Discussion

EACH PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY OF THE DEVELOPMENT and the workings of the psyche is most convincing at the point of its central thesis and less salient when issues that lie outside its main premise are being considered. Attachment theory's central premise is that infants organize demonstrable patterns of behavior and internal working models in response to the need for a secure base in times of danger and loss. Other psychoanalytic theories have confirmed their central hypothesis. Freud convincingly demonstrated infantile sexuality and the oedipal complex. The existence of important pregenital forces have been substantiated, although with differing emphases by Mahler, object relationists, Klein, and Kohut. None of the other theories have presented more careful observation and research to establish its central premise than attachment. Establishing the three categories (Ainsworth) and the fourth (Main) across the world is a scientific tour de force. The second finding, that the categories have statistically significant predictability over time, adds powerful confirmation. At this point in its development, attachment's secure base hypothesis rests somewhere between a proven pattern of behavior and a more process-organized internal working model or models of attachment responses. The Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) permitted a further discovery of an unexpected strong relation between modes of communication about attachment experiences by an adult, the attachment patterns that adult had as a 1-year old, and the likely attachment pattern of children that that adult will parent. These replicated