You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The study of attachment is one of the fields in which a very fruitful co-operation has taken place between psychoanalysis and allied disciplines. Introducing the panel, Robert Emde remarked that ‘recent attachment research, building on the theories of Bowlby and the research of Mary Ainsworth, and now two generations of students, has been influential in both developmental psychology and psychoanalysis’. This success has been, in a significant way, the result of the construction of reliable methods for the evaluation of attachment behaviours in children, and for attachment representations in adults (cf., for example, Goldberg et al., 1995, Attachment Theory. Social Development and Clinical Perspectives, London: Analytic Press).
Even though there are different methods, the most widely used have been Mary Ainsworth's ‘strange situation’ (for infants) and Mary Main's ‘adult attachment interview’ (AAI, for adults). According to this first method, infants are categorised into one of four attachment categories: (a) secure; (b) anxious/avoidant; (c) anxious/resistant and (d) disorganised/disoriented. When around a decade ago Mary Main established a system for evaluating autobiographical narratives of adults with categories comparable with the former, a wide field of investigation opened up, relating infantile behaviours to adult attachment representations. The scope of this field was pointed out by Emde, when he mentioned that current investigation faces problems such as the following: (1) how do attachment representations develop in adulthood, and how do they work outside the parental context? (2) How general or specific are these representations? Does normal development convey growing differentiation and specificity? (3) From the point of view of pathology: what are the conditions under which maladaptive, rigid patterns of attachment and representations in adult persist? (4) Which are the correcting processes that enable a modification of such patterns? (5) What