Infant Attachment and the Origins of Dissociative Processes: An Approach Based on the Evolutionary Theory of Multiple Motivational Systems

The possibility of tracing the origins of emotional difficulties back to infant attachment experiences has been of great appeal, in the past four decades, both to developmental psychopathologists (e.g. Sroufe & Rutter, 1984) and to psychotherapists (e.g. Obegi & Berant, 2008; Slade, 2008; Wallin, 2007). The search by clinicians and researchers to find the roots in early attachment patterns of clinically very relevant aspects of personality development is reflected in the abundance of clinical reflections on this theme and in a mushrooming of research studies. However, careful examination of the rich and extensive literature on the applications of attachment theory and research to psychotherapy may be disappointing to clinicians, for at least two main reasons. First, research on attachment across the life span has yielded a proliferation of different assessment procedures and different classification schemes. Second, while the phrase “attachment based psychotherapy” is often used (Obegi & Berant, 2008), it has been authoritatively argued that although attachment theory and research may be key in informing psychotherapy, they are insufficient for devising a specific type of psychotherapy entirely based on it (Slade, 2008). One reason for this contention is that the relational dynamics upon which attachment theory is focused is only one aspect of the manifold components of human relatedness that should be considered by psychotherapists in their daily practice.

This paper tries to clarify the problems encountered by the clinicians when faced with the many different assessment procedures, classification schemes, and related protocols used by researchers to classify infant and adult attachment patterns. I will then expand on the main psychobiological (motivational) systems that, together with the attachment system, control human behaviour in general and human relatedness in particular from the first months of life onwards. I will argue that the nature of infant attachment