ATTACHMENT SECURITY, AFFECT REGULATION, AND DEFENSIVE RESPONSES TO MOOD INDUCTION

Abstract

Despite disagreeing with important elements of classical psychoanalytic theory, John Bowlby considered many of Freud's ideas about infant-parent and adult-adult relationships to be genuine insights. Among the most important of these propositions are (1) that infants have a complex social and emotional life, (2) that early experiences can have lifelong implications, (3) that mental representations of early experiences mediate effects on later behavior and development, (4) that defensive processes play a role in affect regulation, and (5) that loss of an attachment figure-at any age-is an emergency and mourning is a process that serves an adaptive affectregulation function. Many of Freud's insights about attachment were rooted more in clinical observation than in formal theory. One of Bowlby's most valuable contributions was recognizing that the value of such observations is independent of the theoretical framework in which Freud cast them. Indeed, he recognized that they could be preserved only by recasting them in a more scientifically respectable theoretical framework. Bowlby's (1969/1982) concept of an attachment behavioral system provided an alternative motivational theory/ model that could be expressed in terms of control-systems theory and evolutionary theory. In addition, his working-models concept recast important psychoanalytic insights about mental representation in the language of cognitive psychology.