Disorganized Infant, Child, and Adult Attachment: Collapse in Behavioral and Attentional Strategies

Abstract

This presentation focuses on the disorganized/disoriented (Group D) categories of infant, child, and adult attachment. The infant D category is assigned on the basis of interruptions and anomalies in organization and orientation observed during Ainsworth's strange situation procedure. In neurologically normal low-risk samples, D attachment is not substantially related to descriptions of infant temperament, and usually appears with respect to only one parent. At six, former D infants are often found to be role-inverting (D-Controlling) towards the parent, while drawings and separation-related narratives (D-Fearful) suggest continuing states of fear and disorganization. In adults, marked lapses in reasoning and discourse surrounding the discussion of loss or abuse during the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) causes a transcript to be assigned to Unresolved/disorganized (U/d) adult attachment status, which predicts infant D attachment. Bowlby's theory is extended, with the proposal that certain forms of frightening parental behavior will arouse contradictory biologically channeled propensities to approach and to take flight from the parent. Maltreated infants are therefore highly likely to be disorganized. Also identified are subtler forms of frightening parental behavior (including dissociative behavior and anomalous forms of frightened behavior) that appear to lead to infant disorganization. This suggests that infant D attachment may at times represent a second-generation effect of the parent's own continuing unresolved responses to trauma. Infant D attachment predicts disruptive/aggressive and dissociative disorders in childhood and adolescence, while U/d adult attachment appears frequently in psychiatric and criminal populations. Clinical implications are discussed.

Italian translation and cross-cultural comparison with the Childhood Attachment and Relational Trauma Screen (CARTS)

“…Further novel to the current study was an assessment of the concurrent validity of the CARTS in relation to experiences of attachment in adult romantic relationships, where the literature suggests that experiences of childhood attachment predict future adult romantic attachment (Hesse & Main, 2000; Kochendorfer & Kerns, 2017; MacDonald et al, 2008). In the present study, select correlations between CARTS Mother ratings and responses to the ECR-R were significant, in particular in the association with concurrent anxious romantic attachment.…”

How Do I Connect? Attachment Issues in Adolescence

“…Specifically, primary caregivers who are preoccupied with their own needs, are hostile towards their child, and=or are erratic in their responses to infant distress tend to promote insecure (including disorganized and avoidant) attachment (Hesse & Main, 2000;Lyons-Ruth & Jacobvitz, 1999). Guttmann-Steinmatz and Crowell (2006) have cogently argued, however, that attachment insecurity should be viewed as potentiating the development of psychopathology as opposed to psychological disorders of childhood and adolescence being interpreted as attachment problems per se.…”

Disorganized attachment in infancy: a review of the phenomenon and its implications for clinicians and policy-makers

“…However, the attachment response directs an infant to seek safety from their caregiver. The result is a paradoxical situation for the infant (Duschinsky, Main, & Hesse, in press; Hesse & Main, 2000). Albeit to varying degrees, the different behaviors listed by Main and Solomon (1990) can be regarded as consequences of a tendency to approach the attachment figure and a simultaneous tendency to move away from the attachment figure.…”

“…This concrete prediction was one of the core elements of John Bowlby’s (1969) theory and part of what has made attachment theory so compelling and powerful as a research tool and basis for thinking about clinical interventions. Hesse and Main (2000) reasoned that, at an evolutionary level, proximity to even an alarming caregiver would likely have helped a human infant survive, given that infants are unable to fend for or regulate themselves.…”