Reseña crítica de la teoría del apego.

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A new look at attachment theory & adult "attachment" behaviour - Berghaus, B.J.

Relaciones entre las teorías de Bowlby, Darwin y Freud

Introduction
The purpose of this literature review is to identify and synthesis the relationship between Evolutionary Psychology, the development of Psychoanalytic Theory, and the relationship they each played in shaping Bowlby’s Attachment Theory. Also, in understanding the relationship between these two foundations of psychology this review will attempt to infer connections to the movement of Bowlby’s research in understanding the attachment relationships of young children.  Psychology, as a science, postulates a connection between personality development and early childhood relationships, specifically with primary care providers.  In an attempt to better understand the motivations within the field to connect relationships to personality development, I have chosen to address the historical movements that may have shaped the targets of research in understanding the person.
If we follow the pattern within the development of psychology and the major stages it went through, we would begin to identify major themes that hold relationship to connections humans share with other humans.  Wilhelm Wundt suggested, in his science of mind, that we could understand the inner experiences though analyzing the reported experience others share (Wundt, 1897).  This postulated our connectedness to others through standardizing experiences as universal. Darwin (The Origin of Species, 1909) suggested a connection to others through evolution; he theorizes, through observations, that we share commonalities through genetic adaptations.  Freud (1910) presented his development of psychoanalysis, which would be the foundations of many future theorists and analysts, and demonstrated a theory grounded largely on the relationships between children and their parents; although Freud was not the first to suggest a dependent relationship upon caregivers, Darwin’s suggested the relevance of an attachment relationship to help preserve an genetic proliferation (Brockman, 2007).  These major contributors to attachment suggestions allowed researcher Harry Harlow and theorist Jon Bowlby to collaborate their efforts in legitimizing attachment relationships though studies with Rhesus monkeys and developing a new theory.
Throughout this paper I will discuss concepts of attachment defined as the relationship shared between a child and primary caregiver and caregivers.  I will also discuss the significant theories or concepts that influenced the development of attachment theory such as Evolution and Psychoanalysis. I will be using Darwin’s evolutionary concepts of genetic adaptation and species proliferation. For Psychoanalysis I will be discussing this concepts strictly through the psychosexual theories of Freud’s concepts of child parent relationships. I will also discuss P. Fonagy and M. Target’s concepts of transmission of information. This can be best described as the process by which a mother passes on social information to her children. Reflective functioning will also be discussed.  This is defined as the capacity humans have to understand the implications of human behavior in correlation to a given mental health capacity (Fonagy, 2005).
For the purpose of this paper, I researched attachment considerations in Darwin’s published papers and books.  This theme was researched to begin the connection between Evolutionary Psychology and Psychoanalysis.  Researching the themes of Darwin led to themes of attachment within Freud’s published works.  Finally, I researched the themes of Bowlby and Harlow’s Attachment theories and research to begin piecing together the connection to Freud and Darwin.

Theories
In this section I will discuss the three major theories that will be analyzed for their antecedent influences and the tenets they postulated which could be factors in contributing to the development of attachment theories.  The three theories in question are Evolutionary Psychology, reaching back to the influences of Darwin and his study with the Neonate, Psychoanalysis and Freud’s reaction to Darwin’s theories of evolutionary attachment, and Attachment Theory and how Bowlby’s theories could have been a response to the psychoanalytic movements and the emphasis on unconscious motivators. Although the relationships are mentioned in this section, more detail about their interrelatedness will be given in the following section.
As an overview, Freud was the first to recognize an attachment relationship, in the studies he conducted with the Neonate (Bornstein, R., 1994). However, most commonly associated with Attachment theory and research are Harry Harlow (experimentalist) and John Bowlby (Van der Horst, 2008). There is an interesting relationship between these two individuals. Harlow did work with Rhesus monkeys, Bowlby was purely a theorist. Both began to develop their ideas independently, until Bowlby learned of Harlow’s research through a mutual source. The significance of this new relationship was that Bowlby needed evidence to substantiate his theories and Harlow had the data. Attachment theory suggests a significant relationship between the child and primary caregiver that impacts development of the child either negatively or positively. Through the relationship a child and their caregiver have, the child develops a form of attachment that manifests through various behaviors. Currently, the four types of attachment fall into two categories, secure and insecure: Secure Attachment, Avoidant Attachment, Ambivalent Attachment, Disorganized Attachment (Attachment in Psychotherapy, 2007). Based on the attachment type it is postulated that the personality development of the child will be affected.
Darwin recognized an attachment theme during work on Evolution and what turned into Evolutionary Psychology.  Evolutionary Psychology asserts that there are psychological mechanisms that influence the preservation of a person’s genetic makeup (Schultz, 2008). The psychological mechanisms contribute to the development of relationships that conserve a person’s competence to produce offspring who will also possess this psychological mechanism.
Psychoanalysis can be best understood as a theory of personality development through psychosexual stages.  His theory suggests that an individual is driven by unconscious impulses that are largely a result of unconscious sexual desires to poses the parent of the opposite sex resulting in a conflict to displace the parent o the same sex.  After research with the Neonate, Freud began to develop an understanding of an attachment relationship that exists between the child and primary caregiver.
Attachment theory can be best understood as the descriptive relationship of security or insecurity that exists between a child and their primary caregiver.  Bowlby proposed that the healthy and stable psychological development of a child is hinged on the relationship and stability the primary caregiver offers.

Relationships between theories
I will discuss and synthesize the data suggesting relationships between Evolutionary Psychology, Psychoanalysis, and Attachment Theory.  The first relationship to examine is that of Darwin and Freud, more over, Evolution and Psychoanalysis.  This section will discuss the significant events that occurred within each theories development stages and how these events were connected to one another.  Following the discussion on the relationship between these two theories, I will discuss the significant events that took place in the development of Attachment Theory as they relate to the development of Psychoanalytic Theory.  And finally, I will connect the development of Attachment Theory to the history and development of Evolutionary Psychology.
Bornstein (1994) discussed the relationship between Freudian Psychoanalysis and the Darwin’s theories of evolution.  Bornstein (1994) synthesized Darwin’s theories of social and personal mechanisms that influence the genetic reproduction potential for different species.  He also asserts that Freud was influenced by this research in the development of his theories.

Discussion
Up to this point the literature has identified the major contributions to these three theories of psychology.  It is noted that the relationship between each theory is connected with slightly different ideas of attachment relationship.  Darwin suggested an attachment significant to evolution of species, Freud was impacted by Darwin’s theories of attachment and his own research with the Neonate, and Bowlby expanded the previous thoughts of attachment into an independent theory of psychology.
It appears through synthesizing the research that there appears to be a strong relationship between the theories of Darwin, Freud, and Bowlby.  It appears the original research questions for this paper, does a relationship between Darwin’s evolutionary theory hold a significant relationship with Freud’s psychoanalysis though a historical development of the field; did this relationship between Darwin’s work and Freud’s work establish a foundation for Harlow and Bowlby to build their own theories of attachment?  Darwin’s social and personal mechanisms influenced Freud’s research and studies conducted.  Darwin suggested a biological mechanism of attachment that influenced and guided the reproduction of species.  His theory would suggest an attachment component to between offspring and caregivers.  Freud suggested that there is an attachment relationship after working with the Neonate.  He recognized a component of innate needs to communicate which suggested an innate recognition of the other (Bornstein, 1994).  Harlow and Bowlby have shaped the concepts of Attachment theory that we know today.  Their joined efforts constructed a new understanding of the parent child relationship.  Harlow’s research with rhesus monkeys demonstrated an innate need for comfort and nurturing.  Harlow’s research helped to prove the theories that Bowlby was constructing about parent child relationships.
I would contend that if Darwin had never published his research and postulated an attachment mechanism along with is own studies of neonates, Freud may not have developed his research to address areas of attachment and although Harlow and Bowlby had not yet started their research while Freud was formulating his theories, they may have been redirected to focus their research on other areas of human nature and development.  I would be naive to say that all four theorists and researchers were interdependent upon each other, but I would equally limit the possibilities to say that they did not influence each other’s research.
After analyzing the articles researched and stringing together the connections between Darwin, Freud, Harlow, and Bowlby, it could be possible for further research to address the significance these stages played in shaping psychology today, or how these the absence of these theories could suggest Attachment Theory would have developed anyway, or that another theory would have taken the place of Bowlby’s work.

Por Layne Stoops

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Los experimentos de Harry Harlow

Harry Frederick Harlow (October 31, 1905 – December 6, 1981) was an American psychologist best known for his maternal-separation and social isolation experiments on rhesus monkeys, which demonstrated the importance of care-giving and companionship in social and cognitive development. He conducted most of his research at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow worked for a time with him.
Harlow's experiments were controversial; they included rearing infant macaques in isolation chambers for up to 24 months, from which they emerged severely disturbed. Some researchers cite the experiments as a factor in the rise of the animal liberation movement in the United States.



In a well-known series of experiments conducted between 1957 and 1963, Harlow removed baby rhesus monkeys from their mothers, and offered them a choice between two surrogate mothers, one made of terrycloth, the other of wire.
The studies were motivated by John Bowlby's World Health Organization-sponsored study and report, "Maternal Care and Mental Health" in 1950, in which Bowlby reviewed previous studies on the effects of institutionalization on child development such as René Spitz's and his own surveys on children raised in a variety of settings. In 1953, his colleague, James Robertson, produced a short and controversial documentary film titled A Two-Year-Old Goes to Hospital demonstrating the almost immediate effects of maternal separation. Bowlby's report, coupled with Robertson's film, demonstrated the importance of the primary caregiver in human and non-human primate development. Bowlby de-emphasized the mother's role in feeding as a basis for the development of a strong mother-child relationship. However, his conclusions generated much debate. It was the debate concerning the reasons behind the demonstrated need for maternal care that Harlow addressed in his studies with surrogates.




In Harlow's classic experiment, two groups of baby rhesus monkeys were removed from their mothers. In the first group, a terrycloth mother provided no food, while a wire mother did, in the form of an attached baby bottle containing milk. In the second group, a terrycloth mother provided food; the wire mother did not. It was found that the young monkeys clung to the terrycloth mother whether or not it provided them with food, and that the young monkeys chose the wire surrogate only when it provided food.
Whenever a frightening stimulus was brought into the cage, the monkeys ran to the cloth mother for protection and comfort, no matter which mother provided them with food. This response decreased as the monkeys grew older.
When the monkeys were placed in an unfamiliar room with their cloth surrogate, they clung to it until they felt secure enough to explore. Once they began to explore, they occasionally returned to the cloth mother for comfort. Monkeys placed in an unfamiliar room without their cloth mothers acted very differently. They froze in fear and cried, crouched down, or sucked their thumbs. Some even ran from object to object, apparently searching for the cloth mother, as they cried and screamed. Monkeys placed in this situation with their wire mothers exhibited the same behavior as the monkeys with no mother.
Once the monkeys reached an age where they could eat solid foods, they were separated from their cloth mothers for three days. When they were reunited with their mothers, they clung to them and did not venture off to explore as they had in previous situations. Harlow concluded from this that the need for contact comfort was stronger than the need to explore.
The study found that monkeys who were raised with either a wire mother or a cloth mother gained weight at the same rate. However, the monkeys that had only a wire mother had trouble digesting the milk and suffered from diarrhea more frequently. Harlow's interpretation of this behavior, which is still widely accepted, was that a lack of contact comfort is psychologically stressful to the monkeys.



The importance of these findings is that they contradicted both the then common pedagogic advice of limiting or avoiding bodily contact in an attempt to avoid spoiling children and the insistence of the then dominant behaviorist school of psychology that emotions were negligible. Feeding was thought to be the most important factor in the formation of a mother-child bond. Harlow concluded, however, that nursing strengthened the mother-child bond because of the intimate body contact that it provided. He described his experiments as a study of love. He also believed that contact comfort could be provided by either mother or father. Though widely accepted now, this idea was revolutionary at the time.
Critics of Harlow's research have observed that clinging is a matter of survival in young rhesus monkeys, but not in humans, and have suggested that his conclusions, when applied to humans, overestimate the importance of contact comfort and underestimate the importance of nursing.
Harlow first reported the results of these experiments in "The Nature of Love", the title of his address to the sixty-sixth Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association, Washington, D.C., August 31, 1958.

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La "situación extraña" de Mary Ainsworth

Mary D. Salt Ainsworth (December 1913 – 1999) was an American developmental psychologist known for her work in early emotional attachment with "The Strange Situation" as well as her work in the development of Attachment Theory.

In the 1960s, Ainsworth devised a procedure, called A Strange Situation, to observe attachment relationships between a caregiver and child.
In this procedure of the strange situation the child is observed playing for 20 minutes while caregivers and strangers enter and leave the room, recreating the flow of the familiar and unfamiliar presence in most children's lives. The situation varies in stressfulness and the child's responses are observed. The child experiences the following situations:

1. Parent and infant are introduced to the experimental room.
2. Parent and infant are alone. Parent does not participate while infant explores.
3. Stranger enters, converses with parent, then approaches infant. Parent leaves inconspicuously.
4. First separation episode: Stranger's behaviour is geared to that of infant.
5. First reunion episode: Parent greets and comforts infant, then leaves again.
6. Second separation episode: Infant is alone.
7. Continuation of second separation episode: Stranger enters and gears behaviour to that of infant.
8. Second reunion episode: Parent enters, greets infant, and picks up infant; stranger leaves inconspicuously.

Four aspects of the child's behavior are observed:

1. The amount of exploration (e.g. playing with new toys) the child engages in throughout.
2. The child's reactions to the departure of its caregiver.
3. The stranger aniexty (when the baby is alone with the stranger).
4. The childs reunion behaviour with its caregiver.

On the basis of their behaviors, the children were categorized into three groups, with a fourth added later. Each of these groups reflects a different kind of attachment relationship with the caregiver.

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