Attachment Behaviour

Attachment behaviour has become a characteristic of many species during the course of their evolution because it contributes to the individual’s survival by keeping him in touch with his caregiver(s), thereby reducing the risk of his coming to harm

Bowlby grounds attachment behaviour in evolutionary biology, defining its function as proximity-maintenance for survival, and explicitly rejects the psychoanalytic equation of adult attachment behaviour with pathology or regression.

Bowlby, John, Loss: Sadness and Depression (Attachment and Loss, Volume III), 1980thesis

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Attachment behaviour, like other forms of instinctive behaviour, is mediated by behavioural systems which early in development become goal-corrected… The goal of attachment behaviour is to maintain certain degrees of proximity to, or of communication with, the discriminated attachment figure(s).

Flores reproduces Bowlby’s formal definition, foregrounding the goal-corrected, homeostatic structure of attachment behaviour and its termination conditions as the conceptual basis for understanding addiction as an attachment disorder.

Flores, Philip J., Addiction as an Attachment Disorder, 2004thesis

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when a child’s attachment behaviour is responded to tardily and unwillingly and is regarded as a nuisance, he is likely to become anxiously attached… attachment behaviour I wish to emphasize is that it is a characteristic of human nature throughout our lives—from the cradle to the grave.

Bowlby links the quality of caregiver response to attachment behaviour directly to the formation of secure or anxious attachment patterns, and asserts the lifespan universality of the behaviour against dismissals of adult attachment as immature.

Bowlby, John, A Secure Base: Clinical Applications of Attachment Theory, 1988thesis

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The theory of attachment is an attempt to explain both attachment behaviour, with its episodic appearance and disappearance, and also the enduring attachments that children and other individuals make to particular others. In this theory the key concept is that of behavioural system.

Bowlby clarifies the theoretical distinction between the episodic activation of attachment behaviour and the persisting attachment bond, with the behavioural system concept serving as the explanatory bridge.

Bowlby, John, A Secure Base: Clinical Applications of Attachment Theory, 1988thesis

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behaviour that takes him away from his mother into the wide world, which is conveniently termed exploratory behaviour, is incompatible with attachment behaviour and has a lower priority. It is thus only when attachment behaviour is relatively inactive that exploration occurs.

Bowlby establishes the functional antagonism between attachment behaviour and exploratory behaviour, identifying proximity-seeking as hierarchically dominant and arguing that the secure base enables exploration precisely by deactivating the attachment system.

Bowlby, John, A Secure Base: Clinical Applications of Attachment Theory, 1988thesis

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The securely attached individual when reunited with an attachment figure clings to them for a few minutes and then, in a state of assuagement, can get on with exploratory activity. If the attachment figure is unable to tolerate attachment behaviour or is unavailable, this produces a state of dis-assuagement

Holmes introduces the concepts of assuagement and dis-assuagement to describe the satisfaction or frustration of attachment behaviour, linking caregiver tolerance of the behaviour directly to the child’s capacity for subsequent exploration.

Bowlby, John, John Bowlby and Attachment Theory (Makers of Modern, 2014supporting

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Secure attachment provides a positive ‘primary’ defence; ‘secondary’, pathological defences are methods of retaining proximity to rejecting or unreliable attachment figures.

Holmes reframes defensive organisation in attachment terms, arguing that pathological defences arise specifically as substitutes when attachment behaviour cannot achieve its natural goal of proximity to a responsive figure.

Bowlby, John, John Bowlby and Attachment Theory (Makers of Modern, 2014supporting

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Around 7 months the baby will begin to show ‘stranger anxiety’, becoming silent and clingy in the presence of an unknown person… These changes coincide with the onset of locomotion in the child, which entails a much more complex system of communication if the baby is to remain in secure contact with the mother.

Holmes traces the developmental onset of organised attachment behaviour to the second half of the first year, situating stranger anxiety and locomotion as the behavioural and neuromotor triggers that necessitate a more complex proximity-maintenance system.

Bowlby, John, John Bowlby and Attachment Theory (Makers of Modern, 2014supporting

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children are born with an attachment system that is activated when the child is in or perceives distress. When activated, this system leads to proximity-seeking behaviors (e.g., crying) toward the caregiver who is most likely to provide comfort and protection.

Lanius situates the activation of the attachment behavioural system within a developmental trauma framework, emphasising distress as the trigger and caregiver sensitivity as the moderating variable determining security of attachment.

Lanius, edited by Ruth A, The impact of early life trauma on health and disease the, 2010supporting

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Many people with anxious attachment style, like Emily, live with a chronically activated attachment system without realizing it… Her thoughts, feelings, and behaviors were governed by the

Levine and Heller describe the clinical consequence of a hypersensitive attachment behavioural system in adults, arguing that chronic activation—rather than episodic triggering—characterises the anxious attachment style and governs cognition, affect, and behaviour.

Levine, Amir; Heller, Rachel, Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—and Keep—Love, 2010supporting

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During the early months of life an infant shows many of the component responses of what will later become attachment behaviour, but the organized pattern does not develop until the second half of the first year.

Bowlby differentiates precursor social responses from organised attachment behaviour proper, locating the consolidation of the system in the second half of the first year and tracing the developmental pathway from crying to the full secure-base pattern.

Bowlby, John, A Secure Base: Clinical Applications of Attachment Theory, 1988supporting

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Crying, screaming, shouting, biting, kicking – this ‘bad’ behaviour is the normal response to the threat to an attachment bond, and presumably has the function of trying to restore it, and, by ‘punishing’ the care-giver, of preventing further separation.

Holmes reframes protest behaviour as an adaptive expression of the attachment system under threat, normalising what is conventionally pathologised and identifying separation protest as the primary diagnostic indicator of an attachment bond.

Bowlby, John, John Bowlby and Attachment Theory (Makers of Modern, 2014supporting

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having adopted this novel point of view, I decided to ‘follow it up through the material as long as the application of it seems to yield results’… The resulting conceptual framework is designed to accommodate all those phenomena to which Freud called attention—for example love relations, separation anxiety, mourning, defence, anger, guilt, depression, trauma, emotional detachment

Bowlby situates his ethologically grounded conceptual framework as a systematic alternative to classical metapsychology, arguing that attachment behaviour theory can subsume the full range of phenomena addressed by psychoanalysis without its unscientific postulates.

Bowlby, John, A Secure Base: Clinical Applications of Attachment Theory, 1988supporting

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The alcoholic can be neither, since his attachment relationship remains to his substances. Each does not possess the capacity to feel good about either oneself or the other.

Flores argues that in addiction the attachment behavioural system is redirected onto substances rather than persons, producing a self/other model incapable of genuine intimacy and constitutively incompatible with secure relational functioning.

Flores, Philip J., Addiction as an Attachment Disorder, 2004supporting

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A securely attached child will store an internal working model of a responsive, loving, reliable care-giver, and of a self that is worthy of love and attention, and will bring these assumptions to bear on all other relationships.

Holmes connects the quality of early attachment behaviour interactions to the formation of internal working models, showing how the representational residue of the attachment system extends its influence across all subsequent relationships.

Bowlby, John, John Bowlby and Attachment Theory (Makers of Modern, 2014supporting

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Knowledge of the origins of these deviant patterns confirms in the clearest possible way the influence on a child’s pattern of attachment of the parent’s way of treating his or her child.

Bowlby draws on observational research to demonstrate that deviant patterns of attachment behaviour are traceable to specific parental treatment styles, including unresolved mourning and histories of abuse, providing an empirical basis for intergenerational transmission.

Bowlby, John, A Secure Base: Clinical Applications of Attachment Theory, 1988supporting

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Fails to cry on separation from parent. Actively avoids and ignores parent on reunion (i.e., by moving away, turning away, or leaning out of arms when picked up). Little or no proximity or contact seeking, no distress, and no anger.

Siegel provides the behavioural profile of avoidant attachment, operationalising the suppression of attachment behaviour as a classifiable pattern with corresponding adult narrative correlates in the Adult Attachment Interview.

Siegel, Daniel J., The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are, 2020supporting

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Balint… together with his first wife Alice, had postulated a ‘primary love’ and a primitive clinging instinct between mother and child independent of feeding. Bowlby also saw links between his ideas and those of Fairbairn… who had jettisoned drive-theory in favour of primary object-seeking

Holmes identifies the Hungarian School and Fairbairn as the psychoanalytic precursors closest to Bowlby’s attachment behaviour framework, distinguishing primary object-seeking from drive-reduction as the theoretical basis of the attachment system.

Bowlby, John, John Bowlby and Attachment Theory (Makers of Modern, 2014supporting

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chicks, ducklings, and goslings develop strong attachments for the first moving objects they see at a particular time after hatching… Imprinting is an interesting bit of behavior because it develops in a single session given at the proper time and tends to last indefinitely.

James’s text introduces the ethological phenomenon of imprinting as a phylogenetic analogue to human attachment behaviour, providing the comparative biological grounding that Bowlby drew upon in constructing his behavioural systems framework.

James, William, The Principles of Psychology, 1890aside

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a number of influential analysts… have concluded that a pathological form of response is inevitable and have sought to explain the alleged inevitability by postulating that a child’s ego is too weak and undeveloped ‘to bear the strain of the work of mourning’.

Bowlby surveys the psychoanalytic consensus against which his attachment behaviour framework was constructed, identifying the ego-weakness hypothesis as the primary alternative account of why loss produces pathological rather than adaptive responses in children.

Bowlby, John, Loss: Sadness and Depression (Attachment and Loss, Volume III), 1980aside

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mothers of secure infants respond more promptly when they cry; look, smile at and talk to their babies more… Mothers of avoidant children tend to interact less, and in a more functional way in the first three months

Holmes summarises the observational research linking early maternal responsiveness to infant attachment classification, providing the empirical foundation for the claim that attachment behaviour patterns are shaped by interactional rather than constitutional factors.

Bowlby, John, John Bowlby and Attachment Theory (Makers of Modern, 2014aside

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