The Two-Person Construction of Defenses: Disorganized Attachment Strategies, Unintegrated Mental States, and Hostile/Helpless Relational Processes*

Since the initial identification of disorganized and controlling forms of attachment behavior 15 years ago, the accumulated findings of attachment research have contributed to a paradigm shift in psychoanalytic thinking toward a more fully relational theory and model of treatment. This research report will provide an overview of recent work charting the developmental pathways and family processes associated with disorganized forms of attachment behaviors in infancy. These research findings both converge with and expand on earlier less systematic analytic clinical observations that have variously described inconsistency or role reversal or coercive discipline in the parenting behaviors of parents of clinically referred children.

Attachment research provides one scientific foundation for positing relational as well as biological contributions to many forms of psychopathology. However, attachment theory also advances a more specific model within the broader relational framework. I will describe some of the more specific tenets of attachment theory regarding the development of psychopathology, and then present a brief overview of recent findings regarding the development of disorganized and controlling forms of attachment behavior.

First, from a research perspective, the attachment system is only one of a number of goal-corrected behavioral/motivational systems, and all or most of the interactions between parents and children will not be integral to the attachment system even in infancy. For example, interactions around play,