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Fearful-avoidant (Disorganized) “Attachment Style": Latest Faddish Nonsense

Uploaded 12/23/2024, approx. 14 minute read

Recently, there has been a spate of sham constructs, a proliferation of nonsensical concepts in psychology, constructs and conceptsthat cannot in principle be validated or that are superfluous.

There is a prize, it's known as the Ig Nobel Prize, and you put the two together, that's the Ig Nobel Prize.

It is a satirical prize. It is awarded annually since 1991 to celebrate 10 unusual or trivial or idiotic accomplishments in scientific research. Its aim, and I'm quoting, is to honor achievements that first make people laugh and then make them think.

The name of the award, of course, is Ig Nobel. It's like the Nobel Prize.

It is organized by the scientific magazine. It's a scientific humor magazine. Annals of Improbable Research. The acronym is AIR.

The Ig Nobel Prizes are presented by Nobel laureates, actually. People who have actually won the Nobel Prize.

The ceremony takes place in a very venerable location, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The winners even deliver public lectures about their discoveries. The monetary award is given in a solitary banknote for the amount of a hundred trillion Zimbabwean dollars. A hundred trillion. It dwarfs the Nobel Prize. It's worth half a dollar.


Okay, here are my candidates for next year's Ig Nobel Prize in Psychology.

Dark empath, maladaptive daydreaming, neglectful narcissists, shy or quiet borderline, emotional flashback, and recovered narcissists.

All of them nonsensical or unnecessary beyond description.

As opposed to the exact sciences, in the so-called social sciences, the pseudosciences, and in the humanities, 90% of all the innovations, discoveries are actually recycled, renamed, and rebranded, old ideas. 90% is a charitable estimate, by the way, and 80% of all the studies and experiments and statistics cannot be repeated with the same outcomes.

And this is known as the replication crisis. The whole field is infested with these immutable facts of non-replicability and soft pseudoscience.

These disciplines, you notice how many air quotes I'm making? It's like a floating bunny.

These disciplines or so-called disciplines are, as I said, pseudosciences. Some of them are scams. Or to be more charitable, which is my nature, they are forms of observational literature cloaked in self-aggrandizing mathematics.

When these practitioners grow up, they would like to become physicists. Like me, I have a PhD in physics.


Okay, let's deal with yet another counterfactual and nonsensical proposition.

The fearful avoidant or disorganized attachment style.

It's a latecomer to attachment theory. It was first proposed by Mary Main in 1983, I think.

Mary Main was a colleague of Mary Ainsworth, which was a successor to John Bowlby. Together, they have created modern attachment theory.

Mary Main originally called it disoriented attachment. Later, it became known as disorganized attachment and today it's known as fearful avoidant attachment.

Let me read to you a list of the signs of fearful avoidant attachment in adults.

Both desiring and intensely fearing emotional closeness and intimacy with others. This is known as abandonment anxiety coupled with engulfment anxiety.

Inconsistent or incoherent patterns of behavior, that is known as lability.

Extreme difficulties trusting others, that is known as paranoid ideation.

Negative view of self and others, emotional regulation difficulties, including extreme outbursts of emotions, that is what is known as affective or emotional dysregulation.

Alternating between over-disclosures of emotional information and withdrawal, that is known as approach avoidance, a push-pull pattern of behaviors.

Lack of healthy coping strategies during times of stress, such as impulsive behaviors, this is known as impulse control problems or lack of impulse control.

Dissociation from uncomfortable emotions. That is known as dissociation.

And a strong belief that others will hurt them.

Finally, there's a hereditary component coupled with childhood abuse in the background of the person with fearful avoidant attachment style.

So what's the problem? We all know people like this. In clinical practice, we treat such people regularly. So where's the problem?

The problem is, these are the diagnostic criteria of borderline personality disorder to the letter. Lifted verbatim from the DSM4 and the DSM5, DSM4 at the time. Simply lifted, copy-pasted. There was a DSM-4 at the time. Simply lifted, copy-pasted. There was a DSM-3, they copied-pasted the text from the DSM-3 and adapted it later according to the DSM-4.

So it's a replica of borderline personality disorder.

Now, why would we call borderline personality disorder fearful avoidant attachment style? Why rename it?

Because when you rename something, you gain some fame and celebrity. You acquire some status in the community. You become a renowned scholar just by renaming or rebranding or copying or repeating something that is long forgotten or that is, you know, there's no need for this additional attachment style.

It is not an attachment style. It's a personality disorder.

Similarly, I could construct an attachment style for every single mental illness. That is absolutely nonsense, methodologically flawed, idiotic even.

And of course, there are career considerations and money considerations behind all this, which have tainted and contaminated the process.

Mary Ainsworth herself was not happy with this.

The disorganized, disoriented attachment classification has been criticized by many in the field.

It is too all-encompassing, Mary Ainsworth said. It is too fuzzy, as fuzzy as the borderline's identity. It's all out there. It incorporates a multitude of facets, behaviors, traits, dynamics, genetics, heredity, brain abnormalities, childhood abuse. It's a mess. It's a bloody mess.

In 1990, Ainsworth suggested, actually, she was very worried, she was very anxious, and she's the mother of the field. John Bowlby is the father, Mary Ainsworth is the mother. She's the one who came up with attachment styles.

In 1990, she was very worried. She said that this new addition is open-ended in the sense that subcategories must be distinguished. I'm quoting from Mary Ainsworth's word. She said she is worried that too many different forms of behavior might be treated as if they were the same thing.

And she's right. Mary Ainsworth was right.

She later succumbed to the collective pressure of the profession.

Because here's the thing.

The more entities you multiply, the more diagnosis you create, the more you pathologize people, the more money there is, the bigger the cake to share.

The DSM 1 in 1952 contained 100 pages. The DSM 5 text revision in 2022 contained a thousand pages, 10 times as big, 10 times bigger, 10 times larger than the first edition.

And again, the more diagnosis they are, the better it is for everyone, psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, the pharmaceutical company, insurance companies, and everyone is happy. Everyone is sharing it.

And in the meantime, half the population, half the adult population has been pathologized one way or another.

Either you have depression or you have anxiety or you have personality disorder or you have mood disorder or you have anxiety disorder or you have some other kind of disorder, somatoform.

I mean, you name it, if you consume too much coffee, or if you gamble, if you're on the internet, if you don't like authority, you're instantly pathologized, regardless of your age, and don't get me started on attentiondeficit disorders and so on.

It's a really bad situation out there. We are medicalizing and pathologizing behavior which for millennia was considered common, if not healthy, if not normal, if not normative, if not socially acceptable, at least common.

And now we are pathologizing and medicalizing everything because it's good for business.

This fearful avoidance is no exception.

This classification, known as declassification, disorder, disorient, this classification puts together infants who use a disrupted, secure strategy, known as a B strategy, with infants who are simply hopeless and show little attachment behavior, flat attachment in my vocabulary.

And it mixes, it confuses, it confuses a bloody mess. The disoriented, disorganized attachment is a bloody mess, methodological mess, organizational mess, conceptual mess. It's just chaos reified.

For example, it puts together infants who run or hide when they see their caregivers, and it puts them together with infants who show an avoidance strategy on a first reunion with a caregiver and then ambivalent resistance strategy, an A and then C strategy.

A clinician would immediately understand what I'm saying. You cannot confuse, you cannot mix an infant who avoids the caregiver completely and an infant who is a bit shy at the beginning, a bit ambivalent, a bit resistant, and then runs towards the caregiver and embraces her. You can't mix the two.

And yet the disoriented classification, the declassification, this fearful avoidant nonsense mixes every conceivable classification, it incorporates A, B, and C.

Georgian Solomon divided, tried to make sense of the disoriented, disorganized attachment. They tried to make sense. They were very worried in the wake of Innsworth criticism and so on.

Everyone said, what the heck is this? I mean, where did this come from?

And so they tried to say, listen, some strategies are strategies, some behaviors are actually driven by desperation. Other behaviors are evidence that the attachment system has been flooded by fear or anger.

They're trying to square the circle. They're trying, it's the disorganized, disoriented, alleged attachment style is a basket. A basket of all attachments, all insecure attachment styles to cut a long story short.

But its definition is an unethical, copy-pasted job of the diagnostic criteria of borderline personality disorder, also known as emotionally unstable personality disorder in the ICD. End of story. No need to rename borderline personality disorder and to reclassify it as an attachment style. It's also nonsensical, by the way. Attachment styles cut across categories, gender, race, and mental health. They could have the same attachment style with someone who is mentally ill and mentally healthy.

If you pathologize the attachment style, then it's not an attachment style. It's a pathology. It's some kind of mental illness. It's a personality disorder. It's a mood disorder. It's something. But it's not an attachment style.

Creighton then said that some behavior classified as disorganized, disoriented, is actually more of an emergency version of the avoidant or the ambivalent resistance strategies.

And he says that what we call disorganized or disoriented attachment style is actually protective. It's an attempt to secure the availability of the caregiver to some extent.

There were other studies.

Most studies are negative, by the way. I mean, they pretend to be positive because this is the politically correct thing. This is the bon ton.

But if you delve into the article, if you delve into the literature, it's negative. It rejects this category.

Straus, for example, has written that even disorganized attachment behavior, simultaneous approach avoidance, freezing, etc., enables a degree of proximity in the face of a frightening or unfathomable parent.

So that's more like ambivalent, you know.

And so he said the presumption that many indices of disorganization, in air quotes, by the way, not my air quotes, but Strauss air quotes. He says the presumption that many indices of disorganization are aspects of organized patterns does not preclude acceptance of the notion of disorganization, especially in cases where the complexity and dangerousness of a threat are beyond the child capacity to respond.

Main and Hesse tried to correlate the adverse childhood experiences, background background in childhood with the alleged new disorganized, disoriented attachment style, and they found that most of the mothers of these children have themselves experienced trauma, a major loss or some other trauma, shortly before or after the birth of the infant, and have reacted by becoming dead mothers, by becoming severely depressed, absent, withdrawn, avoidant, and so the mothers of the infants.

And so disoriented attachment style, this disorganized attachment style actually conforms well with what we know about the background in early childhood of people with borderline and narcissistic personality disorders.

And again, there's no need to reinvent the wheel or to rename the wheel. The wheel has a name already. There's no need to rename borderline personality disorder and pretend that it is not a personality disorder but an attachment style.

Yes, in the background of most people with borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, there is dysfunctional mothery. And Rae Green called it dead mother. Dysfunctional mothery.

So, what's the big news here?

56% of mothers who had lost a parent before they completed high school had this kind of disturbed or disrupted children with disrupted attachment.

I am not saying that there is no insecure attachment style. Of course there is. Mary Ainsworth was a genius for having described it and having constructed this, her famous experiments.

That's not what I'm saying.

But I'm saying that within the insecure attachment style universe, we cannot and should not confuse personality disorders whose behaviors are disrupted with attachment styles who are disrupted.

So insecure attachment styles are associated with disruptive or disrupting or sabotaging or problematic or avoidant behaviors. They're associated with these behaviors.

But we do have personality disorders where these behaviors are actually clinical features. They are not about attachment. They're about these behaviors which have to do with interpersonal relationships and object relations.

These disruptive behaviors, these destructive behaviors, this problematic behaviors, this approach, this avoidance, this disintegration, all these have nothing to do with an attachment style. They have to do with the internal dynamics, psychodynamics of the personality disorder. The etiology is 100% different.

And so to take a personality disorder and redefine it as an attachment style is to commit a serious sin because it alters the causation, it alters the etiology, it alters the psychodynamic landscape in ways which are wrong, counterfactual. Simply wrong.

So there are, there is a lot of, there are many debates in the literature. There is no consensus on this.

Clearly loss, trauma, adverse circumstances, abuse are all associated with behaviors which impact the quality and the longevity and the character of interpersonal relationships. There's not debate about this.

But the same behaviors could be the outcomes of certain processes, certain dynamics, or the outcomes of a generalized structural style.

That's why we have, for example, narcissistic personality disorder versus narcissistic style. These are two separate things.

Okay, so this is not an attachment style. It's a personality disorder renamed.

And unfortunately, it's an example, a specimen of behavior, misbehavior in psychology that has rendered the whole field laughable and unreliable and not trustworthy and ultimately meaningless, a pseudoscience.

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