NARRATIVE PROCESS AND ATTACHMENT REPRESENTATIONS: ISSUES OF DEVELOPMENT AND ASSESSMENT

David Oppenheim · Harriet Salatas Waters

125 citations0/0 files storedMonographs of the Society for Research in Child Development

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Attachment and Relationship Dynamics Psychoanalysis and Psychopathology Research Child and Animal Learning Development

Abstract

John Bowlby was a thorough and imaginative scholar. He was also farsighted in his plans for attachment theory. In evolutionary and controlsystems theories, he saw useful alternatives to psychoanalytic motivation models and conceptual foundations that had passed the test of time and could only grow stronger with succeeding generations. Moreover, he perceived how the emerging field of cognitive psychology could play a major role in his efforts to demystify psychoanalytic insights about attachment and adjustment. Most important for current directions in attachment theory, he saw in Craik's (1943) concept of internal working models a way of demystifying and thus preserving psychoanalytic insights about the importance of mental representations in development and adjustment. A great deal of attachment theory and research is based on the controlsystems model and the secure-base concept as developed in the first volume of Attachment and Loss (Bowlby, 1969) and in Ainsworth's empirical and theoretical papers (e.g., Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, & Wall, 1979). Here the focus is on infancy, and any attachment representations are necessarily sensorimotor in nature. The later volumes of Attachment and Loss, several of Bowlby's later writings (e.g., Bowlby, 1988), and a great deal of recent theory and research have focused on mental representations of attachment, which Bowlby referred to as working models. One of the key differences between attachment theory and psychoanalytic theory is Bowlby's consistent emphasis on real rather than intrapsychic events and on ordinary rather than traumatic experiences as determinants of attachment relationships. Both secure-base behavior and attachment working models are said to emerge through everyday child-parent interactions and, although potentially stable, to be open to change in light of new

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