GeistHaus

Object Relations

Attachment and Internal Working Models

When we are frightened, hurt or overwhelmed, most of us reach for someone. Who we reach for, whether we expect them to come, and what we do if they don’t are among the most basic facts about a person. Some people call a friend without a second thought. Some wait, hoping to be noticed. Some would rather handle everything alone than risk asking.

Attachment theory, founded by the British psychiatrist and psychoanalyst John Bowlby, holds that humans are born with a biological system for seeking closeness to protective caregivers when threatened (Bowlby, 1969). From thousands of early experiences of being comforted, or not, children build internal working models: largely unconscious expectations about whether others will be available and responsive, and whether the self is worthy of care (Bowlby, 1973). These models then shape how a person approaches closeness, need and help throughout life.

Attachment theory grew out of psychoanalysis and then partly broke away from it, borrowing methods from ethology and developmental psychology. Today it is one of the most heavily researched areas in all of psychology, and it remains in lively dialogue with object-relations thinking about how relationships become part of the mind.

Attachment patterns are not diagnoses, and no pattern is a verdict. Every pattern began as a sensible adaptation to the care that was actually available, and adult patterns can and do change.

Core Ideas

Attachment behavior
Seeking proximity to a specific, trusted person when distressed: crying, calling, following, clinging. In adults, it might be texting a partner after bad news.
Secure base and safe haven
A good attachment figure is both a haven to return to when frightened and a base from which to explore the world with confidence (Ainsworth et al., 1978; Bowlby, 1988).
Internal working models
Mental models of self and others, built from experience, that guide expectations and behavior in close relationships. They are “working” because they are meant to be updated, though in practice they can be quite stable.
Attachment strategies
When care is reliably available, distress can be openly expressed (security). When it isn’t, children adapt by turning attachment signals down (avoidance) or up (anxiety or ambivalence).

How Different Thinkers See It

John Bowlby: Real Experiences Matter

Bowlby trained as a psychoanalyst in London in the 1930s and was supervised by Melanie Klein. He became convinced that analysis paid too little attention to what had actually happened to children: separations, losses, and how parents really behaved. His early study of young thieves linked their difficulties to prolonged early separations from their mothers (Bowlby, 1944). In “The Nature of the Child’s Tie to His Mother” (1958) and the three-volume Attachment and Loss (1969, 1973, 1980) he proposed that the infant’s tie to the caregiver is a primary, biologically based system for protection, not a by-product of feeding or drive satisfaction, and he described the sequence of protest, despair and detachment that follows separation.

Mary Ainsworth: The Strange Situation

Ainsworth made attachment observable. In her Baltimore study and the laboratory procedure known as the Strange Situation, a one-year-old experiences a short series of separations from and reunions with a parent in an unfamiliar room (Ainsworth et al., 1978). What mattered most was the reunion. Secure infants sought comfort, were soothed and returned to play. Avoidant infants seemed unbothered and turned away, though later physiological research suggested they were not as calm as they looked (Sroufe & Waters, 1977). Ambivalent (or resistant) infants were intensely upset, sought contact and resisted it at once, and were hard to settle. Ainsworth linked these patterns to the sensitivity of the mother’s care at home.

Mary Main: Disorganization and the Adult Attachment Interview

Mary Main and Judith Solomon identified a fourth pattern, disorganized/disoriented, in infants who showed contradictory or frozen behavior on reunion, as if they had no workable strategy (Main & Solomon, 1990). A leading hypothesis is that these children faced a caregiver who was at once the source of comfort and of fear, for example because the parent was frightening or frightened, often in connection with unresolved trauma or loss.

Main then moved attachment research “to the level of representation” (Main, Kaplan & Cassidy, 1985). The Adult Attachment Interview (AAI), developed with Carol George and Nancy Kaplan, asks adults about their childhood relationships and losses. Strikingly, it is scored less on what happened than on how the story is told. Drawing on the philosopher Paul Grice’s rules of good conversation, coders assess coherence: whether the account is truthful and supported by examples, appropriately complete without being overlong, relevant, and clear (Hesse, 2008). Secure-autonomous adults can talk about painful childhoods coherently. Dismissing adults offer idealized generalities they cannot back up (“She was a great mother; I don’t really remember specifics”). Preoccupied adults become entangled, angry or vague, as if the past is still happening. Unresolved adults show lapses in reasoning when discussing loss or trauma. A parent’s AAI classification predicts their infant’s Strange Situation classification well above chance (van IJzendoorn, 1995).

Earned Security

One of the most hopeful findings from AAI research is earned security: some adults describe genuinely difficult childhoods yet tell their stories coherently and parent securely (Pearson et al., 1994). Later work debated how much of this reflects real change versus the way people remember (Roisman et al., 2002), but the clinical message has held: what you went through does not fix how you can come to understand it. Relationships with partners, mentors, friends and therapists can revise working models.

Peter Fonagy and Colleagues: From Attachment to Mentalization

Fonagy and colleagues asked what it is about a coherent narrative that matters. In the London Parent–Child Project they rated parents’ reflective functioning, the capacity to understand behavior in terms of mental states such as feelings, beliefs and intentions, from AAI transcripts, and found it predicted their infants’ security (Fonagy et al., 1991). This led to the theory of mentalization (Fonagy et al., 2002): a caregiver who reads the infant’s mind and reflects it back in a digestible way helps the child develop a sense of their own and others’ minds. In this view, attachment security and mentalizing grow together, and both can be strengthened later in life.

Mario Mikulincer and Phillip Shaver: Adult Attachment Dimensions

A parallel line of research in social psychology, beginning with Hazan and Shaver’s (1987) work on romantic love as an attachment process, measures adult attachment with self-report questionnaires. Research using these measures suggested that adult differences are best described not as types but along two dimensions: attachment anxiety (worry about rejection and abandonment, a heightened need for reassurance) and attachment avoidance (discomfort with closeness and dependence, a preference for self-reliance) (Brennan, Clark & Shaver, 1998). Mikulincer and Shaver (2007) linked these to “hyperactivating” and “deactivating” strategies for regulating distress. Interview and questionnaire measures overlap less than one might expect, which reminds us they capture somewhat different things: one the coherence of a life story, the other how people consciously see their relationships.

Attachment and Object Relations: Kin, Not Twins

Attachment theory and object-relations theory both hold that early relationships become templates inside the mind. Bowlby’s internal working models closely resemble what object-relations theorists call internal objects and self–other dyads. But the two traditions parted ways early, and the split was bitter.

Object relations also covers ground attachment theory leaves aside: rivalry, envy, sexuality, aggression, and how people relate to themselves. Attachment theory is especially precise on one question: what happens when we need someone.

How It Shows Up in Adults

Examples

These are composite illustrations, not real individuals.

“I’m Fine, Really”

After a miscarriage, a woman goes back to work two days later and declines offers to talk. When her husband tries to comfort her, she changes the subject. She describes her childhood as “normal, totally fine,” but cannot remember a time her parents comforted her when she was upset. This resembles what researchers call a deactivating strategy: shutting down the need for others before it can be refused.

The Unanswered Text

A man sends his new partner a message and gets no reply for three hours. By the second hour he has reread their recent conversations for signs of coldness; by the third he has drafted, and deleted, a message ending things. When she replies cheerfully from a meeting, relief arrives, along with embarrassment. This fits the pattern of attachment anxiety: a sensitive alarm and difficulty settling it.

Earning It

A teacher grew up with an alcoholic father and a frightened mother. In her twenties she leaned heavily on her grandmother and later on a long, steady friendship. Now she can describe her childhood frankly, with grief and some humor, and without either glossing over it or being swept away. Her story illustrates what researchers mean by earned security.

How It Differs From Look-Alikes

In Personality Styles

Attachment patterns cut across personality styles but have natural affinities. Anxious patterns appear often in dependent and hysterical-histrionic styles; avoidant ones in schizoid and some obsessive-compulsive styles; disorganization and unresolved trauma are associated with emotionally dysregulated and dissociative patterns. These are tendencies in research samples, not rules for individuals. Attachment history also bears on the capacities for trust, empathy and intimacy and affect regulation.

History

Bowlby’s attachment theory took shape between his 1944 study of juvenile thieves, his 1951 report on maternal care for the World Health Organization, and his 1958 paper on the child’s tie to the mother, which drew sharp criticism from colleagues in the British Psychoanalytical Society. Mary Ainsworth, who worked with Bowlby in London and then studied infants in Uganda and Baltimore, supplied the empirical method that made the theory testable, culminating in Patterns of Attachment (1978). Bowlby completed his trilogy in 1980.

In the mid-1980s Main’s work on disorganization and the Adult Attachment Interview shifted the field toward mental representation, while Hazan and Shaver (1987) opened a separate research program on adult romantic attachment. In the 1990s Fonagy, Miriam Steele, Howard Steele and later Mary Target connected attachment to reflective functioning and mentalization, and a growing literature, including Fonagy (2001) and Eagle (2013), began reconciling attachment theory with the psychoanalytic tradition it had left.

Sources