Beatrice Beebe - The Origins of Attachment: Infant Research and Adult Treatment

THE ORIGINS OF RELATEDNESS

Film Illustrations

In this chapter we invite you into our motherinfant filming lab to watch several films of motherinfant face-to-face interaction at 4 months. We describe two motherinfant dyads who will be classified as securely attached at 1 year. One illustrates a pattern of facial mirroring, and one a pattern of disruption and repair. We then present a pair at 4 months who will be classified as exhibiting disorganized attachment at 1 year. Based on these films and our findings, we infer what mothers and infants might come to expect in their interactions. The expectancies of dyads on the way to secure attachment, compared to disorganized attachment, are strikingly different. In the following chapter we discuss how infants come to represent their social experiences at this early age.

Microanalysis reveals subtle, split-second events that are often not visible with the naked eye in real time. It is this subterranean level of communication that our research reveals. This level of detail generated new findings on the origins of communication disturbances in infancy. And it is this split-second level of communication which may powerfully inform adult treatment. These moment-to-moment processes are rapid, subtle, co-created by both mother and infant, and generally out of awareness. Nevertheless they continue to influence how we act and feel, from infancy to adulthood. They profoundly affect moment-to-moment communication and the affective climate, organizing different modes of relating.

The motherinfant actiondialogue generates infant and maternal expectancies of how action and interaction sequences unfold from moment-to-moment, within the self, within the partner, and between the self and the partner. The films that we describe illustrate how strikingly different expectancies are created, as these patterns repeat over time and form generalized action-sequence (procedural) memories. These expectancies involve anticipation of what will happen, as well as memories of what has generally happened in the past (Haith, Hazan, & Goodman, 1988). Expectancies refer to the same process that Stern (1985) terms RIGs: representations of interactions generalized, or Bucci (2011) terms emotion schemas.

In our descriptions below we attempt to translate the actiondialogue language into words in an effort to facilitate our understanding of these action sequences. However, we do not imply that as infants develop, these patterns are actually translated into a linguistic format. We assume that early infant expectancies are encoded in a nonverbal, imagistic, acoustic, visceral, or temporal mode of information, and that they may not necessarily be translated into linguistic form (see Bucci, 1985, 1997).

In the section below we describe the interactions of two future secure dyads and one future disorganized attachment dyad. We term them future because the 4-month infant cannot be classified for attachment until 12 months. In the Ainsworth separationreunion paradigm used to assess attachment, infants must be old enough to crawl or walk toward and away from the mother as she leaves and returns (Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, & Wall, 1978). As we look at these dyads at 4 months, we know what the 12-month attachment outcome will be, but that is still in their future.

To understand these films, we first review how we film 4-month face-to-face play, and how the 12-month Ainsworth attachment assessment is conducted. Based on this assessment, infants are classified as secure or insecure (avoidant, resistant, and disorganized). In this chapter we illustrate dyads at 4 months who are on the way to secure, and to disorganized, attachment.

Four-Month Face-to-Face Communication

When infants are 4 months old we invite mothers and infants to our laboratory. We film them as they interact face-to-face. The infant is in an infant seat, and the mother is seated opposite. The mother is instructed to play with her infant as she would at home, but without toys. One camera is focused on the mothers face and hands, and one camera on the infants face and hands. The two cameras generate a split-screen view, so that both partners can be seen at the same time. The mother and the infant are left alone in the filming chamber to play for 510 minutes.

We then painstakingly code 2 minutes of each motherinfant film second-by-second, a microanalysis. It took 10 years to obtain the data we used in the research in this book. Twelve devoted doctoral students coded the films across this period (see Acknowledgements).

Face-to-face communication in the early months of life sets the trajectory for patterns of relatedness as they develop over the lifetime. Face-to-face communication elicits the infants most advanced communication capacities. Its importance for social and cognitive development is widely recognized (Beebe & Lachmann, 2002; Feldman, 2007; Field, 1995; Jaffe, Beebe, Feldstein, Crown, & Jasnow, 2001; Stern, 1985; Malatesta, Culver, Tesman, & Shepard, 1989; Messinger, 2002; Fogel, 1992; Tronick 1989).

This research has documented that motherinfant interaction is a continuous, reciprocally coordinated process, co-created moment-to-moment by both partners. Each partner affects the behavior of the other, often in split-seconds (Beebe, 1982; Beebe & Stern, 1977; Stern, 1971), but not necessarily in similar, symmetrical, or equal ways. We have termed our approach to motherinfant face-to-face communication a dyadic systems approach (Beebe, Jaffe, & Lachmann, 1992; Jaffe et al., 2001; Beebe & Lachmann, 2003; Beebe, Knoblauch, Rustin, & Sorter, 2005).

The dyadic system is defined by the ways that both mother and infant co-create their face-to-face communication. The infant is an active contributor, having a remarkable range of engagement as well as disengagement behaviors (Beebe & Stern, 1977; Brazelton, Koslowski, & Main, 1974; Stern, 1971, 1985; Murray & Trevarthen, 1985). Processes of self-regulation and interactive regulation go on simultaneously within each partner. Each person monitors and coordinates with the partner, and at the same time regulates his or her own inner state. In this view all interactions are a simultaneous product of self- and interactive processes (Gianino & Tronick, 1988; Sander, 1977; Thomas & Martin, 1976; Tronick, 1989). In the process each partner develops expectancies of how I affect you, and how you affect me. Each also develops expectancies of how ones own self-regulation processes unfold.

The 4-month face-to-face paradigm is organized around play, with no other goal than mutual enjoyment (Stern, 1985). In contrast, the attachment paradigm taps fear by assessing how the infant manages the threat of separation and the process of reunion (Cassidy, 1994; Sroufe, Egeland, Carlson, & Collins, 2005; Steele & Steele, 2008). Thus we bring together two different research paradigms which assess different motivational systems. Ainsworth herself believed, as do we, that the two research paradigms are likely to inform one another (Blehar, Lieberman, & Ainsworth, 1977).

Attachment Assessed at 12 Months

In our laboratory, at 12 months mothers and infants take part in the Ainsworth separationreunion paradigm, termed the Strange Situation (Ainsworth et al., 1978). The extent to which the infant uses the parent as a secure base from which to explore, and as a safe haven when distressed, is central to the coding of attachment types.

Mother and infant participate in 3-minute periods of play, separation, and reunion. The sequence is then repeated a second time. In the first separation the infant remains with a stranger, a trained graduate student; in the second the infant is alone. These 3-minute separations are cut short if the infant becomes too distressed. Infants are classified as having a secure or insecure (avoidant, resistant, or disorganized) attachment style based on the infants reactions in the reunion episodes.