Abstract
Mary Ainsworth’s legacy continues to shape the social and developmental sciences well after her death. The Ainsworth Strange Situation Procedure has, for decades, not only provided the underpinning methodology of attachment research, but also the frame of reference for theory. This has produced conditions where, as in psychoanalysis, debates about the future of the paradigm also entail a struggle to claim and negotiate the legacy of a founding figure. To date, historians have only looked at attachment research up to the 1980s. Interviews with 15 leading contemporary attachment researchers revealed Ainsworth’s importance to later research, but also laid bare the challenges of claiming her inheritance in responding to the current challenges facing this area of research.
Highlights
IntroductionIn the 1950s, a research group led by Bowlby pursued a study of children separated from their caregivers by hospitalization or by foster care
Attachment research has its basis in the work of John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth
Several participants expressed concern that Ainsworth had subsequently been allocated the role of “prophet, god and the queen of attachment.”. They felt that images of Ainsworth and her legacy had sometimes unhelpfully shaped contemporary priorities and perceptions of legitimate research
Summary
In the 1950s, a research group led by Bowlby pursued a study of children separated from their caregivers by hospitalization or by foster care. Bowlby came to theorize that children are predisposed to develop an attachment behavioral system, which directs them to seek the availability of their familiar caregiver or caregivers when alarmed or separated. Among children who had been chronically unable to achieve this availability due to hospitalization, the over-dependent and ambivalent response made sense since the continual pining for the attachment figure expressed an intensification of the attachment behavioral system, together with attendant frustration. The rejecting and avoidant response could make sense as an attempt to suppress the attachment behavioral system and its associated pining for the caregiver or caregivers. Bowlby conceptualized the two responses as opposite ways of dealing with the problem of the lack of assuagement of the attachment behavioral system
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