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This article intends to summarise the main features of one of the offshoots produced by Attachment research and thinking. Though Patricia Crittenden's DMM (Dynamic Maturational Model) has produced a vast interest in a number of countries across the planet, including Italy, Poland, Russia, Norway, Canada, France, Egypt and Japan, mobilising the attention of researchers in child development, child psychiatrists, social workers and child psychotherapists, she is not widely known in the United Kingdom. DMM is a framework for the study and observation of the organisation of attachment relationships and the Internal Working Models (here identified as strategies for protection from danger), from the perspective of context, culture and maturation.
Another important feature of DMM is the attempt to classify all observed behaviours within the original A, B and C categories as they were introduced by Bowlby and Ainsworth. It objects to the D category on the ground that it would be ineffective in terms of survival, and sets out to carry on a detailed description of features and behaviours within the A, B and C strategies; it aims at including within these categories also the more pathological states of mind and the more dangerous behaviours, with the intention of establishing a diagnostic language on one hand based on unconscious relational legacy, on the other richer in details and scope then the currently used DSM.