The infant disorganised attachment classification: “Patterning within the disturbance of coherence”

Sophie Reijman,Sarah Foster,Robbie Duschinsky

doi:10.1016/j.socscimed.2017.12.034

Sophie Reijman, Sarah Foster + Show 1 more

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https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2017.12.034

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Abstract

Since its introduction by Main and Solomon in 1990, the infant disorganised attachment classification has functioned as a predictor of mental health in developmental psychology research. It has also been used by practitioners as an indicator of inadequate parenting and developmental risk, at times with greater confidence than research would support. Although attachment disorganisation takes many forms, it is generally understood to reflect a child's experience of being repeatedly alarmed by their parent's behaviour. In this paper we analyse how the infant disorganised attachment classification has been stabilised and interpreted, reporting results from archival study, ethnographic observations at four training institutes for coding disorganised attachment, interviews with researchers, certified coders and clinicians, and focus groups with child welfare practitioners. Our analysis points to the role of power/knowledge disjunctures in hindering communication between key groups: Main and Solomon and their readers; the oral culture of coders and the written culture of published papers; the research community and practitioners. We highlight how understandings of disorganised attachment have been magnetised by a simplified image of a child fearful of his or her own parent.

Highlights

An established and highly generative tradition of research and theory has explored how scientific and medical classificatory practices are constituted (Bowker et al, 2016; Hacking, 2004; Kendig, 2016), building from Foucault's pioneering work, for instance on societal images of mental illness as chaotic breakdown
Infant “disorganised/disoriented attachment” (Main and Solomon, 1990), generally called “disorganised attachment”, is a classification made of infant-caregiver relationships in the Ainsworth Strange Situation
All sources of data helped support the interpretation of the others, oriented by the overall aim of examining how the disorganised attachment construct has been framed and with what consequences

Summary

Introduction

An established and highly generative tradition of research and theory has explored how scientific and medical classificatory practices are constituted (Bowker et al, 2016; Hacking, 2004; Kendig, 2016), building from Foucault's pioneering work, for instance on societal images of mental illness as chaotic breakdown. Researchers have explored how classifications work, what they do, what relations they make, and with what consequences. Such inquiry attends to the practical activities scientists and clinicians enact (recording, describing, deducing, grouping, measuring, presuming, hazarding, talking past one another), not just the stabilised products of this work (empirical results, distributions of diagnoses, standardised protocols and systems of measurement, propositional knowledge, theories). These features - i.e., the randomness of the behaviours, and their common cause in fear of or for the caregiver may be regarded as the orthodox account of disorganised attachment. This orthodox account, though right in some regards depending on exactly how terms are used, generally oversimplifies the phenomenon in important ways

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