Attachment and Development of the Self

The TBIPS’ Attachment and Affect second year course continues to utilize David Wallin’s very readable and informative 2007 book Attachment in Psychotherapy. In Chapter 7. How Attachment Relationships Shape the Self, Wallin connects the child’s developing sense of self and agency with the caregiver’s capacity to participate in what Lyons-Ruth (1999) termed ‘collaborative communication,’ with its four main components of 1) being receptive to the child’s affects and experience; 2) initiating timely repair of inevitable failures in collaborative communication; 3) providing “scaffolding” [Kohut] to the child’s emerging capabilities; and 4) staying engaged [and/while struggling] with the child even across differences in experience and agendas. [Recall Beebe’s and Lachmann’s (1996) three principles of salience: ongoing affect regulation; timely and consistent repair of ruptures; shared heightened affective moments--providing both security and safe novelty]. It goes without saying that all four elements also serve the therapist and client well.

Being inclusive and open to the “entire array of affective communications” (Lyons-Ruth) of the child’s experience helps the child integrate its feelings, thoughts, and behaviors [unlike, for example, a dismissing parent who implicitly teaches the child that certain feelings or behaviors are unwelcome and thus to be dissociated as ‘not-me’ (Bromberg)]. Lyons-Ruth says a collaborative caregiver actively structures dialogue to elicit the child’s needs and desires. Consistent and timely repair implicitly shapes a child’s expectations about caregivers and the world [Recall Erikson’s first stage Trust v. Mistrust]. Scaffolding supports the child’s emerging sense of self and agency so that the child can safely explore, have experience of self confidence as well as experience that the self’s agency does not jeopardize the relationship. Staying engaged [e.g. surviving, ala Winnicott] fosters the experience of intersubjectivity, allowing for connection even within difference.

Parents of securely attached infants mirror and ‘mark’ [Gergely and Watson, 1996] vocalizations, affect, and facial expressions with midrange [Beebe and Lachmann, 1997] contingency, while low range contingency may predict avoidant and highest range contingency disorganized attachments.  Secure parents, flexibly respond to a child’s needs both for attachment and proximity and for autonomy and exploration. Their communication is collaborative, contingent and affectively attuned. Note that, like Main, Lyons-Ruth (1999) speaks to the coherence of dialogue, using Grice’s criteria for communication: quantity (e.g. succinct while complete), quality (truthfulness and internal consistency), relation and manner (collaborating with listener; relevant). The therapist’s responsiveness also enhances the client’s sense of having effect on the other, enhances agency.

Wallin notes that some (dismissing) patients -- obsessive, narcissistic, schizoid-- may have learned as children (avoidant attachment) to distance themselves from others and to rely on left-brain strategies. Their dismissing parents may have discouraged attachment behaviors. Conversely, hysterical and borderline individuals may hyperactively seek closeness, preoccupied with others, by maximizing emotional distress (ambivalent-resistant attachment as children). Their preoccupied parents may have discouraged autonomy. Unresolved adults, who as children had disorganized attachment without a consistent pattern of coping behaviors, may oscillate between distancing (“avoidance of closeness”) and preoccupation (“terror of abandonment”) and with dissociated affects.

Wallin, D.J. (2007) Attachment in Psychotherapy Chapter 7. How Attachment Relationships Shape the Self. (Guilford Press, NY)

Lyons-Ruth, K. (1999). The Two-Person Unconscious. Psychoanal. Inq., 19(4):576-617