Internal Working Models (IWMs) occupy a pivotal position within the depth-psychology corpus as the conceptual bridge between Bowlby’s ethological attachment theory and the broader field of representational psychology. Derived from Kenneth Craik’s cybernetic notion of mental models, Bowlby proposed that humans construct and carry two interacting maps — an environmental model of the world and an organismal model of the self in relation to it — assembled from repeated early relational experiences and fundamentally shaped by the availability and responsiveness of attachment figures. The corpus presents IWMs neither as merely cognitive schemas nor as purely affective templates, but as dynamic, affect-laden, and defensively inflected structures that govern expectation, perception, and action across the lifespan. Schore’s neurobiological readings embed IWMs in the right hemisphere’s orbitofrontal circuitry, grounding what Bowlby described abstractly in the actual ontogenesis of affect-regulatory neural architecture. Siegel extends the construct toward memory systems, linking IWMs to implicit memory, multisensory schemas, and narrative coherence. Ogden’s somatic perspective treats IWMs as bodily anticipatory systems shaping action tendencies from infancy onward. The crucial clinical tension the corpus surfaces is between the persistence of early IWMs — their resistance to revision even in the face of disconfirmatory experience — and the genuine possibility of earned security through therapeutic reprocessing. Main’s Adult Attachment Interview research, extensively cited, demonstrates the intergenerational transmission of IWMs, elevating the construct to a mechanism of transgenerational continuity.
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.
This passage delivers the canonical formulation of IWMs, showing how attachment security generates paired self-and-other representational models that generalize to all subsequent intimate relationships.
, John Bowlby and Attachment Theory (Makers of Modern, 2014thesis
Bowlby saw higher animals as needing a map or model of the world in the brain… humans have two such models, an ‘environmental’ model, telling us about the world, and an ‘organismal’ model, telling us about ourselves in relation to the world.
This glossary entry articulates the dual-model architecture of IWMs and traces their cognitive-psychology derivation while noting their application to affective life and defensive functioning.
, John Bowlby and Attachment Theory (Makers of Modern, 2014thesis
Main saw these differences as reflecting underlying differences in internal working models (IWMs) of attachment, that is, representational models built up as the result of actual experience.
The passage establishes Main’s pivotal contribution: adult AAI categories are interpretable as differences in IWMs, and parents’ IWMs predict infants’ Strange Situation classifications at approximately 70 percent accuracy.
, John Bowlby and Attachment Theory (Makers of Modern, 2014thesis
The term internal working models refers to the complex systems of beliefs we have developed about our attachment figures, beginning as infants and very Jung children, in response to repeated experience (Bowlby, 1988). These working models help us anticipate and forecast the future and therefore serve to shape our actions.
Ogden situates IWMs within a sensorimotor framework, arguing that they function as anticipatory action-organizing systems — not merely cognitive beliefs but embodied predispositions that shape behavioral readiness.
, Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy, 2006thesis
An ‘internal working model of attachment’ is a form of mental model or schema… Children carry those to whom they are attached inside of them, in the form of multisensory images (faces, voices, smells, tastes, touches), mental representations of their relationships with them.
Siegel reformulates IWMs as multisensory, implicitly encoded mental schemas and links them to evocative memory and the scriptlike generalization of interpersonal experience, grounding the construct in developmental neuroscience.
, The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are, 2020thesis
The Regulatory Function of Early Internal Working Models… The Affect Regulating Functions of Inceptive Right Hemisphere Internal Working Models.
Schore’s chapter headings announce a neurobiological program: IWMs are primarily right-hemisphere, orbitofrontally mediated affect-regulatory structures whose earliest function is to regulate the infant’s arousal in relation to the attachment object.
, Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self: The Neurobiology of Emotional Development, 1994thesis
The core of the earliest indelible internalized models of the self in relationship with an emotionally significant other, the substratum of self-identity, contains an expectation, a bias, that the primary attachment object will or will not remain available and accessible at times of hypo- or hyperstimulating affective stress.
Schore specifies the content of the earliest IWMs as neurally encoded expectancy biases regarding caregiver availability under affective stress, linking Ainsworth’s concept of internal attachment to physiological coding.
, Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self: The Neurobiology of Emotional Development, 1994supporting
Into this the patient will import all those perceptions, constructions, and expectations of how an attachment figure is likely to feel and behave towards him that his working models of parents and self dictate.
Bowlby here translates IWMs into a clinical register, describing how the therapeutic relationship becomes the arena in which the patient’s working models are enacted and can be examined and revised.
, A Secure Base: Clinical Applications of Attachment Theory, 1988supporting
In attachment research, ‘working model’ is a phrase that describes our basic belief system when it comes to romantic relationships — what gets you going, what shuts you down, your attitudes and expectations.
Levine and Heller translate the IWM construct into the domain of adult romantic attachment, framing it as a practically revisable belief system amenable to therapeutic reshaping.
, Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—and Keep—Love, 2010supporting
Representations, see also Internal working models, Mental images, and Schemas… adaptive regulatory functions of… affective and cognitive components of… encoding expectations… of self and object relationships.
This index entry maps the conceptual territory of representations in Schore’s system, explicitly cross-referencing IWMs with schemas, mental images, and the encoding of expectations, revealing the construct’s centrality to his neurobiological framework.
, Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self: The Neurobiology of Emotional Development, 1994supporting
Attachment, anxiety, internal working models… Around 7 months the baby will begin to show ‘stranger anxiety’, becoming silent and clingy in the presence of an unknown person.
This passage contextualizes the developmental onset of IWM formation within the broader maturational sequence of attachment proper, marking the second half of the first year as the critical period for model construction.
, John Bowlby and Attachment Theory (Makers of Modern, 2014supporting
when a woman manages either to retain or to regain access to such unhappy memories and reprocess them in such a way that she can come to terms with them, she is found to be no less able to respond to her child’s attachment behaviour so that he develops a secure attachment to her
Bowlby demonstrates that therapeutic reprocessing of adverse early experience can effectively modify a mother’s IWMs, thereby interrupting intergenerational transmission of insecure attachment.
, A Secure Base: Clinical Applications of Attachment Theory, 1988supporting
Horner (1989)… offers the proposal that the mental image of the object (mother) is ‘created by the child in accord with his or her limited mental capacities’… these representations become more complex.
Schore draws on object-relations theory to show that the mental representations underlying IWMs are constructed incrementally, their complexity expanding in concert with brain development across infancy.
, Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self: The Neurobiology of Emotional Development, 1994supporting
Insecure children, especially if avoidant, tend to have had mothers who found holding and physical contact difficult, who were unresponsive to their infant’s needs and not well attuned to their rhythms.
The passage traces the phenotypic expression of insecure IWMs in children and adults, linking specific patterns of maternal unresponsiveness to identifiable interpersonal and narrative deficits in offspring.
, John Bowlby and Attachment Theory (Makers of Modern, 2014aside
Infancy → Maternal handling → Attachment pattern → Relationship style → Internal world (a) ‘thinking’ about ‘thinking’ (b) self–other representation.
This schematic diagram of attachment’s developmental trajectory places IWMs — understood as self-other representations and reflective capacity — at the terminus of a pathway beginning with early maternal handling.
, John Bowlby and Attachment Theory (Makers of Modern, 2014aside