We followed a normative Finnish sample of primiparous mothers, fathers, and maternal grandmothers from pregnancy until the child was 3 years old (N = 32 families). The Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) was used to assess attachment in mothers, fathers and grandmothers during the last trimester of the mother's pregnancy. The Preschool Assessment of Attachment (PAA) was used to assess attachment in children at 3 years. Forty-seven percent of the 32 grandmother-mother-infant triads had the corresponding attachment classifications. Using EXACON for the analysis of single cells of 3 x 3 contingency tables with type-antitype classifications, and frequency tabulation of the major three-generation combinations, both triads indicating continuity across three generations (B/B/B 22% and A/A/A 19%) and reversal reactions (A/C/A and C/A/C 22%) were found. The results indicated continuity across three generations for Type B and for Type A and alternations from A to C and vice versa for insecure attachment. We discuss the implications of these findings for theory development and clinical work.
This article presents the third study of an interview investigation concerning 10 Finnish war children who were evacuated during the World War II to Sweden and who did not return to live in Finland after the war. The focus is on how they remembered or did not remember their early experiences of displacement and on how they expressed thoughts about their childhood and their adult life. We found that all of them as adults still bore signs of trauma. The younger the children were at the time of the evacuation, the more difficult or even impossible it was for them to think or fantasize about the past. It was consequently not possible for them to work through their experiences of loneliness, absence, and loss. All of them had lost their Finnish mother tongue and their ties to their earlier lives in Finland. The present study focuses on how their thinking and language changed when they during the interview talked about their childhood. Effects were seen on the structure of the language, syntax as well as on their word choices. Their narratives could become incoherent, with unfinished sentences and their emotional language collapsed. We compare their descriptions of their childhood with their accounts of their adult life.
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