GeistHaus

Compared To

Attachment Styles

Anxious, avoidant, secure, disorganized. Attachment styles are probably the most widely known psychological vocabulary of the last decade, and for good reason: they are built on sixty years of careful research, they describe something real, and most people recognize themselves in one within a paragraph. They are also, by design, a summary. Each style compresses a whole inner world into a label, and the inner world is what this site is about.

Attachment theory is not a rival to object relations. John Bowlby was an object-relations analyst, trained in the British school, who thought his colleagues relied too much on fantasy and too little on what actually happened between children and caregivers (Bowlby, 1969). The theory he built is object relations with the observations put back in. The styles came later, from Mary Ainsworth’s laboratory and, later still, from questionnaires about adult romance (Ainsworth et al., 1978; Hazan & Shaver, 1987).

The Map

Secure
Comfortable with closeness and with being alone; able to seek comfort and to give it. In object-relations terms, a person with a good internal object, reasonable object constancy, and a self that does not need the other person present to feel real.
Anxious (preoccupied)
Wanting closeness, fearing abandonment, monitoring the other person for signs of withdrawal. The inner scene is a self that is about to be left and an other whose love is uncertain, joined by dread. This is a dyad, and the behaviors that follow from it often run a vicious circle: pursuit produces withdrawal, which confirms the fear. It overlaps with the dependent style.
Avoidant (dismissing)
Valuing independence, discounting the need for others, feeling crowded by closeness. The inner scene is a self that must not need and an other who will disappoint or engulf. The characteristic defenses are isolation of affect, intellectualization and devaluation. It overlaps with the schizoid and obsessive styles.
Disorganized (in adults, often called fearful-avoidant)
Wanting closeness and fearing it, with no stable strategy; the caregiver was both the source of comfort and the source of fear. This is the attachment picture of splitting and of unintegrated good and bad images, and it overlaps with the borderline level of organization. Mary Main’s work on unresolved loss and trauma is the bridge (Main & Hesse, 1990).
Internal working model
Bowlby’s term for the expectations about self and other that a child builds from experience and carries forward. This is the attachment-theory name for an internal object relationship, and for the beliefs it generates.

Where They Agree

Where They Differ

A Note on Quizzes

The adult attachment questionnaires behind most online quizzes were designed for research on populations, not for diagnosing an individual, and they measure a self-report of romantic attachment on one day. The Adult Attachment Interview, the research instrument that predicts a person’s children’s attachment, works quite differently: it scores not what people say about their childhood but how coherently they say it (Main, Kaplan & Cassidy, 1985). That emphasis on the manner of telling, rather than the content, is exactly what a careful listener attends to, and it is closer to how Geist works than any quiz.

Sources