantasized) early relationships have become a guide or template for all later relationships. Byrd, Patterson, and Turchik (2010) describe how attachment theory can help with selecting appropriate and effective interventions:

Therapists may be better able to select effective interventions by taking the client’s attachment pattern into consideration. For instance, a client who is comfortable with closeness may be able to make good use of the therapeutic relationship to correct dysfunctions in his or her working models of self and others. On the other hand, a client who is not comfortable with closeness may find it difficult to change internal working models through the therapeutic relationship. Finally, knowing that a client is not comfortable with closeness would allow the therapist to anticipate a relatively impoverished alliance, and therefore avoid interventions such as insight oriented or object relations therapies that rely heavily on the alliance. (p. 635)

As an internal working model, attachment theory also has implications for how therapists handle within-session interpersonal process. Later in this chapter we provide an attachment-informed psychoanalytic case example (see the Treatment Planning section).

It should be emphasized that many criticisms of attachment theory exist. Some critiques have similarities to criticisms of psychoanalytic theory. Perhaps the greatest criticism is the tendency for individuals to take the Mary Ainsworth’s 21 minutes of behavioral observations with one primary caregiver and generalize it to the entire global population. In this sense, the theory is not especially multiculturally sensitive. It seems obvious that there are many divergent ways to raise children and not all cultures subscribe to the “American” overemphasis and perhaps preoccupation with the infant’s relationship with a single caregiver (usually the mother).

Although scientific critiques have sought to reign in attachment theory as it has galloped its way into pop psychology and the media (Rutter, 1995), its popularity continues to escalate and the consequences seem to magnify the importance of an overly dramatized dance of love between a child and his or her mother. In the following excerpt from A general theory of love, you can see the language is absolute and, interestingly, rather sexist—in that children are typically portrayed as male and parents as female.

One of a parent’s most important jobs is to remain in tune with her child, because she will focus the eyes he turns toward inner and outer worlds. He faithfully receives whatever deficiencies her own vision contains. A parent who is a poor resonator cannot impart clarity. Her inexactness smears his developing precision in reading the emotional world. If she does not or cannot teach him, in adult-hood he will be unable to sense the inner states of others or himself. Deprived of the limbic compass that orients a person to his internal landscape, he will slip through his life without understanding it. (Lewis, Amini, & Lannon, 2001, p. 156)

Take a moment to imagine how Karen Horney or Mary Ainsworth might respond to this overgeneralization of attachment concepts and blaming of mothers for their children’s emotional deficiencies.