Clinical Implications Drawn from the New Biology of Attachment

I usually begin by describing what we have found in our basic laboratory research using animal models, how these give us a new understanding of attachment, and finally, when there's no time left, I get around to mentioning the implications for clinical intervention. In this paper I'm going to begin with the implications, and then tell you about the research that led us to them. I hope that this format will encourage discussion and elicit ideas from you. I think that what I am proposing will fit well with the conclusions coming from attachment researchers working with people and in very different settings. This is as it should be and is reassuring for the future of translation between basic and clinical studies in this area.

The first implication is a relatively broad one, and it concerns the kinds of behaviors and interactions that we try to modify in our interventions. Evidence over the past two decades, from field studies in primates (Kraemer, 1992) and experimental studies in laboratory animals like rats , has convinced most of us that attachment is not a unitary system. It's a concept like appetite, which is composed of a number of different underlying processes such as the development of motor and sensory systems, perception, attention, learning, memory, motivation, and affect, as well as the more complex kinds of experiences focused on in this volume. And together they generate the phenomena we describe as the attachment system, as well as generating other broad areas of functioning. The implication of this is that the focus of intervention, ideally, should be at the level of these constituent processes because these are what make the attachment system work.

Let me give you an example from our research. Only very recently we think we discovered the learning process that underlies the infant's development of the ability to know its own mother and to want to stay close to her. This is the imprinting-like process that Bowlby (1982) hypothesized as