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The development of the human mind during infancy seems to be a dynamic structure like a mighty river, with many tributaries, varying depths, and natural and human-made dams, contributing to the overall power, form, and future of the system. Freud's 1923 perspective that conscious as well as unconscious processes are part of the perceptual apparatus that inform mind reflects a rich, complex, cumulative process (Gedo and Goldberg, 1973). In contrast, the conclusions drawn from attachment research distill development of mind down to the internalized pattern of parental response to infant exploration and anxiety reduction and the acknowledgment of individual differences as the influential motivators of development and the fundamental predictors of behavior during infancy and early childhood (Ainsworth, 1978).
The implications drawn from attachment research ignore dynamic system-based descriptions of the development of mind (Smith and Thelen, 1993), biopsychosocial perspectives of development during infancy and early childhood (Nelson, 2007), and attachment security achieved after infancy through life experience (Phelps, Belsky, and Crnic, 1998). The popular notion of attachment as the source of a baby's developmental course and mental complexity creates a sense of understanding where none really exists. The growth of mind during infancy and early childhood appears to proceed in a messy, systemic, and open manner. This selective survey argues that a theory of development based principally in attachment theory does not account for the phenomena of development or the sort of complex evolution of mind that we do observe during infancy, early childhood, and later.
Bowlby (1979a) postulated that the baby and parent experience shared affect in the attachment process, resulting in varying styles of affect management created through iterative moments of relatedness (pp. 130-131). When his student Ainsworth observed difficulty in the baby's capacity for adaptation to affective