Attachment Theory and Clinical Practice: A Cyclical Psychodynamic Vantage Point

ABSTRACT

This article describes an approach to the clinical use of attachment theory and research that is rooted in the cyclical psychodynamic perspective. Cyclical psychodynamics is a version of relational thought that emphasizes the way that early patterns of interpersonal transaction and subjective experience are perpetuated in the present via the occurrence of vicious and virtuous circles. It traces the feedback loops that create self-perpetuating patterns both between people and in the subjective world of each individual and shows how the induction of others as accomplices in maintaining these patterns plays a critical role. Attachment phenomena are understood from this vantage point as maintained via the continuing transactions that both result from and re-create each individual’s attachment status. This approach to attachment highlights attachment dynamics more than attachment categories. Two clinical cases are presented to illuminate how this way of thinking about attachment can guide clinical work.

Notes

¹ For more detailed and very insightful discussions of these varieties of understanding of attachment and of their clinical implications, see Renn (2012) and Wallin (2007).

² This problem was manifested in previous relationships as well, but it especially distressed her now because this was the man she wanted to spend the rest of her life with and because she could no longer think that “when the right man came around” things would change.

³ Jenny had, up till then, been hesitant to mention the problem to anyone in her family, partly out of shame and partly out of protective feelings toward her husband, who she felt might not want such intimate aspects of their life together to be shared. It was one more indication of how close and caring their relationship was that they were able to talk it through and decide together that she should go ahead and discuss it with her brother. They were not superficially blasé about this, nor was the family overly enmeshed, with no secrets or privacy. It was a real coming to grips with a challenge, resulting in his support of her efforts to try to understand.

⁴ Compare in this regard Weiss and Sampson’s (1986) conception of the patient’s unconscious therapeutic plan.

⁵ My being able to relate to him differently from other people in his life, it must sadly be noted, did not reflect any special or wonderful quality in me. As therapists, we have a different kind of commitment and listen and perceive in a different way than other people in the person’s life—or than we ourselves do with people in our lives who are not our patients.

⁶ I have discussed elsewhere (e.g., Wachtel, 2008) the ways in which the cyclical psychodynamic account of this process differs from that deriving from such concepts as the repetition compulsion or projective identification.

⁷ Of course, as the young child becomes more mobile, the dialectic becomes increasingly about regulating movements as well; human mothers, too, must allow their children to physically explore their environment, but not to wander too far. But, for humans, even years after mobility is established, the dialectic remains about more than physical movement. Interestingly, these days it is often played out, with older children, around how much the child is permitted to explore in the virtual world and how much he or she must be reined in and protected in that realm.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Paul L. Wachtel

Paul L. Wachtel, Ph.D., is Distinguished Professor of Psychology in the Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership at the City College of New York and in the doctoral program in clinical psychology at the CUNY Graduate School. He is also on the faculty of the NYU Post-Doctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis and the Steven Mitchell Center.