Conflicts between motivational systems related to attachment trauma: Key to understanding the intra-family relationship between abused children and their abusers

ABSTRACT

Research on disorganization of infant attachment provides evidence that it can be caused not only by violent aggression or very early sexual abuse, but also by covert maltreating behavior, which includes the abdication of the caregiver’s responsibility to soothe the infant’s distress. This paper argues that both overtly abusive caregivers and merely “abdicating” caregivers may cause disorganization of infant attachment through a simultaneous and conflicting activation of the motivational systems governing attachment and survival defense in the infant.

Other inborn motivational systems—regulating caretaking, competitiveness, and sexuality—are disorderly activated, during personality development, within the intra-family relationships of children whose infant attachment has been disorganized. The paper argues that conflicts and abnormal tensions between different motivational systems explain some paradoxical features of the interactions between abusers and abused, and allow for a better understanding of the interpersonal processes involved in the surfacing and exacerbation of dissociative symptoms in the abused.

KEYWORDS:

• Conflict between motivational systems
• disorganized attachment
• disorganized-controlling strategies
• evolutionary multi-motivational theory