Attachment Patterns

Harry Harlow and John Bowlby Find Mom Guilty

Harry Harlow was an experimental psychologist.  John Bowlby was a clinical child psychiatrist. The publication of Harlow’s research with monkeys helped John Bowlby’s Attachment Patterns Theory gain acceptance. They corresponded and attended some of the same scientific meetings from about 1957 trough the mid-1970s when Harlow retired. Harlow provided the experimental research – the controlled laboratory studies that Bowlby needed to document his theories.

Harlow and Bowlby’s work center about the premise that much of present resentment, anger, and hostility stem from past mistreatment at the hands of a significant other, most often Mother, very early on. Both men’s work were all about the necessity of motherly love.

As I mentioned in my first post on Attachment Theory, when I was born in 1938, psychologists and pediatricians were in agreement that the physical demonstration of motherly love was harmful to the child’s emotional development. So as unbelievable as it is today, both Harlow and Bowlby had a steep uphill battle proving that infants needed any more than feeding and changing. Even major government publications said that is that feeding and changing was all that is required for good infant care.

Bowlby’s development of Attachment Theory began soon after his graduation from Cambridge University, when he was employed in a home for maladjusted boys. He observed that boys who were separated from their mothers suffered intense distress, though they were adequately fed and cared for. And what followed this distress were angry protests and then despair.

“Absent” Moms Create Dumb Psychopaths

Bowlby found that even limited deprivation of three to six months during the first three or four years can produce “affectionless and psychopathic character.” He reported that early maternal deprivation results in dramatically lower IQ scores and poor physical development.

Infants he observed showed listlessness, emaciation, immobility, unresponsiveness, failure to gain weight properly, poor sleep, an appearance of unhappiness, and an inability to love or enter into relationships.

“Not only do threats of abandonment create intense anxiety, but they also arouse anger, often of an intense degree. In this light, I believe, that we can understand such absurdly paradoxical behavior as the adolescent who having murdered his mother, exclaimed, ‘I couldn’t stand to have her leave me.”

When you research senseless mass killings by young people, you can usually come across some sort of emotional or even physical signs of abandonment. It is rare that a child who is loved from infancy will become a killer.  Most young mass killers are victims of serious abuse.

Basic Attachment Patterns

Understanding the three basic patterns of attachment are necessary for the treatment of infants and toddlers, but also for the treatment of youth and adults. Bowlby details both the evidence base and treatment for Attachment Theory in a trilogy of books: “Attachment” 1969, “Separation : Anxiety and Anger” 1972,  and “Loss: Sadness and Depression” (1980).

Below are Bowlby’s three styles or patterns of Attachment from best case to worst.

Secure Attachment Pattern (Best)

The caregiver is warm, giving, and emotionally and physically responsive to the child’s physical and emotional needs.

Anxious Resistant Attachment Pattern (Not good.)

Anxious Resistant Attachment is when the caregiver is available and helpful only some of the time, and threatens the child with abandonment as a means of control. The child is always prone to separation anxiety, tends to cling and is anxious about exploring the world.

Anxious Avoidant Attachment Pattern (Worst of all)

Anxious Avoidant Attachment, worst of the three patterns, is when the mother rebuffs the child whenever he approaches for comfort or protection. The child has no confidence at all that the parent will be there for her/him. In severe cases, the child is constantly rejected, ill-treated, or institutionalized. The child has no confidence he can get help from anyone, and attempts to live his life without the love and support of others. Needless to say, this results in personality disorders and suffering.

I am 80 years old (Yikes!!!) and continue to awaken my wife with screaming nightmares. My mother was completely affectless from my earliest memory on. And my sister told me they (parents) would let me go on crying for hours without coming in to even check.

I have just begun to open my mind to the likelihood that my mother did not have a secure attachment herself.  Actually, I already knew that late in my teenage years after reading Dostoyevsky’s “Notes From the Underground.” I realized the existential question is not who am I, but who is there to blame. And the depressing answer: no one. It gets passed down from one victim to the next.

Focus on the Here and Now

An unhappy past cannot be changed however understandable the suffering may be. Bowlby would say that to continue fighting old battles is unproductive. Even with attachment so dependent on early years, Bowlby broke from Freudian therapy with its roots in the patient’s past.

As with Cognitive Therapy, Attachment Therapy focuses on the here and now, and only brings up past events when the events might shed light on the patient’s present way of dealing with her/his current life.

Self-help books that help:

The Open-Focus Brain: Harnessing the Power of Attention to Heal Mind and Body

Total Self-Renewal through Attention Therapies and Open Focus

Photo Credits:

Gavel     Pixaby Public Domain

Medieval Village Idiot Bing Images  Public Domain

Father and Child   Bing Images  Public Domain

Wedding Cake    Google Public Domain

Introduction to Attachment Theory  YouTube  Public Domain