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In 2005, Arietta Slade and her colleagues published an influential article on “the transmission gap” in the theory of attachment (Slade, 2005). The article began from the well-established empirical finding that a mother's attachment status prior to the birth of her child is a strong predictor of the infant's own attachment status when measured using the Strange Situation Test (Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, & Wall, 1978) at 18 months. This finding, which provides empirical support to ideas that have long been around in psychoanalysis, helps to make the case for early intervention, if we wish to give children the best start possible in life. But what should the focus of those interventions be? Or in other words, what is the mechanism by which a parent's attachment status is transmitted to the next generation, and how can those processes be modified? And if we can identity that missing link, and explain the “transmission gap,” what implications would this have for our clinical interventions?
The response that Arietta Slade and others have offered to these questions was apparently simple: The capacity for “maternal reflective functioning” appears to be the key to the transmission of secure attachment from one generation to the next. According to the studies by Slade, Miriam Steele, Mary Target, and others, mothers pass on their own security of attachment by relating to their infant in a mindful way—by being able to interpret their child's behaviors (explicitly or implicitly) in terms of intentional states of mind and helping them to develop a capacity to mentalize. And where this is missing— when the parent is unable to relate to their child as a person with a mind of their own, because of their own difficulties with “reflective functioning”—then this is likely to contribute to their child developing insecure or disorganized patterns of attachment themselves. The clinical implication of this, it was clear, was that interventions should focus not only on parental behaviors (