Attachment Failure

At the most primitive level, failure of attachment may carry with it severe deficits in the early organization of the self. The failure to develop attachment and to achieve a satisfactory symbiosis because of environmental factors, such as institutionalization, may lead to the development of characteristic disturbances such as the inability to keep rules, lack of capacity to experience guilt, and indiscriminate friendliness with an inordinate craving for affection with no ability to make lasting relationships.

Horner, via Flores, argues that primitive attachment failure produces constitutive deficits in self-organization, culminating in the ‘affectionless psychopath’ unable to sustain relational bonds.

Flores, Philip J, Group Psychotherapy with Addicted Populations An, 1997thesis

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failure of attachment may carry with it severe deficits in the early organization of the self… may lead to the development of characteristic disturbances such as the inability to keep rules, lack of capacity to experience guilt, and indiscriminate friendliness with an inordinate craving for affection with no ability to make lasting relationships. The ‘affectionless psychopath’ is also characterized by the failure to develop the affectional bond that goes with attachment.

Flores frames addiction within a developmental account in which early attachment failure generates the character pathology—including the ‘affectionless psychopath’—that makes chemical substitution for relational regulation inevitable.

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

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if the perpetrator is a primary caregiver, it includes a failure of the attachment relationship, undermining the child’s ability to recover and reorganize, to feel soothed or even safe again… Without adequate attunement and development of the social engagement system within a secure attachment relationship, children are not able to create a sense of unity and continuity of the self across the past, present, and future.

Ogden demonstrates that when the perpetrator is also the caregiver, attachment failure compounds trauma by eliminating the very relational resource needed for arousal regulation and self-continuity.

Ogden, Pat, Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy, 2006thesis

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‘growth inhibiting environments’ specifically impair the ontogeny of attachment and self-regulatory systems… such environments afford less than optimal psychobiological attunement histories. These conditions retard the experience-dependent development of affect regulating structure-function relationships.

Schore grounds attachment failure neurobiologically, showing that suboptimal early environments retard the structural development of affect-regulatory brain systems through insufficient psychobiological attunement.

Schore, Allan N., Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self: The Neurobiology of Emotional Development, 1994thesis

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The gamut of childhood circumstances—from secure attachment to disorganized–disoriented attachment to severe, prolonged attachment trauma… engenders different degrees of integrative failure, conceptualized as occurring on a continuum.

Ogden maps attachment failure onto a continuum of integrative failure, with severe attachment trauma at the extreme pole producing profound dissociative fragmentation of self-states.

Ogden, Pat, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Interventions for Trauma and, 2015supporting

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Premature Birth Even with loving parents who are fully capable of strong attachment, trauma can find its way into an infant’s life… the effects of inadequate contact can remain in the physiology and psychology of the developing child and later, in the adult.

Heller extends attachment failure beyond relational neglect to somatic-level deprivations such as inadequate touch in premature infants, embedding the failure in physiological as well as psychological development.

Laurence Heller, Ph D, Healing Developmental Trauma How Early Trauma Affectssupporting

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The relentless overall feeling that something bad is going to happen reflects the reality that something bad has already happened and is being carried forward unconsciously… a state of hypervigilance characterized in NARM as nameless dread.

Heller describes ‘nameless dread’ as the phenomenological signature of early attachment failure, a chronic somatic hypervigilance that encodes historical relational rupture in present-tense bodily experience.

Laurence Heller, Ph D, Healing Developmental Trauma How Early Trauma Affectssupporting

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parental secure attachment was linked to infant secure attachment through high levels of parental mind-mindedness, whereas parental insecure attachment was linked to infant insecure attachment through low levels of parental mind-mindedness.

Lanius presents empirical evidence that attachment failure transmits intergenerationally through deficits in parental mentalizing, with insecure parents’ low mind-mindedness predicting infant insecure attachment.

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

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Deprived of the capacity for symbolic representation of their unhappiness, and therefore the opportunity for emotional processing or transcendence, the traumatised child resorts to projective identification in which the intolerable feelings of excitation and pain are ‘evacuated’ into those to whom he or she is attached.

Holmes, reading Bowlby through Fonagy and Target, argues that attachment failure forecloses symbolic processing and drives the child toward projective identification as a regulatory substitute.

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

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pathological patterns, once internalised, are perpetuated by the sufferers themselves: the vicious circles in which mistrust breeds disappointment, avoidance invites neglect, clinging provokes rejection, depressive assumptions lead to negative experiences which confirm those assumptions.

Holmes identifies the self-perpetuating dynamic by which internalized attachment failure organizes subsequent relational experience into confirming cycles of rejection and deprivation.

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

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those with ‘short’ alleles in the serotonin transporter system are susceptible to adverse environmental influences in childhood such as neglect and abuse… the short version of this gene sensitises the bearer to the impact of childhood maltreatment, and determines whether or not depression becomes chronic.

Holmes situates attachment failure within a gene-environment interaction model, showing that genetic susceptibility mediates the pathway from early relational deprivation to chronic adult depression.

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

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Individuals who later develop a psychiatric disorder, it is found, are far more likely than are those who do not to have received deficient parental care following the loss. Discontinuities of care, including being cared for in unloving foster-homes or institutions and of being moved from one ‘home’ to another, have been the lot of many.

Bowlby marshals survey evidence that psychiatric disorder following parental loss is predicted not by bereavement alone but by the subsequent failure of care—a second-order attachment failure compounding the first.

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

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some develop secondary attachment strategies as a result of less-than-optimal interactions with close others and the recognition that normal proximity seeking is not possible. These secondary strategies can be conceptualized as two orthogonal dimensions of attachment insecurity – anxiety and avoidance that reflect either a hyperactivation or deactivation of the attachment system.

Lench frames insecure attachment as an adaptive response to suboptimal caregiving, organizing the consequences of attachment failure along anxiety and avoidance dimensions representing hyperactivation and deactivation of proximity-seeking.

Lench, Heather C., The Function of Emotions: When and Why Emotions Help Us, 2018supporting

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the capacity of the mother to hold and ‘detoxify’ her infants’ negative affect, and eventually to put unhappiness and mental pain into words as a vital stepping stone towards the growing child’s psychological health.

Holmes aligns Bion’s containing function with Bowlby’s sensitivity construct, implying that attachment failure is constituted by the caregiver’s inability to detoxify and symbolize the infant’s negative affect.

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

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apart perhaps from post-traumatic stress disorders there is no one-to-one link between environmental trauma and psychiatric illness… A more subtle, if less attractively simple, model of stress, vulnerability and buffering is required.

Holmes cautions against reductive models that directly equate attachment failure with specific psychiatric outcomes, advocating instead for a multifactorial model of stress, vulnerability, and buffering.

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

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problems in. see attachment inadequacies or failure procedural learning and, 99–102 relational capacities influenced by, 585, 591–92, 593, 685

This index entry confirms that Sensorimotor Psychotherapy systematically treats attachment inadequacy and failure as organizing concepts linked to procedural learning and relational capacity development.

Ogden, Pat, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Interventions for Trauma and, 2015aside

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