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The document discusses the second edition of John Bowlby's influential book 'Attachment,' which integrates his observations and theories on how early environments shape character development. It highlights the importance of interdisciplinary approaches in understanding attachment dynamics and the biological and psychological mechanisms involved. The foreword emphasizes the ongoing relevance of Bowlby's work in contemporary research on attachment and its implications for understanding human development.
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100% found this document useful (12 votes)
226 views17 pages

Attachment - 2nd Edition pdf epub

The document discusses the second edition of John Bowlby's influential book 'Attachment,' which integrates his observations and theories on how early environments shape character development. It highlights the importance of interdisciplinary approaches in understanding attachment dynamics and the biological and psychological mechanisms involved. The foreword emphasizes the ongoing relevance of Bowlby's work in contemporary research on attachment and its implications for understanding human development.
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Attachment - 2nd Edition

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Attachment and Loss
VOL. I: ATTACHMENT

Second Edition

By the same Author


*
Separation:
Anxiety and Anger
(Attachment and Loss, Volume II)
Loss:
Sadness and Depression
(Attachment and Loss, Volume III)
ATTACHMENT AND LOSS
VOLUME I

ATTACHMENT
by
JOHN BOWLBY

Second Edition
Copyright © Tavistock Institute of Human Relations 1969, 1982

Published by Basic Books,


A Member of the Perseus Books Group

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this
book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written
permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical
articles and reviews. For information, address Basic Books, 387 Park
Avenue South, New York, NY 10016-8810.

Library of Congress Catalog Number: 83-71445


ISBN 10: 0-465-00543-8 ISBN-13: 978-0-465-00543-7 (paper) eBook
ISBN: 9780786722730
To
URSULA
Foreword

In 1969, twenty-nine years after his initial publication of an article in the


International Journal of Psycho-Analysis on how the early environment
could influence the development of character (1940), John Bowlby
integrated his career-spanning observations and theoretical
conceptualizations into the first of three influential books on Attachment
and Loss. The foundational volume, Attachment, was groundbreaking.
It focused upon one of the major questions of science, specifically, how
and why do certain early ontogenetic events have such an inordinate effect
on everything that follows? Bowlby presented the essential problems in
such a way that both a heuristic theoretical perspective and a testable
experimental methodology could be created to observe, measure, and
evaluate certain very specific mechanisms by which the early social
environment interacts with the maturing organism to shape developmental
processes.
But perhaps of even more profound significance was his carefully
argued proposition that an interdisciplinary perspective should be applied to
the study of developmental phenomena. The collaborative knowledge bases
of a spectrum of sciences would yield the most powerful models—of both
the fundamental ontogenetic processes that mediate the infant’s first
attachment to another human being, and the essential psychobiological
mechanisms by which these processes indelibly influence the development
of the organism at later points of the life cycle.
“In effect what Bowlby . . . attempted is to update psychoanalytic theory
in the light of recent advances in biology” (Ainsworth, 1969, p. 998).
Bowlby’s deep insight into the synergistic potential of combining what
appeared on the surface to be distantly related literatures now may seem
like a brilliant flash of intuition, but it actually represented a natural
convergence of his two most important intellectual influences, Charles
Darwin and Sigmund Freud. The interweaving of concepts from ethology
(behavioral biology) and psychoanalysis facilitates description of critical
events in both the external and internal world, demonstrating that a
mutually enriching dialogue can be organized between the biological and
the psychological realms (viz., Darwin’s The Expression of Emotions in
Man and Animals and Freud’s Project for a Scientific Psychology).
Whereas both Darwin and Freud primarily (though not exclusively)
focused their observational and theoretical lenses on the adaptive and
maladaptive functioning of fully matured adult organisms, Bowlby argues
that clinical observers and experimental scientists should concentrate on
still-developing organisms. More specifically, he calls for deeper
exploration of the fundamental ontogenetic mechanisms by which an
immature organism is critically shaped by its primordial relationship with a
mature adult member of its species—that is, for more extensive studies of
how an attachment bond forms between infant and mother. Bowlby asserts
that these developmental processes are the product of the interaction of a
unique genetic endowment with a particular environment, and that the
infant’s emerging social, psychological, and biological capacities cannot be
understood apart from its relationship with the mother.
Attachment research has exploded over the thirty years since the
original publication of this volume, attesting to its impact, but Bowlby’s
classic will not be upstaged. On rereading, it continues to reveal subtle
insights into the nature of developmental processes, and to shine light upon
areas of developmental research yet to be explored. In fact, as Bowlby
surveys the uncharted territory of mother-infant relationally driven
psychobiological processes, he identifies its essential topographic
landmarks—the phenomena central to any overarching model of how the
attachment relationship generates both immediate and enduring effects on
the developing individual.
The quality of the experimental and clinical explorations of attachment
theory that have been undertaken since Bowlby’s call for “a far-reaching
programme of research into the social responses of man, from the preverbal
period of infancy onwards” (p. 174), has served as a standard in
psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis generally; its breadth spans
developmental psychology, developmental psychobiology, developmental
neurochemistry, infant psychiatry, and psychoanalysis. What follows not
only applies a psychoneurobiological perspective to Bowlby’s work but also
measures current investigations against Bowlby’s original prescriptions and
isolates for interdisciplinary research certain still uninvestigated areas of the
attachment domain limned in Bowlby’s cartography.1
Most researchers focus on the concepts outlined in the latter two
sections of this seminal volume, where Bowlby expands on his essential
contributions on the infant’s sequential responses to separation from the
primary attachment figure—protest, despair, and detachment—and
introduces Ainsworth’s incrementally stress-producing “strange situation,”
which was soon to become the major experimental paradigm for attachment
research.
Bowlby also addresses what he sees as the fundamental dynamics of the
attachment relationship. In stating that the infant is active in seeking
interaction, that the mother’s maternal behavior is “reciprocal” to the
infant’s attachment behavior, and that the development of attachment is
related both to the sensitivity of the mother in responding to her baby’s cues
and to the amount and nature of their interaction, he lays a groundwork that
presents attachment dynamics as a “reciprocal interchange” (p. 346), a
conceptualization that is perfectly compatible with recent advances in
dynamic systems theory (Schore, 1997b, in press a; Lewis, 1995).
At the very beginning of the section called Attachment Behavior,
Bowlby offers his earliest model of its essential characteristics. It is
instinctive social behavior with a biological function, “readily activated
especially by the mother’s departure or by anything frightening, and the
stimuli that most efficiently terminate the systems are sound, sight, or touch
of the mother” (p. 179). Although he adds that attachment is “a product of
the activity of a number of behavioural systems that have proximity to
mother as a predictable outcome,” he attempts in his second volume (1973)
to refine the set-goal of the attachment system as not just proximity but
access to an attachment figure who is emotionally available and responsive.
A further evolution of this concept is now found in transactional
theories that emphasize the central role of the primary caregiver in co-
regulating the child’s facially expressed emotional states (Schore, 1994,
1998a, in press b), and that define attachment as the dyadic regulation of
emotion (Sroufe, 1996) and the regulation of biological synchronicity
between organisms (Wang, 1997).2 In these rapid, regulated face-to-face
transactions the psychobiologically attuned (Field, 1985) caregiver not only
minimizes the infant’s negative affective states but also maximizes his
positive affective states (Schore, 1994, 1996, 1998b). This proximate
interpersonal context of “affect synchrony” (Feldman, Greenbaum, and
Yirmiya, 1999) and interpersonal resonance (Schore, 1997b, in press b)
represents the external realm of attachment dynamics.
Bowlby concentrates on the internal realm, however; he speculates on
the developing child’s construction of internal working models “of how the
physical world may be expected to behave, how his mother and other
significant persons may be expected to behave, how he himself may be
expected to behave, and how each interacts with the other” (p. 354). That
formulation has evolved into “process-oriented” conceptions of internal
working models as representations that regulate an individual’s relationship
adaptation through interpretive attributional processes (Bretherton and
Munholland, 1999) and encode strategies of affect-regulation (Kobak and
Sceery, 1988; Schore, 1994) and expectations concerning the maintenance
of basic regulation and positive affect even in the face of environmental
challenge (Sroufe, 1989). Current psychobiological models refer to
representations of the infant’s affective dialogue with the mother that can be
accessed to regulate its affective state (Polan and Hofer, 1999).
Interestingly, Bowlby also describes internal working models in the first
eight chapters of the book, which are devoted to instinctive behavior and
collectively constitute the foundation for the later chapters on attachment. A
deeper explication of the fundamental themes of the early section represents
the frontier of attachment theory and research. Bowlby postulates that
internal models function as “cognitive maps” in the brain, and are accessed
“to transmit, store, and manipulate information that helps making
predictions as to how set-goals (of attachment) can be achieved” (p. 80).
Furthermore, he states that “the two working models each individual must
have are referred to respectively as his environmental model and his
organismic model” (p. 82). This is because “sensory data regarding events
reaching an organism via its sense organs are immediately assessed,
regulated, and interpreted. . . The same is true of sensory data derived from
the internal state of the organism” (p. 109). Here Bowlby is pointing to the
need for a developmental theoretical conception of attachment that can tie
together psychology and biology, mind and body.
And so, Bowlby begins “The Task” (Part One) by describing a
theoretical landscape that includes both the biological and social aspects of
attachment, a terrain that must be defined in terms of its structural
organization as well as its functional properties. Following the approach of
all biological investigators, he attempts to elucidate the structure-function
relationships of a living system, but he enriches his vision with the
perspective of developmental biology to focus specifically on the early
critical stages within which the system first self-organizes. Thus the form of
the book is to first outline the general characteristics of the internal
structural system, and then to describe this system’s central functional role
in attachment processes.
Bowlby opens the third chapter by quoting Freud’s (1925) dictum that
“There is no more urgent need in psychology than for a securely founded
theory of the instincts “ His endeavor to meet that need by offering an
“alternative model of instinctive behavior” in essence bespeaks his
conviction that what Freud was calling for was the creation of a model that
could explicate the biology of unconscious processes. Toward that end,
Bowlby starts by proposing that attachment is instinctive behavior
associated with self-preservation, and that it is a product of the interaction
between genetic endowment and the early environment.
Yet he soon launches into a detailed description of a biological control
system centrally involved in instinctive behavior, and organized
hierarchically as “an overall goal-corrected behavioral structure.” Bowlby
also gives some hints as to the neurobiological operations of this control
system; its functions must be associated with the organism’s “state of
arousal,” which results from the critical operations of the reticular
formation, and with “the appraisal of organismic states and situations of the
midbrain nuclei and limbic system” (p. 110). He even offers a speculation
about its anatomical location, the prefrontal lobes (p. 156).
This control system, he says, is “open in some degree to influence by
the environment in which development occurs” (p. 45). More specifically, it
evolves in the infant’s interaction with an “environment of adaptiveness,
and especially of his interaction with the principal figure in that
environment, namely his mother” (p. 180). Furthermore, Bowlby speculates
that the “upgrading of control during individual development from simple
to more sophisticated is no doubt in large part a result of the growth of the
central nervous system” (p. 156). He goes so far as to suggest the temporal
interval critical to the maturation of this control system—nine to eighteen
months (p. 180).
In a subsequent chapter, “Appraising and Selecting: Feeling and
Emotion” Bowlby quotes Darwin’s (1872) observation that the movements
of expression in the face and body serve as the first means of
communication between the mother and infant. Advancing this theme,
Bowlby emphasizes the salience of “facial expression, posture, tone of
voice, physiological changes, tempo of movement, and incipient action” (p.
120). Such input is experienced “in terms of value, as pleasant or
unpleasant” (pp. 111–12) and “may be actively at work even when we are
not aware” of it (p. 110); in this manner feeling provides a monitoring of
both the behavioral and physiological states (p. 121). Thus, emotional
processes lie at the foundation of a model of instinctive behavior.
In succeeding chapters Bowlby concludes that the mother-infant
attachment relation is “accompanied by the strongest of feelings and
emotions, happy or the reverse,” (p. 242), that die infant’s “capacity to cope
with stress” is correlated with certain maternal behaviors (p. 344), and that
the instinctive behavior that emerges from the co-constructed environment
of evolutionary adaptiveness has consequences “vital to the survival of the
species” (p. 137). He also suggests that the attachment system is readily
activated until the end of the third year, when the child’s capacity to cope
with maternal separation “abruptly” improves as “some maturational
threshold is passed” (p. 205).
So the next question is, thirty years after the appearance of this volume,
at the end of the “decade of the brain,” how do Bowlby’s original chartings
of the attachment domain hold up? They were indeed, in a word, prescient.
His bird’s-eye perspective of the internal attachment landscape was so
comprehensive that we now need to zoom in for close-up views of not only
the essential brain structures that mediate attachment processes but also
visualizations of how these structures dynamically self-organize within the
developing brain. The neurobiological studies of Bowlby’s control system
may now be identified with the orbitofrontal cortex, an area that has been
called the “senior executive of the emotional brain” (Joseph, 1996) and that
has been shown to mediate “the highest level of control of behavior,
especially in relation to emotion” (Price, Carmichael, and Drevets, 1996, p.
523). (For more extensive expositions of these concepts and references see
Schore, 1994, 1996, 1997b, 1998a, 1999, in press a, b, c, d, e). The
publication of a new edition of Bowlby’s classic Attachment and Loss
comes at a time when we are able to explore the neuropsychobiological
substrata on which attachment theory is based. Given that “the primordial
environment of the infant, or more properly the commutual
psychobiological environment shared by the infant and mother, represents a
primal terra incognita of science” (Schore, 1994, p. 64), the next generation
of studies of Bowlby’s theoretical landscape will chart in detail how
different early social environments and attachment experiences influence
the unique microtopography of a developing brain.
Such studies will be projecting an experimental searchlight on events
occurring at the common dynamic interface of brain systems that represent
the psychological and biological realms. The right-brain-to-right-brain
psychobiological transactions that underlie attachment processes are fast
acting, bodily based, and critical to the adaptive capacities and growth of
the infant. They call for concurrent measures of brain, behavioral, and
bodily changes in both members of the dyad.3
Furthermore, psychoneurobiological studies of the effects of attuned
and misattuned parental environments will reveal the subtle but important
differences in brain organization among securely and insecurely attached
individuals, as well as the psychobiological mechanisms that mediate
resilience to, or risk for, later-forming psychopathologies. These
interdisciplinary developmental studies can elucidate the mechanisms of the
intergenerational transmission of the regulatory deficits of different classes
of psychiatric disorders, and also can serve as the basis for more refined
treatment models. In a sense, these deeper explorations into the early roots
of the human experience have been waiting for theoretical advances in
developmental neurobiology and technical improvements in methodologies
that can noninvasively image developing brain-mind-body processes in real
time.
Mary Main, a central figure in the continuing development of
attachment theory, observes that “we are currently at one of the most
exciting junctures in the history of our field. We . . . will soon be in a
position to begin mapping the relations between individual differences in
early attachment experiences and changes in neurochemistry and brain
organization. In addition, investigation of physiological ‘regulators’
associated with infant-caregiver interactions could have far-reaching
implications for both clinical assessment and intervention” (1999, pp. 881-
82).
The final word on the meaning of his work goes to Bowlby himself.
“The truth is that the least-studied phase of human development remains the
phase during which a child is acquiring all that makes him most
distinctively human. Here is still a continent to conquer.”

–ALLAN N. SCHORE
UCLA
OCTOBER 1999

Studies on the Neurobiology of Attachment


According to Ainsworth (1967, p. 429), attachment is more than overt
behavior, it is internal, “being built into the nervous system, in the course
and as a result of the infant’s experience of his transactions with the
mother.” Following Bowlby’s suggestion, the limbic system has been
posited as the site of developmental changes associated with the rise of
attachment behaviors (Anders and Zeanah, 1984). Indeed, the specific
period from seven to fifteen months has been shown to be critical for the
myelination and therefore the maturation of particular rapidly developing
limbic and cortical association areas (Kinney et al., 1998); limbic areas of
the human cerebral cortex show anatomical maturation at fifteen months
(Rabinowicz, 1979). Evidence shows that attachment experiences, face-to-
face transactions of affect synchrony between caregiver and infant, directly
influence the imprinting, the circuit wiring of the orbital prefrontal cortex, a
corticolimbic area known to begin a major maturational change at ten to
twelve months and to complete a critical period of growth in the middle to
end of the second year. The time frame for this is identical to Bowlby’s for
the maturation of an attachment control system open to the influence of the
developmental environment.
The cocreated environment of evolutionary adaptiveness is thus
isomorphic to a growth-facilitating environment for the experience-
dependent maturation of a regulatory system in the orbitofrontal cortex.
Indeed, this prefrontal system appraises facial information (Scalaidhe et al.,
1997), and processes responses to pleasant touch, taste, smell (Francis et al.,
1999) and music (Blood et al., 1999) as well as to unpleasant images of
angry and sad faces (Blair et al., 1999). It also modulates the motivational
control of goal-directed behavior (Tremblay and Schultz, 1999), provides a
high level of coding that flexibly coordinates exteroceptive and
interoceptive domains and functions to correct responses as conditions
change (Derryberry and Tucker, 1992), and monitors, adjusts, and corrects
emotional responses (Rolls, 1986).
These functions reflect the unique anatomical properties of this area of
the brain. Due to its location at the ventral and medial hemispheric surfaces,
it acts as a convergence zone where cortex and subcortex meet. It is thus
situated at the apogee of the “rostral limbic system” a hierarchical sequence
of interconnected limbic areas in orbitofrontal cortex, insular cortex,
anterior cingulate, and amygdala (Schore, 1997, in press a, in preparation).
The limbic system is now thought to be centrally involved in the capacity
“to adapt to a rapidly changing environment” and in “the organization of
new learning” (Mesulam, 1998, p. 1028). Emotionally focused limbic
learning underlies the unique and fast-acting processes of imprinting, the
learning mechanism associated with attachment, as this dynamic evolves
over the first and second years. Hinde (1990, p. 62) points out that “the
development of social behavior can be understood only in terms of a
continuing dialectic between an active and changing organism and an active
and changing environment.”
But the orbitofrontal system is also deeply connected into the autonomic
nervous system and the arousal-generating reticular formation, and due to
the fact that it is the only cortical structure with such direct connections, it
can regulate autonomic responses to social stimuli (Zald and Kim, 1996)
and modulate “instinctual behavior” (Starkstein and Robinson, 1997). The
activity of this frontolimbic system is therefore critical to the modulation of
social and emotional behaviors and the homeostatic regulation of body and
motivational states, affect-regulating functions that are centrally involved in
attachment processes. The essential aspect of this function is highlighted by
Westin (1997, p. 542), who asserts that “The attempt to regulate affect-to
minimize unpleasant feelings and to maximize pleasant ones-is the driving
force in human motivation.”
The orbital prefrontal region is especially expanded in the right
hemisphere, and it comes to act as an executive control function for the
entire right brain. This hemisphere, which is dominant for unconscious
processes, computes, on a moment-to-moment basis, the affective salience
of external stimuli. This lateralized system performs a “valence tagging”
function (Schore, 1998a, 1999), in which perceptions receive a positive or
negative affective charge, in accord with a calibration of degrees of
pleasure-unpleasure. It also contains a “nonverbal affect lexicon,” a
vocabulary for nonverbal affective signals such as facial expressions,
gestures, and prosody (Bowers, Bauer, and Heilman, 1993). Because the
right cortical hemisphere, more than the left, contains extensive reciprocal
connections with limbic and subcortical regions, it is dominant for the
processing and expression of emotional information and for regulating
psychobiological states (Schore, 1994, 1998a, 1999; Spence, Shapiro, and
Zaidel, 1996). Thus the right hemisphere is centrally involved in what
Bowlby described as the social and biological functions of the attachment
system (Henry, 1993; Schore, 1994; Shapiro, Jamner, and Spence, 1997;
Wang, 1997; Siegel, 1999).
Confirming this model, Ryan, Kuhl, and Deci (1997, p. 719), using
EEG and neuroimaging data, conclude that “The positive emotional
exchange resulting from autonomy-supportive parenting involves
participation of right hemispheric cortical and subcortical systems that
participate in global, tonic emotional modulation.” And in line with
Bowlby’s assertion that attachment behavior is vital to the survival of the
species, it is now held that the right hemisphere is central to the control of
vital functions supporting survival and enabling the organism to cope with
stresses and challenges (Wittling and Schweiger, 1993).
A growing body of studies shows that the infant’s early-maturing
(Geschwind and Galaburda, 1987) right hemisphere is specifically impacted
by early social experiences (Schore, 1994, 1998b). This developmental
principle is now supported in a recent single photon emission computed
tomographic (SPEGT) study by Chiron et al. (1997), which demonstrates
that die right brain hemisphere is dominant in preverbal human infants, and
indeed for the first three years of life. This ontogenetic shift of dominance
from the right to left hemisphere at this time may explicate Bowlby’s
description of a diminution of the attachment system at the end of the third
year that is due to an “abrupt” passage of a “maturational threshold.”
Current neuropsychological studies indicate that “the emotional
experience (s) of the infant . . . are disproportionately stored or processed in
the right hemisphere during the formative stages of brain ontogeny”
(Semrud-Clikeman and Hynd, 1990, p. 198), that “the infant relies
primarily on its procedural memory systems” during “the first 2-3 years of
life” (Kandel, 1999, p. 513), and that the right brain contains the “cerebral
representation of one’s own past” and the substrate of affectively laden
autobiographical memory (Fink et al., 1996, p. 4275). These findings
suggest that early-forming internal working models of the attachment
relationship are processed and stored in implicit-procedural memory
systems in the right hemisphere. In the securely attached individual, these
models encode an expectation that “homeostatic disruptions will be set
right” (Pipp and Harmon, 1987, p. 650).
Such representations are processed by the right orbitofrontal system,
which is known to generate cognitive-emotional interactions (Barbas, 1995)
in the form of affect-regulating strategies for coping with the positive and
negative emotional interactions inherent in intimate contexts. The efficient
operations of this regulatory system allow for cortically processed
information concerning the external environment (such as visual and
auditory stimuli emanating from the emotional face of the attachment
object) to be integrated with subcortically processed information regarding
the internal visceral environment (such as concurrent changes in the child’s
emotional or bodily self state). The relaying of sensory information into the
limbic system allows incoming information to be associated with
motivational and emotional states, and in this manner the orbitofrontal
system integrates environmental and organismic models.
The functioning of the orbitofrontal control system in “emotion-related
learning” (Rolls, Hornak, Wade and McGrath, 1994) is thus central to self-
regulation, the ability to flexibly regulate emotional states through
interactions with other humans (interactive regulation in interconnected

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