What are the four attachment styles?

Secure, anxious-preoccupied, dismissive-avoidant, and fearful-avoidant (sometimes called disorganized). Each names a different configuration along two dimensions: how much anxiety you feel about connection (fear of abandonment) and how much avoidance you feel about closeness (discomfort with dependence).

Who are Bowlby and Ainsworth?

John Bowlby was a British psychiatrist whose three-volume work Attachment and Loss (1969–1980) established attachment theory. Mary Ainsworth, working with Bowlby, developed the Strange Situation experimental paradigm that identified the secure, anxious, and avoidant styles in early childhood. Contemporary research extends this into adult romantic attachment.

Can my attachment style change?

Yes. Attachment patterns are formed in early relationships but are not fixed. Secure attachment can be developed in adulthood through what researchers call "earned security" — via therapeutic relationships, long-term secure partnerships, and the psychological work of making the implicit working model of relationship explicit and available for revision.

How is this different from other attachment tests?

This assessment uses the two-dimensional anxiety/avoidance map (the standard in contemporary adult attachment research) and overlays a depth-psychological reading that names what each pattern reveals about the soul’s early work with closeness, distance, and holding. Your result is a score on each dimension plus a paragraph-length reading that engages the pattern as more than a category label.

Earned security is a worthwhile developmental direction, but depth psychology resists treating any single attachment configuration as a telos. Every pattern carries both constraint and gift. The anxious pattern is also the pattern that feels connection most keenly; the avoidant pattern is also the pattern that can hold boundaries when they matter. The work is not to eliminate the pattern but to know it well enough that it stops running you.

Attachment Style Test — Free Depth-Psychological Assessment

John Bowlby\u2019s attachment theory, developed across the three volumes of Attachment and Loss (1969\u20131980), established that the human infant comes into the world with a specific relational architecture: a need for proximity to a trusted figure, a set of signals that call that figure close when distress arises, and an internal working model of relationship that gets written in the body long before it is available to consciousness. Mary Ainsworth\u2019s Strange Situation research made the different configurations of that working model empirically observable, and the tradition since has extended into adult romantic attachment with increasing sophistication.

This assessment maps you on the two dimensions contemporary research uses: anxiety (how much the system fears abandonment) and avoidance (how much the system fears closeness). Your scores place you in one of four quadrants \u2014 secure, anxious-preoccupied, dismissive-avoidant, or fearful-avoidant \u2014 each of which names a specific configuration of the early relational work the psyche carries forward into adult life.

The Four Patterns

Secure. Low anxiety, low avoidance. Trusts that others can hold distress without withdrawing; tolerates closeness without losing self. About half the adult population tests here.
Anxious-preoccupied. High anxiety, low avoidance. Feels connection keenly, fears loss more than most. Reaches for closeness; reads absence as threat.
Dismissive-avoidant. Low anxiety, high avoidance. Self-sufficient, often to a fault. Closeness registers as pressure; autonomy is load-bearing.
Fearful-avoidant (disorganized). High anxiety, high avoidance. Wants closeness and fears it; approach and withdrawal alternate. Often rooted in early relationships where the attachment figure was also a source of fear.

The Depth-Psychological Reading

Attachment theory gives you the empirical map. Depth psychology asks what the map reveals about the soul\u2019s work. Every pattern is a specific intelligence \u2014 a set of solutions the early psyche arrived at in order to stay in relationship with what was available. The anxious pattern is also a pattern of heightened relational attunement. The avoidant pattern is also a pattern of preserved self-integrity. The disorganized pattern is also the pattern most acquainted with the underworld of relationship \u2014 where love and fear are not separate.

Jung rarely used the attachment vocabulary (it postdated him), but his writings on the mother complex, the anima and animus, and the wounds of early family life engage the same territory. Donald Kalsched\u2019s The Inner World of Trauma (1996) is the most sustained bridge between depth psychology and attachment: his account of the self-care system names what happens when early attachment goes wrong and the psyche must improvise its own holding.

What the Results Will Tell You

Two scores \u2014 one on the anxiety dimension, one on the avoidance dimension \u2014 plotted on a two-dimensional map. Your dominant quadrant is where your scores fall; many people are near a boundary between two, which is its own information. Alongside the map you receive a paragraph-length reading that names the characteristic phenomenology of your pattern and what depth work with that pattern tends to involve.

How the Assessment Works

Thirty-six statements, eighteen per dimension. For each, rate your agreement on a five-point scale. The assessment takes about six minutes. Your results are stored only in your browser \u2014 nothing is sent to a server, no account is required.

Attachment Patterns

The Four Patterns

The Depth-Psychological Reading

What the Results Will Tell You

How the Assessment Works

Further Reading

Attachment Patterns