Hello everyone. I have good news for you and then I have bad news for you.
Which do you want first? Let's start with the good news.
The good news is that I'm traveling to Zagreb to give a one-day seminar to clinicians, and so I won't be able to give you the classes on December 4th and December 11th in person.
Now it's your turn to say, yay!
But here come the bad news.
The bad news is that I'm recording these classes right now and right here in the beautiful city of Ohid, and you have to watch them. And then there will be an exam.
Isn't university horrible? Don't you regret joining in?
Okay, I'll try to make it as easy as possible.
Today we're going to discuss mentalization. Then we're going to discuss internalization, and then we're going to discuss attachment.
And all these are actually topics that influence your daily lives.
Even if you didn't know the words or the phrases, all these dynamic psychological processes happening inside you are in operation, day in and day out, with absolutely every person you meet.
This especially applies to people who matter to you, people who are significant in your life, for example, your intimate partners, or your parents, or your children, once you get married and have children.
In these cases, when the people in your life matter to you a lot, when they are significant, when they are meaningful, when you can't imagine your life without them, in these cases, the psychological processes I'm about to describe, are in full force.
And they start in childhood and they continue until the day you die. They are lifespan forces, lifespan processes.
And this is what we are going to discuss today once I change the settings on my phone so that it doesn't keep turning itself off time and again. The miracles of modern technology.
The first process that I would like to discuss with you is mentalization.
Mentalization is the ability to make sense about how the minds of other people work.
Just a second, there's something with a phone, I will change it and we will all be one big, happy family.
The first process we are going to discuss is mentalization. It is also known as theory of mind.
Think about it for a minute. You come across people, you talk to them, you laugh with them, you have relationships with them.
How do you know that these are human beings?
Maybe there are robots sent from the future.
Do you have any way to prove that people around you are exactly like you? That they experience emotions the way you do? That they think the way you do? That they make decisions and make choices and experience fears and have priorities and dreams and fantasies exactly like you?
The truth is we can't. There's no way we can prove this.
We have to rely on the self-reporting of people. We have to rely on what people tell us.
And there is of course the risk that people are lying to us and that the information that they provide is inaccurate or fallacious or manipulative.
And so when we confront other people, we have to make assumptions.
These assumptions are not scientific. They're not even safe assumptions. They may be completely wrong, but there's no other way.
So we create this theory about what makes other people tick. We create theories about the minds of other people.
We have something called intersubjective space. That is the space of interaction between us and other people.
And then we make assumptions. We create theories, presuppositions about this space and the way people operate in this space together with us.
This is known as theory of mind and the whole process of making these assumptions is known as mentalization.
So for example, if you see someone crying, you would say, well, probably they're sad. Because when I'm sad, I cry.
If you see someone laughing, you would say, well, probably they've heard something funny. Because I laugh when I'm exposed to a joke or something funny.
So what you do is you project yourself. You take parts of yourself, your emotions, your cognitions, your experiences, your personal biography, your predilections, your tendencies, your preferences, your fears, your dreams, you take all these and you attribute them to other people.
You say other people are like me. Other people are like me because they have one head, they have two arms and they have two legs.
That's the only facts you can be sure of when you confront other people.
And so we compare bodies, so we have the same body, and because we have the same body, presumably we experience the world exactly the same, and we react to reality exactly the same.
So as you can see, there's a lot of maybes and buts and ifs in this kind of theory.
But that's the best we can do.
And so a theory of mind starts when you're very young. The first experiences you have with another person is with mother or a maternal figure.
And then if these experiences allow you to understand the other person, to predict the behaviors of the other person, of your mother in this case, then you are able to develop a theory of mind.
If your mother is reliable, stable, a secure base, if she gives you a sense of safety. If you can decipher, decode her behavior, if you can see a connection between the way you behave and the way your mother reacts to you. If you observe your mother and you see that she's consistent, not only with you, but with other people, behaviorally consistent, then you can develop a theory about your mother and your mother's mind.
This is the first theory of mind.
If this theory of mind works, if this theory of mind about your mother proves to be very successful, if consequently you regard your mother as a safe haven, a secure base, you would be able to develop theories of mind in the future regarding other people.
You would feel safe. You would feel that you are capable of, you are competent to develop theories about the minds of other people because you have succeeded to develop such a theory about your mother's mind.
But of course, if the mother is what is known as a dead mother, metaphorically dead mother, not in reality, but psychologically dead mother, if the mother is emotionally absent, if the mother is selfish, if the mother is rejecting, frustrating, a bad mother, a mother who refuses to interact with the child, neglects the child, abandons the child, ignores the child.
This kind of mother does not allow the child to develop a theory of mind. This kind of mother is not safe. She is unstable. She is insecure. She is unpredictable.
So the child is unable to mentalize her. The process of mentalization is disrupted. The child is not able to create a theory about mother, what makes her tick, what provokes her, what triggers her, what changes her behaviors, and what is best to do in order to secure favorable outcomes from mother.
So children who are exposed to bad mothers, and more generally bad parenting, these children cannot understand other people. They fail to understand other people. They cannot develop a theory of mind. They cannot mentalize.
And we have such a case, for example, in borderline personality disorder and in other mental health issues.
The whole idea of mentalization or a theory of mind was first proposed by Fonagy, a Hungarian British psychologist, and it took hold. Today we have been able to prove via studies in neuroscience and studies of the brain we've been able to prove that mentalization indeed takes place and that we really do develop theories about other people.
But these theories are not limited to the minds of other people. As we shall see when we continue this lecture, these theories pertain to yourself in the world, your place in the world, other people in relation to you and other people in relation to themselves, and reality. This is known as the internal working model, and we will come to it a bit later.
At this stage all you need to know is that the child is born, the world is confusing, full of conflicts, full of unexplained phenomena, unpredictable, and a bit terrifying.
And so the child tries to make sense of the world. And initially, at least in the first five to 18 months, the child's world is the mother. The mother is the world. So the child tries to make sense of mother.
This project of making sense of another human being is a very critical phase in human development.
Because when you try to make sense of another human being, you are actually trying to make sense of your separateness, of the fact that you are not that human being.
When you realize that there's someone else out there and that you need to understand them, you need to decode their minds, you need to decipher their behaviors, when you do that, you realize that there are two of you. There's you and there's the other person you're trying to understand. And this gives rise to the sense of self.
Mentalization is crucial in the formation of the self.
As you expand your world, as the child expands his or her world, the child takes in additional people, starting with mother and then father, and then maybe grandmother and grandfather, and then maybe peers and teachers and role models and so on. The child expands outwards to incorporate and include additional people all the time.
And part of this project known as object relations, part of this project, is making sense of it all, making sense of other people especially.
There is no self, there is no core identity, there is no sense of you, there is not becoming you unless you realize that other people are separate from you, that they're external to you, that they are not you, and to some extent they are different to you.
If you do not engage as a child in the project of devising theories about other people, then you don't realize that you are separate from other people. You don't realize that other people have minds which are not like yours. You don't realize that other people have emotions and cognitions and dreams and fears and so on, which are not like yours. You don't realize your distinctiveness. You don't realize that people are different to each other.
And then in this case there is a severe pathology. Some of these people are known as narcissists, others are known as borderlines and so on so forth. These are severe mental health pathologies that involve a disrupted process of mentalization and the inability to recognize the separateness and the externality of other people and the fact that they have a mind that needs to be understood within a coherent cohesive consistent theory.
So this is mentalization. Remember everything we just said, bear that in mind as we progress to Margaret Mahler.
Margaret Mahler, exactly like Jean Piaget, was in love with children, in a good sense. She studied children all her life. She observed children, she worked with children, she, in a way, adopted children emotionally. She made herself into a child as she tried to somehow understand the child's mind.
So did Jean Piaget. These two giants, these two pioneers of the study of childhood psychology, came up with schemes of development which were essentially pretty much alike. Of course, because the raw material was the same. When you study the same topic, you are liable to come up with the same discoveries, with the same ideas.
And so today I will focus on Margaret Mahler, after we have already studied Jean Piaget.
Margaret Mahler believed that the processes that occur in early childhood have an impact on adulthood, that actually adulthood is determined in early childhood. And she thought that the crucial aspect of early childhood was the interplay, the interaction between the child and his or her mother.
Margaret Mahler was not alone in this observation. Melanie Klein said the same. John Bowlby believed the same. Most major scholars of human psychology in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s came to the conclusion that the primary relationship between the child and his mother is the most critical by far.
No one is underestimating the role of the father, but fathers come much later and their roles, their functions in the child's life are of a different character, of a different nature.
The psychology of the child is determined almost exclusively by the mother. And this is the kind of psychology that carries over to adulthood. The child's psychology, as it evolves, becomes the adult psychology. The adult is just a continuation of the child in many ways.
The processes in childhood undergo some transformation but they are still recognizable in adulthood and the mother is at the core of all of this.
Margaret Mahler described the process of separation, individuation.
Margaret Mahler said that when the child is born, initially the child is detached, sleeps all the time, unaware of the environment and unaware of mother.
Later discoveries falsified this assumption. And Margaret Mahler retracted her words. She said, I was wrong.
This initial stage, known as the normal autistic stage, she said, I was wrong. This initial stage, known as the normal autistic stage, she said, I was wrong about that.
The child is never detached. The child is always aware of the environment. And above all, from the first few days, the four or five days, after birth, the child instantly becomes aware of mother.
Children actually react to facial expressions of the mother as early as four or five weeks of age. The newborn reacts to cues emitted or emanated from the mother very early on in the first few days and first few weeks.
The mother smiles. The baby smiles back. The mother is nervous and irritated. Baby becomes fidgety and anxious.
The mother and the child are like a single organism where the baby, the very, very young newborn baby, reflects the mother both behaviorally and psychologically.
And this is what convinced Margaret Mahler that her initial assumption about a normal autistic phase was wrong and that babies are never detached and never oblivious to the environment and always aware of mother.
And so she came up with what is known as the symbiotic phase.
She said that the symbiotic phase lasts until age five months. In these five months, the child regards itself as one with a mother.
Actually, the child has no sense of self whatsoever. The child does not realize that it is separate from mother. The child doesn't realize that mother is separate from himself.
The child and the mother are one entity, a unitary entity. They are one and the same.
And so the child is not only reactive to mother's expressions, behaviors, movements, moods, and effects, but the child also is incapable of perceiving the world, perceiving the environment, perceiving reality, except through the mediation of the mother.
The mother, in other words, becomes the child's reality testing. Everything is mediated through the mother.
When there's a sound, when there's an image, when they're instantly linked in the child's mind with the mother. Everything is the mother.
In a way we could say that the mother is the world, and the world is the mother, and there's nothing except the mother. Even the child is just a part of the mother.
And this is the symbiotic phase in Mahler's work.
The symbiotic phase is very interesting because in this phase the child has no sense of individuality. The child doesn't feel that there is a self or that his or her emotions, its cognitions are coming from the inside.
So there's no conception of external and internal. The child doesn't say, oh, these things are happening inside me, because there's no inside, there's no internal.
Whenever the child has a thought, whenever the child has an emotion, whenever the child is reacting to a sound or an image, whenever there is sensory inputs from the environment, the child attributes them to the mother.
The child subsists, exists through the mother. The mother is the conduit through which the child becomes and through which the child experiences itself and the world.
There's no individuality. There's no internal, external. There's no separateness. Me and the world. There's no externality. I'm here, she's there. None of these.
In a way, the child is non-existent.
We as adults experience ourselves, other people in reality very, very differently. As adults, we realize that people are external to us. We understand that some processes, our emotions, our cognitions, are happening inside us, not outside.
So as adults, we are very different.
This is the essence of existence. We exist because we are separate to other people. We exist because we have boundaries. We exist because we have an internal space, internal environment, internal landscape that is totally different to the external world and is demarcated. There's a boundary, a firewall separating our inside from our outside, from the outside.
So this is the adult experience.
The child, until age six months, doesn't have any of this.
And so we can safely say that the child does not exist until age six months.
So what does exist?
A strange hybrid, a mother child.
But you could look at it in another way. It's a continuation of pregnancy.
What is pregnancy? Pregnancy is when the child is inside the mother.
And so once the child has exited the mother's body, the child continues to be inside the mother psychologically.
We could therefore differentiate, to distinguish, physical pregnancy, where the child is inside the mother physically, continued by psychological pregnancy, where the child is inside the mother mentally, psychologically, still not born in the psychological sense.
Pregnancy continues outside the womb of the mother for another 25 years, actually. The brain continues to develop and the last stages of development of the brain are at the age of 25 years.
So the pregnancy continues outside the mother for a very, very long period of time.
Similarly, psychological birth is much later than physical birth.
Even when we are born physically, we are still one with mother psychologically.
This is important to understand because the process of being born psychologically is very, very complex, very traumatic, very onerous.
The process of being born psychologically is much more difficult than the process of being born physically.
And many, many children don't get it right. They fail to be born psychologically and they spend the rest of their lives as adults mentally ill or mentally disordered or attachment disordered.
In other words, not fully functional, unhappy and essentially non-productive.
So there's a lot that can go wrong in the process of psychological pregnancy and psychological birth.
This was the topic of the study, the focus of the study, of Margaret Mahler.
So according to the revised Margaret Mahler, the first stage after birth is the symbiotic phase. And this is followed by what she called the separation individuation phase.
At some point, the child begins to realize that mother is a separate entity.
You must understand how traumatic this is.
The child perceives itself and the world as part of mother. The whole thing is unitary, it's a single entity.
And then suddenly, this single entity, which is the child's world, breaks down. And suddenly there's child and mother. Suddenly the whole world breaks apart. It's an enormous trauma.
Margaret Mahler and Jean-Pierre and others, speculated as to why this happens, and they were unable to come with a satisfactory answer.
Margaret Mahler said that the child doesn't have an ego, the child doesn't have a self until much later in life, usually two years old or three years old.
But this has been refuted. This has been proven wrong, even 10 years later, in the 60s. We now know that children are born with a rudimentary, a very basic ego, very basic self.
Fairbairn in the 1960s called it the ego nuclei. Daniel Stern described it otherwise. But there is a growing consensus.
The children are born with a template of language and the template of a self, a kind of container that is ready to be filled in with content.
And so the self is there. It's just not fully differentiated, not fully formed, and not cognizant. The child is not conscious of the self.
But the self seems to be there from a very early stage, perhaps a few weeks old.
So Margaret Mahler was wrong about this.
And the question arises, why does the child suddenly reach the conclusion that mother is a separate entity? What in the environment gives rise to this?
In the first few months of life, there is a routine. The routine is unchanging. There is breastfeeding, changing of diapers. Nothing new is happening.
The brain develops, of course, at a very high rate, very high speed, so maybe there are some sensory inputs that alter the consciousness of the child. We don't know.
But I think one thing could explain the sudden separation.
The mother's gaze. The child sees itself in the mother's eyes. The child is reflected in the mother's gaze.
When the child apprehends itself or perceives itself through the mother's gaze, the child realizes, someone is watching me. I am reflected in someone's eyes.
That reflection is not me.
Jacques Lacan called this the mirror effect. The child is mirrored in the mother's gaze. That's the first mirror.
When animals, advanced animals, like primates, chimpanzees and so on, when they're confronted with a mirror, at some point they realize that they're the ones who are reflected in the mirror.
It's the same with the child.
When the child is reflected in the mother's gaze, which is the first mirror, the child realizes, that's me. That's me. This reflection is me.
Of course, it's not physical reflection. It's the mother's love, mother's attention, the mother's caring and compassion. This is the mirror.
And the child says, this is me. I'm the one who is reflected there.
But if I am the one who is reflected there, then there is something outside me. There is someone reflecting me.
And this is how separation starts.
The child begins to realize that the world is not unitary, that the world is full of other entities, except mother, and accept itself.
The child begins to make sense of the world as a plurality, as an agglomeration and accumulation of other people, other objects, other entities and processes.
Interaction. The mother's gaze is the first interaction.
Think about the word interaction. It says, interaction, action between two or more.
So the minute the child is reflected, through the mother's eyes, through her caring, through her attention, that moment the child is psychologically born. That moment, the child begins to grasp the world or reality much more accurately.
The child says, wait a minute, there's someone out there. So there is something external. And if there is something external that is watching me, that is reflecting me, then there is something internal that is being reflected, that is being watched.
And that's something that is being reflected and watched. That's something internal is me.
And this is the first time the child comes across the concept of self.
There is me. There is an I as opposed to mommy. Mommy is not me. I am not mother. We are two separate things.
And that's a giant leap forward, enormous realization, a revolution in thinking, and very traumatizing, very frightening.
The minute the child begins to realize that there is external and internal, that there is the child and the mother, the mother is not the child, etc. The minute the child begins to grasp the concepts of separate and external, the child wants to explore further, wants to explore the world.
And so the child begins to draw away from mother. The child begins to study the environment. The child begins to taste all kinds of things, play with all kinds of things, smell all kinds of things, look at all kinds of things.
The child becomes very curious about everything in the environment and in reality, and the child becomes an explorer, a discoverer.
You know, like the people who discovered Africa in the 19th century, the child's reality is terra incognita, unknown continent. And the child embarks on a tour of exploration and discovery.
To do that, to go out into the world, touch all kinds of things, taste all kinds of things, smell all kinds of things, maybe interact with other people, other children, for example. To do all this, there is one precondition.
The child must let go of mommy, must let go of mother. The child must go away from mother.
A good mother, a good enough mother encourages this. She encourages the child to go away. She even pushes the child away. She wants the child to become an individual, divided from her. She wants the child to become independent, to acquire personal autonomy and agency, to be able to act upon the world and in the world, interact with others.
A good mother wants a child to separate from her and become an individual, and that's why the process is called separation individuation.
And separation and individuation is divided to various stages.
The initial attempts of the child to explore the environment and reality are very hesitant. The child is still afraid to let go of mommy. He goes a little, comes back, and so on so forth.
There's a phase called rapprochement, where the child explores the world and then gets terrified, runs back to mommy and hugs her, and then gradually tries again to separate from her and explore the world.
These are all the outcomes of the observations made by Margaret Mahler as she was working with children.
And any mother knows that this is true. This is exactly what the child does. The child walks away or even crawls away to the environment, to reality, away from mother. The child tastes all kinds of things, touches all kinds of things, and then the child runs back to mother. Mother is known as a secure base.
What happens when the mother is not a secure base? What happens if the mother, for example, is absent physically or emotionally? The mother does not encourage a child to experience reality.
What happens if the mother is insecure? She's overprotective. She's smothering. She does not allow the child to walk away from her. To try and experiment with all kinds of new experiences, to interact with other people and other kids.
What happens if the mother keeps the child with her and never allows the child away from her? What happens if the mother is abusive, abuses the child, mistreats the child? What happens if the mother instrumentalizes the child, uses the child as some kind of tool or instrument?
These kind of mothers who are dysfunctional mothers, they are not good enough mothers. They are what is known as dead mothers. It's a phrase coined by Andre Green, the French psychoanalyst.
These kind of mothers do not allow the child to separate. The child doesn't feel that this kind of mother is a secure base. The child doesn't feel safe. The child is afraid that if it were to explore the world, this kind of mother would abandon him. Or this kind of mother would punish her.
So the child is afraid to walk away from mother. The child is afraid to put distance between itself and mother. The child is afraid to experiment and to explore and to discover and to interact and to taste and to smell and to touch.
The child remains with mother, clinging to mother, terrified of letting go of mother, because letting go of mother may mean losing mother altogether.
Separation, individuation, therefore, can be disrupted. And once it is disrupted, the effects, the impacts are lifelong.
People who as children have failed to separate from their mothers and consequently fail to become individuals, these people throughout life have severe difficulties in relationships because they are unable to perceive other people as separate from them. They're unable to perceive other people as external and they're terrified of exploring reality so they withdraw into fantasy.
This is exactly what happens in pathological narcissism.
Separation individuation is a crucial phase.
Because when you separate from mummy, you realize that the world exists. You realize the existence of the world. You create a mental image or a mental map of internal versus external. You accept that there are other people out there and that they are separate.
All this is crucial. These are crucial survival and relationship skills.
And adults that lack these skills because they have failed to separate and individuate, these adults suffer serious problems in relationships, which we will discuss a bit later.
Mahler introduced the concept of object constancy. Piaget has a similar concept. Piaget called it object permanence.
Object constancy or object permanence is when the child is able to create an image of mother or an image of other important people, later an image of a father, an image of a teacher, an image of an influential peer.
When the child is able to create images of other people, I call these images snapshots. So when the child is able to create these snapshots and internalize these snapshots, creates a library of these snapshots, and then these snapshots represent these people when they are physically absent.
So initially the child takes a snapshot of mother. The child is terrified that mother will abandon it because a child abandoned by his mother is a dead child. Being abandoned by mother threatens the child's survival.
So the child creates an image of mother. The child internalizes this image of mother, and then the child feels safe.
Because even when mother is not in the room, even when mother is traveling, even when mother is at work, the child has an image of mother in his or her mind.
And this image of mother represents mother. This image of mother feels like mother. This image of mother substitutes for mother when she is not there.
And this is known as object constancy or object permanence. It's a crucial key feature.
When the child fails to internalize mother, for example, then the child suffers from object inconstancy.
In other words, a child who cannot create a reliable, stable, safe image of mother in his or her mind, this kind of child always feels that it is about to be abandoned.
When mother leaves the room, this kind of child is distressed and terrified because this kind of child doesn't have an image of mother to interact with when mother is away.
So object in constancy. And object in constancy continues into adult life.
These people, when they grow up, become adults, they begin to interact with other people. They begin to court members of the opposite sex or same sex. They create relationships, families, and so and so forth.
All the time have the feeling that they're about to be betrayed, that they're about to be abandoned, that they cannot trust the other person to remain stable, present and available.
Whenever the other person is physically absent, they feel anxious, they feel a catastrophe is about to happen. They feel that they're about to be abandoned and betrayed.
So object consistency is critical in the maintenance of healthy, mature, adult relationship. And object constancy is linked to the process of separation, individuation.
When the child begins to separate from mother and explore reality or explore the world, the child creates an image of mother, and the child carries this image of mother. It's like a photograph of a loved one. The child carries this image of mother. It's like a photograph of a loved one. The child carries this image of mother wherever the child goes.
And this image of mother in the child's mind is sufficient. The child feels safe. The child interacts or relates to this image of mother as if it were mother.
And so the child is able to let go of mother. The child is able to get away from mother. The child is able finally to completely detach from mother and begin to have a life of its own relationships with other people.
This is known as object relations phase.
So this is what Mahler had to say about the process of development in early childhood.
Now, her work is much more detailed. The separation individuation process has many, many sub-stages and sub-phases, which I didn't go into right now in this lecture. You can go online and read more about it.
Let's summarize this part of the lecture.
Margaret Mahler said that when children are born, they are one with mother. They don't have a self. And everything, all their connection to reality, all their contact with reality, is mediated through mother.
The child perceives itself as a part of mother, and the child perceives the world as a part of mother.
So mother is the totality of existence. It's a unitary entity, godlike, in a way that comprises the entire universe.
Today we know this view is wrong. But where Mahler has been right is about the separation individuation phase.
At some point, the child begins to realize that it is not mother, and mother is a separate entity. At that point the child begins to explore the world and detach from mother, go away from mother.
If mother is a secure base, loving, present, caring, compassionate, available, attentive, the child feels safe, the child goes out into reality and develop a life of its own, becomes an individual.
If mother is a dead mother, emotionally absent, selfish, neglectful, ignores the child, doesn't provide feedback, and so on so forth, the child fails to separate from her, is afraid to let go of mother because the child is afraid of being abandoned.
And so this kind of child is never able to perceive other people as separate and cannot fully tell the difference between external and internal. These impacts are lifelong and they have a catastrophic effect on adulthood and especially on intimate relationships in adulthood.
One last point that Margaret Mahler made is that when the child begins to separate from mother, the child creates a mental representation of mother in his or her mind and the child interacts with this mental representation in lieu of mother instead of mother so that when mother is absent physically when the child has gone away and mother is no longer there the child is able to interact with the mental image of mother with the introject of mother and that way the child feels safe to continue to explore the world and discover relationships with other people.
That in a nutshell, is Margaret Mahler's work.
I mentioned the word introjection, or the word interject interject because Margaret Mahler constructed her work on an edifice previous work by the likes of Sigmund Freud, Anna Freud, Melanie Klein and others and incorporated several concepts borrowed from schools in psychology known as object relations schools.
Most notably, Margaret Mahler used the idea or the concept of internalization and introjection, which is the topic that I'm going to discuss right now.
Someone who failed as a child to separate from the mother and to become an individual, by definition would be insecure, would have low self-esteem, would not be able to interact with other people as an equal, would have difficulty regarding other people as separate and external, would constantly fail in relationships, in adult relationships, and not talking only about romantic or intimate relationships, any kind of relationship with other people.
You see that separation individuation is a crucial, crucial stage or milestone in psychological development.
And this concept is intimately linked to a galaxy of other concepts.
Let's start with Heinz Kohut.
Heinz Kohut described a series of interactions between children and their parents, and these interactions are important conditions or preconditions for healthy development.
He said that parents idealize their children.
He neglected to mention that children idealize the parents and parents idealize the children as well.
In other words, it's a process of co-idealization. Both children idealize parents and parents idealize children.
In the initial phase, when the child is seen through the parents' eyes as ideal, when the child is seen as perfect, as flawless, and so on so forth, it affords the child with a sense of invincibility, a kind of healthy grandiosity, the ability to take on the world, unencumbered, and to feel safe, the parent's idealization and the fact that the child could idealize the parent provided a safe ground, a secure base from which the child can launch itself onto the world to discover and to explore and to interact and to have relationships and so on and so forth.
Idealization is of course a good thing in early childhood and a very bad thing in adulthood.
Because idealization is counterfactual. It's unrealistic. It's the misperception of other people. It's a form of impaired reality testing.
But in very, very early childhood, the fact that the child can idealize the parents and the parents can idealize the child, this is very, very important.
And a child who has not been idealized by the parents, and a child who has not been able to idealize the parent because of parental misbehavior, parental absence and neglect, parental abandonment, parental abuse, parental trauma-inducing behavior, when the parent is bad, when the parent is a dead parent in Andre Green's words, the child is unable to idealize the parent.
And at that point, idealization breaks down and the child grows, becomes an adult, and this adult is mistrustful. This adult does not trust others.
He is constantly hyper-vigilant, constantly paranoid, constantly suspicious, unable to maintain a healthy relationship with other people because he anticipates the worst, he catastrophizes, he expects people to betray, he expects people to misbehave, he expect people to exploit and abuse and so on and so forth, because in early childhood he did not have a good role model in terms of being able to idealize someone and to trust someone.
So this is the first kind of interaction described by Heinz's quote, the idealizing.
The second interaction is mirroring. The parent mirrors the child. The parent encourages the child or the parent discourages the child. The parent mocks the child, ridicules the child, criticizes the child, attacks the child and punishes the child whenever the child tries to become independent or autonomous, whenever the child shows courage, whenever the child is curious, whenever the child tries to become independent or autonomous, whenever the child shows courage, whenever the child is curious, whenever the child ventures out into the world, tries to explore and discover things, whenever the child interacts with other people, including peers, this kind of parent becomes punitive and threatening and abandoning and so on.
So this kind of parent provides negative mirroring.
A healthy parent provides positive mirroring.
Whenever the child attempts any of the above, this kind of parent says, well done, you could do more, I trust you, you're great, you're perfect, and so on.
So the mirroring function is an extension of the idealization function.
The child's grandiosity is actually encouraged by the parent because grandiosity and primary narcissism, healthy narcissism, are preconditions for self-confidence, self-esteem, and a stable, internally regulated sense of self-worth.
A mirroring parent, having idealized the child and encouraging the child in its pursuits, in its exploration of the external world, in its attempts at relationships with others, object relations, this kind of parent creates a healthy child.
So this is the second function.
And the third function is the twin-ship function.
Kohut said that children would tend to identify with a parent. Children would tend to emulate and imitate the parent, would tend to become one with a parent by adopting the parent's behaviors, views, beliefs, mores, and so on and so forth.
In this sense, Kohut suggested, constituted a kind of a bridge between psychoanalytic theory and social cognitive theory or social learning theory.
In social learning theory, as you may remember, Bandura said that children imitate their parents, they emulate the parents, and this way they become individuals.
In psychoanalytic theory, there is the concept of identification, which we will discuss momentarily.
And Kohut is the bridge between these two schools.
So to summarize Kohut, Coit suggested that good parents engage in idealizing or allow the child to idealize them. They engage in mirroring, encouraging the child to explore the world and to develop object relations, and they allow for twinship. They allow the child to identify with them and internalize some of their behaviors and beliefs and values and cognitions and so on.
And now let's go to psychoanalytic theory.
But before we go there, there was a scholar by the name of Bowlby. Bowlby is widely considered as the father of attachment theory.
In the third part of this lecture, we're going to discuss attachment theory.
Bowlby contributed the concept of internal working model.
Internal working model is a very interesting idea. It is the set of beliefs and assumptions regarding relationships.
Bowlby said that we create models, we create theories about relationships. And these theories are the internal working models, the IWMs.
I keep having difficulties today with my smartphone. It doesn't separate an individual, it separates an individual, it's in the wrong moments.
So internal working model is, as I said, the theory about relationships.
An internal working model or internal working models in plural have three components.
A set of assumptions and theories about yourself. A set of assumptions and theories about other people, also known as mentalization or theory of mind, and a set of assumptions and theories about the world.
These assumptions and theories, when you put them together, they create a working model.
So for example, you could have a negative view of yourself. Your internal working model would be negative about yourself, would be positive about other people, and negative about the world.
So there are many combinations. Positive, positive, positive, negative, positive, negative, positive, negative, negative, and so on.
This complexity and this flexibility of the internal working models allows us to explain the variety of relationships that adult people have.
Adult relationships are very complex, they're very unique. No relationship is like the other.
In order to explain relationships, we nowadays use Bowlby's idea of internal working model.
And one of the things that internal working models explain perfectly is attachment. We'll come to attachment momentarily.
Before we go to attachment, let's discuss the contribution of psychoanalytic theories, there are many of them, to all this conversation of adulthood as an extension of childhood, or childhood psychological processes that affect adulthood.
Let's see what psychoanalytic theory has to say.
Psychoanalytic theory, and especially object-relations schools in psychodynamic and psychoanalytic theories, they suggested that there are four processes in early childhood. And these four processes affect us well into adulthood, and some of these processes continue well into adulthood.
The four processes are incorporation, identification, internalization, and interjection.
Incorporation is a process that occurs only in very, very early childhood. Usually in the first six months, incorporation is when the child mistakenly believes that it is able to digest and consume external objects.
So when the child sees an object out there, because the child is unable to tell the difference between external and internal, because the child is one with a mother in a symbiotic state, because the child is not capable of telling apart reality and mother and itself, it's all one thing, one big thing, oceanic feeling, you know, one field.
So the child makes mistakes. The child believes that external objects are actually internal. And the child develops the theory that it is consuming these external objects somehow.
A famous example is the breast. When a child is breastfed, the child begins to believe that it is digesting the breast, and therefore that the breast is an extension of itself.
When you try to separate the child from the mother's breast during breastfeeding, the child becomes very aggressive and very violent, even when the child is not hungry.
And the reason is the child perceives the breast as a part of itself. It believes that it is one with the breasts.
So this is called incorporation, and luckily for us, incorporation stops at age six months. We no longer make these mistakes, this mistake as children, let alone as adults.
So this is incorporation.
The second process is known as identification. Identification is lifelong.
As children, we identify with our parents. As adolescents, we identify with our peers. As adults, we identify with our nations, our football clubs, our friendships, and so on.
Identification is simply when we attribute to ourselves behaviors, beliefs, values, and traits of others.
So as adolescents, we would attribute to ourselves the behaviors and the traits and the beliefs and the values of our peers. As children, we would adopt and mimic and imitate and emulate the behaviors and the values and the traits of our parents. As adults, similarly, if we belong to a nation, we would adopt the beliefs and the values of that nation. And we would firmly believe that these values and beliefs are ours, not the nations, or not only the nations.
So this is a process of identification. Andsaid, it's pretty much lifelong.
You could say that when the child, when the very, very young child, is unable to tell itself apart from mother, when the very young child regards itself and mother as a single entity, a unitary entity, this is a process of identification. The child identifies with the mother. The mother and the child become one.
Identification later in life, even in adulthood, has the same effect, the same impact.
If you ask someone whether they belong to the nation, they would say, yes, I am a part of the nation. Exactly like the young baby, if it could speak, the young baby would say, I'm a part of mommy.
So someone is a part of the nation, a part of mother as a child, a part of a peer group as an adolescent, and so on and so forth.
Belonging to a group to the point that you identify yourself with a group, belonging to another person to the point that you identify yourself with that person, this is the process of identification.
In certain mental illnesses, for example in narcissistic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, identification is a pathological process, a maladaptation.
The narcissists and the borderline and so on so forth, they merge and they fuse with other people. They get enmeshed. They become one with other people.
Mainly because the narcissist is unable to tell the difference between external objects and internal objects.
The narcissist regards other people as extensions of himself. He regards them as internal objects. They don't exist outside the narcissist.
Similarly, the borderline merges and fuses with her intimate partner. The codependent mergers and fuses with her partner.
These mental health pathologies involve primitive identification processes which are common only in early childhood, and these processes continue into adulthood, and they are at the core of the pathologies. They create the pathologies.
Anything that continues from childhood to adulthood in its original primitive form creates a mental health pathology.
Mental illness could be described as simply childhood uninterrupted, childhood that continues into adulthood, unchanged. That's a good definition of mental illness.
Identification is an example.
Now in psychoanalytic theory, identification has a very important role.
You remember Mahler's object constancy and Piaget's object permanence, when the child creates an image of mother, for example, and then he's able to continue to interact with the image, and he's not afraid that mother will abandon it or disappear, even when mother is away, because the child has an internalized mother.
So this is object consistency.
In psychoanalytic theory, which long preceded Margaret Mahler's work and Piaget's work, there's a similar idea. According to psychoanalytic theory, the child is afraid to lose mother. There's a fear of loss.
So what the child does, the child identifies with mother. The child says, I am mother, so I can never lose mother. I am mother and mother is me so I can never be abandoned by mother because I am mother.
And so this is known as identification. It's a compensatory mechanism for a fear of loss. It is a form of self-deception.
I cannot lose mother because mother is always inside me and mother is me.
Similarly, when there is hostility, when there is aggression between the child and the parental figure, the child ironically would tend to identify with the parental figure in order to not lose the parental figure and in order to not be aggressive towards the parental figure.
I will explain this bit, this a bit because it's a very interesting concept.
When the child develops hostility, develops aggression towards a parental figure because a parental figure is abusive or because the parental figure is neglectful or because the parental figure for some reason is incompatible with a child or could be, you know, any number of reasons.
Where the child becomes hostile, the child regards a parental figure as a persecutory object, as an enemy. And the child becomes very aggressive, and the child wants to kill the parental figure.
The child is terrified of this. The child is, because in the child's mind, there is magical thinking. The child believes that if he thinks something, it will happen. If he imagines something, it will occur in reality.
So when the child thinks about the death of the parental figure, the child is afraid that this thought, this imagination, would actually kill the parental figure. So there is a huge fear.
And to assuage this fear, to reduce the anxiety, to cope with the guilt, the child identifies with the parental figure.
The child says, I am not hostile, I'm not aggressive, I'm not going to kill the parental figure with my thinking, with my imagination, with my wishes. I know that my wish is very powerful. If I wish something to happen, it's going to happen. This is magical thinking.
So I am going to counter this. I'm going to fight this. Because it's not okay to kill the parental figure. I'm going to become the parental figure.
The minute I become the parental figure, problem is solved. I'm no longer hostile and I'm going to become the parental figure. The minute I become the parental figure, problem is solved. I'm no longer hostile and I'm no longer a danger to the parental figure. And I cannot lose the parental figure because I am the parental figure.
And this is the process of identification in psychoanalytic theory.
So we discussed identification.
Now, there are other, and incorporation.
Two very important processes are introjection and internalization.
Now, even in scholarly literature, people make mistakes. They confuse these processes with each other. They're not the same. They're four distinct processes. And all of them are at work. And all of them teach the child how to relate to an external separate entity, initially the mother, then the father, then peers, then teachers, then role model, etc.
So these processes are a kind of university, a kind of an academy, and the child is kind of student, and the child learns how to relate to other people using these processes.
So, initially, there is incorporation. The child relates to other people by consuming them, by digesting them, by physically eating them. They disappear into the child.
Then there is identification. The child learns to identify with external objects, with other people. The child identifies with these other people, and he believes that by identifying with them he becomes one with them. He unites with them, he merges with them, he fuses with them, and there is enmeshment.
At that point, the child is indistinguishable from other people, but he identifies with them and that way they all become a single entity unitary.
The next stage is introjection.
I'm sorry. In introjection, the child recognizes that other people are separate. Child realizes that other people are external. The child acknowledges that he or she is not one with other people. There is other people out there and there is the child.
At this point what the child does, the child kind of assimilates or incorporates or takes in certain traits, certain qualities, certain behaviors, certain beliefs, certain ideas, certain utterances, words of other people.
The child kind of takes traits, behaviors, ideas, beliefs, values of other people, and says, from now on, these are going to be my traits, my ideas, my beliefs, my values.
This is done through the process of imitation, of course.
So this links well with social learning theory or social cognitive theory.
But introjection is a more profound thing.
When you imitate someone, you know that you are imitating someone. You know who is the original and who is the imitation.
But when you interject, the process is unconscious. You don't realize that you are imitating someone. You don't understand, you don't grasp that you're copying someone.
As far as you're concerned, you are becoming, and you are becoming by incorporating the attributes of other people. You borrow some traits from mother, you borrow some behaviors from father, you borrow some beliefs and some values from your peers and your teachers, you borrow all these things, you put them together and they become you.
And you are not aware that you are borrowing them. And you are not aware that you are putting them together. And you are not aware that these things are not you. They are coming from the outside. They are coming from other people. You are not aware of any of this.
It just happens automatically and unconsciously. And you become by assimilating, incorporating, imitating, imitating many people.
So this is very interesting because it means that we are all of us. We are the products of many other people. We are the intersection of the personalities and traits and characters and temperaments of many other people. We are a hive mind. We are a colony of other people.
Our consciousness, our unconscious, our mind, our thoughts, our emotions, our traits, our behaviors are not ours, actually. They're borrowed. They're imitated. They're copied from other people.
And so this is the relational approach to psychology. We are the sum total of our relationships.
What we call the self, what we call ego, what we call core identity. When you say I, I am, I did, I went, I, this concept of I, this concept of me, mine, myself, they are wrong. They're not true.
Because we are just multiple reflections of multiple people, especially people who have been influential and significant in our lives.
And this is a beautiful thought because it means that all people are networks. We are all networks. And we all carry with us the images and the reflections and elements of other people, dozens of other people. And we hand over, we transmit these to our children, to our students, and to other people.
In a way, all of mankind is interconnected. We're all one huge interaction.
What we call the self, this feeling that we are separate, that there is an eye that is distinguished from all others and so on, is a bit wrong. It's a bit wrong.
Because the process of interjection means that we have become other people, and other people have become us, of course.
So this is introduction, and introduction in psychoanalytic theory is structural.
What happens is when the child imitates a specific individual, for example, a father, the child would tend to create a construct, an element of the personality, a unit, operational unit or functional unit, that would reflect the values and the beliefs and the thoughts and so on of the father.
Now in the case of psychoanalysis, this is known as a superego. The superego reflects mostly parental and paternal injunctions, the injunctions of the father.
But generally speaking, psychoanalysts believe that various structures in the personality reflects highly specific influences and inputs and feedback from other people.
The attributes of other people, the traits of other people, the ideas and beliefs of values of other people that we took from them, we put all these in containers.
And these containers in the mind or in the soul or in the psyche, these containers are known as constructs.
As I said, one such construct is the superego, which reflects usually paternal values.
Finally, we need to discuss internalization.
Internalization is a pretty complex mechanism and very little understood.
You remember that in interjection, when we interject someone, when we borrow the traits and qualities and ideas and beliefs and values of someone, we interject this person, we interject the person into a construct. We interject the person into a container of some kind within the psyche.
And now, when we wish to represent in the mind an interaction with this person, this would be an interaction between constructs in the mind.
What psychoanalysis says is that our mind is comprised and composed of multiple constructs. There are many, many entities and units in the mind.
And when we interact with other people, these interactions are modeled, they are represented, they are copied into the mind, and the various constructs in the mind interact in a similar way.
The constructs of the mind reenact the interaction outside.
When we interact with someone externally in the real world, in reality, at that point, various constructs in our mind interact as well.
And their interaction is an imitation, a reflection of the interaction that we are having with people in the real world.
It's a very, very intricate idea and very intriguing because it means that we have like a permanent cinema or permanent theatre in the mind.
And whenever we interact with other people, this cinema comes to live and shows a movie.
And this is the movie of our interaction with other people.
Various constructs in the mind are the actors in this movie.
So the ego and the super ego, for example, they are the actors in a movie, and this is a movie about the way we interact with Father.
When we talk to Father, when we argue with Father, when we imitate father, when we any kind of interaction with father, the ego and the super ego would play the same roles internally in the theater of the mind.
And this is the process that is known as internalization.
So these are the four processes that lead to a representation of relations in the external world, object relations, in the human mind, in cooperation, identification, interjection, and internalization.
When you take these four mechanisms and you couple them, you add them to Bowlby's internal working models, then what you get is attachment theory.
To recap and remind you, the internal working models are theories or models or sets of assumptions about the way we behave, who we are, our identity, about other people and about reality.
And so these models are constructed as the outcomes of internalization, introjection, identification, these processes in the mind lead to the generation or the creation of internal working models when they are coupled with attachment.
And what is attachment and what role does it play is the last part of this lecture.
It's time to pull all the strands together.
What we've been discussing in the past two hours is an overview, a tour of the major theories of childhood development.
It was Mary Ainsworth in her groundbreaking work who put together all these to generate a coherent theory of attachment, attachment in childhood and how this attachment in childhood translates into attachment styles in adulthood.
Mary Ainsworth borrowed the work or built on the work of many of her predecessors.
Margaret Mahler with its separation individuation, Kohut, with its ideas of mirroring and idealization and twinship in mother-child relationships, the psychoanalytic mechanisms of interjection and internalization and identification.
And most importantly, John Bowlby's work on attachment and on internal working models, these theories or models that we build based on assumptions on regarding ourselves, regarding other people, and regarding relationships.
And so Mary Ainsworth took all these and created a coherent theory of attachment, which is in use to this very day and is extremely influential.
Attachment styles explain a lot of the variability in adult human relationships.
Attachment in general is a situation where the presence of another person induces a feeling of inner peace, calmness and harmony.
A child, for example, reacts to the presence of a good parentthis way. The child feels at peace. It is less distressed. It is more visibly content and happy. It feels safe. It is more exploratory. It is more curious. And it is much more comfortable interacting with other people in the presence of the good parent.
That's a manifestation of attachment.
In adult relationships, a secure attachment, a good form of attachment, is dependent on trust and on a sense of self-worth, a stable, internally regulated sense of self-worth. And it reflects secure attachment in childhood.
In a way, in our adult relationships, we recreate our relationships with our parents and we transmit or convey the attachment that we felt with our original parental figures onto our intimate partners, our friends, our colleagues, and so on.
In intimate romantic relationships, the partner acquires dimensions of a parental figure, usually a maternal figure, even in healthy relationships. And so the attachment that is created with the intimate partner is essentially an echo of the attachment with the original mother.
That's the theory, that's Ainsworth theory of attachment.
Now Ainsworth designed an experiment. It is known as the Strange Situation Experiment.
She subjected children to a set of experiences, which are a bit cruel.
She placed the children in a strange, unknown, unfamiliar environment. Then she took away the parents. The parents left the room. Then a stranger entered the room. Then the parents returned and then the parents left again. Abandoned the child the second time.
And throughout this Mary Ainsworth observed the children's reactions.
How does a child react to the unfamiliar settings when the parents are present? How does the child react when a stranger enters the room when the parents are present? How does a child react when the parents leave the room and the stranger is still there? How does the child react when the parents return to the room? How does a child react when the parents leave the room a second time?
These are the elements of the strange situation experiment.
And what Mary Ainsworth has discovered is that attachment can be basically divided into two types.
Secure attachment and insecure attachment.
And this original insight, this basic insight, is valid to this very day, and that's the way we study adult relationships by dividing them into secure and insecure.
What I would like to do now, I would like to read to you the definitions of the entire zoo of attachment styles.
There is about four basic ones and another two or three variants and an attachment style that I have proposed and contributed to the debate of the conversation.
So, allow me to read to you the definitions of the various attachment styles.
We start with a secure attachment style.
Secure attachment style, there's only one. There are no variations of secure attachment style. Secure attachment style.
In the strange situation, the positive parent-child relationship, in which the child displays confidence when the parent is present, shows mild distress when the parent leaves, and quickly re reestablishes contact when the parent returns.
This is a secure attachment style in childhood.
What happens to the secure attachment style when this kind of child grows up?
In adult attachment style, secure attachment style combines a positive internal working model of attachment of oneself, characterized by a view of oneself as worthy of love, and a positive internal working model of attachment of others, characterized by the view that others are generally accepting and generally responsive.
So secure attachment style in adult relationships involve a couple of internal working models. These are models of relationships.
The first internal working model has to do with oneself. It is the belief that one is lovable, that one is worthy of acceptance and compassion and care and empathy and so on.
In other words, the internal working model with regards to the self is actually positiveIt's a form of self-love in a healthy kind of way. This is coupled with another internal working model about other people. And the other, the second internal working model says that other people are receptive, they're responsive, they're empathic, they're essentially good, they're capable of loving and compassion and caring and so on. So if you put together these two internal working models, I'm worthy of love and people are capable of love, you get the secure attachment style. In secure attachment style, in the strange situation, one of several patterns of a generally negative parent-child relationship, in which the child fails to display confidence when the parent is present, sometimes shows distress when the parent leaves, and reacts to the returning parent by avoidance. This is the avoidant attachment. Or reacts to the returning parent with ambivalence, and that is the ambivalent attachment. Let's elaborate a bit about these attachment styles. Avoidant attachment. In the strange situation, it's a form of insecure attachment in which infants do not seek proximity to their parent after separation. Instead, the infant does not appear distressed by the separation and avoids the returning parent.
Ambivalent attachment in the strange situation is a form of insecure attachment in which infants show a combination of positive and negative responses towards the parent. After separation, for example, infants may simultaneously seek and resist close contact with a returning parent. Sometimes they seek contact with a parent. sometimes they resist contact with a parent. This is why ambivalent attachment is also known as resistant attachment. But ambivalent attachment can and does happen in adult relationships. And this is how it is defined.
In an adult relationship, the ambivalent attachment is an interpersonal style characterized by worry that a partner will break off a relationship, or by hesitancy in forming deeply committed relationships despite a desire to do so. This is also known as the anxious ambivalent attachment style. What about the anxious resistant attachment? In the strange situation, anxious resistant attachment is a form of insecure attachment, in which an infant appears anxious in the parent's presence, distressed in the parent's absence, and angry upon the parent's return, often resisting contact with the parent. Anxious avoidant attachment in the strange situation is a form of an insecure attachment in which an infant explores only minimally and tends to avoid or to be indifferent to the parent. And this continues into adulthood. In an adult relationship, anxious avoidant attachment is an interpersonal style characterized by discomfort in being with others and a tendency to avoid intimate relationships with other people. It is also called avoidant attachment style, and it is identified in two forms. It has two forms, the dismissive attachment and the fearful attachment. And I will elaborate a bit now on both of them.
Dismissive attachment style is an adult attachment style that combines a positive internal working model of attachment of oneself characterized by a view of oneself as competent and worthy of love. And it combines this model with a negative internal working model of attachment of others, characterized by one's view that others untrustworthy, others are not dependable.
Individuals with dismissive attachment are presumed to discount the importance of close relationships and to maintain rigid self-sufficiency. So in dismissive attachment style, we have two internal working models, one internal working model of oneself and one internal working model of others. The internal working model of the self is very positive. I am lovable, I'm reliable, I'm dependent, you can depend on me, I am trustworthy, etc. The internal working model of other people is highly negative. Other people are traitorous, they're unreliable, they're not trustworthy. You cannot believe other people, etc.
When you combine these two, you get a dismissive attachment style. And these are people who are very bitter and very angry because they believe they deserve love, but they also believe that no one can give it to them.
The fearful attachment style, and as you may recall, dismissive attachment style and fearful attachment style, there are variants, they are subtypes of anxious, avoidant attachment.
So the fearful attachment style is an adult attachment style characterized by a negative internal working model of attachment of oneself and of others.
In the fearful attachment style, you have a negative view of yourself and a negative view of other people.
So it's a terrifying situation. You cannot trust yourself, you cannot love yourself, and you cannot trust and love others.
Individuals with fearful attachment doubt both their own competence and other people's competence and efficacy. They are presumed to not seek help from other people when they are distressed.
The next attachment style is known as pre-occupied attachment style.
It is an adult attachment style that combines negative internal working model of attachment of oneself, characterized by doubt in one's own competence and efficacy, and a positive internal working model of attachment of other people, characterized by one's trust in the ability and dependability of others.
Individuals with preoccupied attachment, I presume, seek other people's help when they are distress or in need.
So you can immediately see that the preoccupied attachment style is the mirror image of the dismissive attachment style.
In dismissive attachment style, you have a positive view of yourself and a negative view of others.
In the preoccupied attachment style, you have a negative view of yourself and a positive view of others.
These people would be reluctant to develop intimacy because in intimacy you need to expose yourself, you need to be vulnerable, you need to be truthful, and because they have a negative view of themselves, they would be very reluctant to do so.
Disorganized attachment in a strange situation is a form of insecure attachment as well.
And it is a form of attachment that is usually reserved to childhood. We don't actually have disorganized attachment in adulthood. That's very rare or even I would say non-existent.
And what is a disorganized attachment?
A disorganized attachment in a strange situation is a form of insecure attachment in which infants show no coherent or consistent behavior during separation from and reunion with their parents. This is also called disoriented attachment.
Finally, there is an attachment style which I have proposed, and that is the flat attachment style.
I think, for example, psychopaths have a flat attachment style.
A flat attachment style is the absence of an internal working model. It's the lack of beliefs about oneself and about others. It's the total indifference to relationships, to attachment, to love, to bonding. It's when your attachment is non-existent.
It's not dismissive. You don't dismiss people. You're not aggressively against other people. You don't regard yourself well. You don't regard others negatively. You don't regard yourself negatively and others well.
There is no activity in this sense. There is no attachment background of any kind. There's no attachment reflex, if you wish. And there are no internal working models.
This kind of person would go through life solipsistically and totally self-sufficiently.
But the self-sufficiently would not be grounded in any views of oneself or others. It would not be the outcome of some attachment style or ideology.
It would just be a derivative of the fact that there is no need for attachment, there is no model of attachment, there's no style of attachment, there's no attempt at attachment, there's no desire for attachment, there's no attachment, period.
And since there's no attachment, there's no desire for attachment, there's no attachment, period. And since there's no attachment, there are no meaningful interactions, there is a need for self-sufficiency.
This would be the flat attachment style.
Thank you for listening, and we will continue with the second lecture tomorrow, and it will deal with cognition, metacognition, and other pretty fascinating topics.