ATTACHMENT THEORY AND MENTAL REPRESENTATION
Separation (Bowlby, 1973) and Loss (Bowlby, 1980a), the second and third volumes in Bowlby’s attachment trilogy, were slower to make an impact on the field of developmental psychology than the first volume, in part because relevant empirical studies lagged behind. Like Attachment, these two volumes cover much more theoretical ground that their titles imply.
Separation
In this book, Bowlby (1973) revises Freud’s (1926/1959) theory of signal anxiety, lays out a new approach to Freud’s (1923/1961, 1940/1964) motivational theories, and presents an epigenetic model of personality development inspired by Waddington’s (1957) theory of developmental pathways.
Elaborating on his seminal 1959 paper, Bowlby notes that two distinct sets of stimuli elicit fear in children: the presence of unlearned and later of culturally acquired clues to danger and/or the absence of an attachment figure. Although escape from danger and escape to an attachment figure commonly occur together, the two classes of behavior are governed by separate control systems (observable when a ferocious dog comes between a mother and her young child.
Although Bowlby regarded the systems controlling escape and attachment as conceptually distinct, he considers both as members of a larger family of stress-reducing and safety-promoting behavioral systems, whose more general function is that of maintaining an organism within a defined relationship to his or her environment. Rather than striving for stimulus absence, as Freud had suggested, Bowlby posits that humans are motivated to maintain a dynamic balance betweenfamiliarity-preserving, stress-reducing behaviors (attachment to protective individuals and to familiar home sites, retreat from the strange and novel) and antithetical exploratory and information-seeking behaviors.
After revising Freud’s theories of fear and motivation, Bowlby reexamined Freud’s concept of the “inner world” in light of modern cognitive theory. In Separation, he expands ideas proposed in Attachment by suggesting that, within an individual’s internal working model of the world, working models of self and attachment figure are especially salient. These working models, acquired through interpersonal interaction patterns, are complementary. If the attachment figure has acknowledged the infant’s needs fur comfort and protection while simultaneously respecting the infant’s need for independent exploration of the environment, the child is likely to develop an internal working model of self as valued and reliable. Conversely, if the parent has frequently rejected the infant’s bids for comfort or for exploration, the child is likely to construct an internal working model of self as unworthy or incompetent. With the aid of working models, children predict the attachment figure’s likely behavior and plan their own responses. What type of model they construct is therefore of great consequence.
In Separation, Bowlby also elucidates the role of internal working models in the intergenerational transmission of attachment patterns. Individuals who grow up to become relatively stable and self-reliant, he postulates, normally have parents who are supportive when called upon, hut who also permit and encourage autonomy. Such parents tend not only to engage in fairly frank communication of their own working models of self, of their child, and of others, hut also indicate to the child that these working models are open to questioning and revision. For this reason, says Bowlby, the inheritance of mental health and of ill health through family micro-culture is no less important, and may well he far more important, than is genetic inheritance (Bowlby, 973, p. 323).
Loss
In the third volume of the attachment trilogy, Bowlby (1980a) uses information-processing theories to explain the increasing stability of internal working models as well as their defensive distortion. The stability of internal working models derives from two sources: (a) patterns of interacting grow less accessible to awareness as they become habitual and automatic, and (b) dyadic patterns of relating are more resistant to change than individual patterns because ofreciprocal expectancies.
Given that old patterns of action and thought guide selective attention and information processing in new situations, some distortion of incoming information is normal and unavoidable. The adequacy of internal working models can be seriously undermined, however, when defensive exclusion of information from awareness interferes with their updating in response to developmental and environmental change.
To explain the workings of defensive processes, Bowlby cites evidence showing that incoming information normally undergoes many stages of processing before reaching awareness (see Dixon, 1971; Erdelyi, 1974) At every stage, some information is retained for further processing and the remainder discarded. That this may happen even after information has already undergone very advanced levels of encoding is shown by dichotic listening studies, In these studies, individuals who are presented with different messages to each ear through headphones are able to selectively attend to one of them. That the unattended message is nevertheless receiving high level processing becomes obvious when the person becomes alerted to a word of personal significance (e.g., the person’s name) that has been inserted into the unattended message.