ABSTRACT
This chapter defines attachment for children and adults according to findings from the SSP and the AAI. It defines the four attachment processes in two ways. First, a set of definitions refer to individual differences in mental processes. These mental habits of believing, creating memories, and forming anticipatory feelings and relating, when overused give an impression of what can be called the relational character of someone’s personality. Second, mental processes and the tendency of a person to use one particular form should not be confused with the actual moment-to-moment changing dynamic of caring that exists between two persons. Whether or not there is a responsibility of care of any specific sort, from one to the other, it needs to be born in mind that two intimate persons have their own preferences and that what happens between them is the substantial process of attachment. In order to differentiate children and adults, the provision of care to children is called “patterns” and sharing of care between adults is called “processes”. They are comprised of verbal and nonverbal social acts that communicate meanings of care and its absence, reticence, neglect, and slowness to respond, and include the vicissitudes between them. What is presented are the findings of empirical research about secure attachment—the optimal sort, two suboptimal 36insecure processes, and fourth, the disorganised sort. Although there is a continuum of strengths of action and reaction and individual variability, only four discrete phenomena appear in connecting with, or distancing self from others, with some variation in the two dimensions of low and high avoidance and of low and high anxiety. The manner of presentation below is psychodynamic in explaining how consciousness and its ego construe their intimate worlds and determine how to live in them. The purpose is to make specific, observable phenomena understood from a first-person perspective of what it feels like between the parties involved in the same process.
