Attachment and Mentalization in Humans: The Development of the Affective Self

György Gergely, Zsolt Unoka

Research output: Contribution to Book/Report typesChapterpeer-review

Abstract (may include machine translation)

The authors argue that the currently popular view endorsed by a number of attachment theorists and infant researchers that assumes a possibly evolutionarily based and human-specific direct causal and functional link between the ontogeny of early security of infant attachment on the one hand, and the acquisition of explicit mentalizing skills on the other, must be significantly revised. The present argument does not imply that certain types of early interactive patterns characteristic of specific attachment relationships of human infants would have no developmental effect whatsoever on one's later ability to functionally and efficiently use the evolved capacity for mind reading in coping with interpersonal interactions and relationships during childhood or adulthood. There are, in fact, good empirical reasons to believe that certain dysfunctional types of early attachment relations involving severe neglect, abuse, dissociative, highly intrusive, or grossly unpredictable patterns of parental reactivity have significant and long-term detrimental and disruptive effects on one's later capacity to functionally use the innate competence for online mentalization as an adaptive interpersonal coping strategy to deal with the vicissitudes of affectively charged intimate and affiliative relationships of later life. Thus, according to the present view, the specialized capacity for mentalization is likely to be an independent social-cognitive adaptation whose primary evolutionary function is separate and unrelated to the basic evolutionary function for which the attachment instinct system has been selected. To that degree it should not be surprising if security of early infant attachment in humans did not turn out to play a direct causal functional role in the ontogenetic development or acquisition of our explicit mindreading capacity. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved)
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationMind to Mind: Infant Research, Neuroscience, and Psychoanalysis
EditorsEL Jurist, A Slade, S Bergner
Place of PublicationNew York
PublisherRandom House Inc.
Pages50-87
Number of pages38
ISBN (Print)9781590512517
StatePublished - 2008

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