Between the Familiar and the Stranger: Attachment Security, Mutual Desire, and Reclaimed Love

Abstract

This article explores the idea that relationships of attachment security are simultaneously relationships of mutual desire. Seen through this lens, separation and reunion behavior become increasingly psychologically charged: infant and mother as well as patient and analyst must revisit their willingness to expose their desire in each encounter. By recognizing that personal agency is vital to both healthy attachment and romantic desire, we can begin to appreciate the dawning of romantic desire, not so much as promoting “separation-individuation” as often conceived, but as exerting a gravitational pull to revisit an original love—one that is now erotically reconceived. We reclaim an original love but now in a relational context between mother and the Other, the pre-Oedipal and the Oedipal, the familiar and the stranger.

Cet article explore l’idée que les relations d’attachement sécurisé sont simultanément des relations de désirs mutuels. Dans cette perspective, le comportement de séparation-réunion devient progressivement plus chargé psychologiquement: comme le nourrisson et la mère, le patient et l’analyste doivent revoir leur disposition à révéler leur désir à chaque rencontre. En reconnaissant que l’agentivité personnelle est mise à contribution dans l’attachement sain et dans le désir amoureux, nous concevons l’apparition de ce désir non pas en tant que facilitateur de la “séparation-individuation” comme on le conçoit souvent, mais en tant que force d’attraction pour revisiter un amour originel—lequel est alors érotiquement vécu. La personne retrouve un amour originel mais maintenant dans un contexte relationnel entre la mère et l’autre, le pré-oedipien et l’oedipien, le familier et l’étranger.

Questo saggio esplora l’idea che relazioni di attaccamento sicuro siano simultaneamente relazioni di desiderio reciproco. Visti in questa prospettiva comportamenti di separazione e riunificazione sono psicologicamente sempre più carichi: in ogni incontro la madre e il bambino, come l’analista e il paziente, devono rivedere la loro disponibilità a esporre il loro desiderio. Nel riconoscere che la capacità personale di agire (agency) è essenziale sia per un attaccamento sano che per il desiderio in una relazione sentimentale, possiamo apprezzare l’ emergere di un desiderio romantico non tanto perché promuove il processo di “separazione-Individuazione” come generalmente si ritiene, ma in quanto capace di esercitare una spinta gravitazionale a rivisitare un amore originario—un amore che adesso è concepito nuovamente ma in forma erotica. Richiamiamo un amore originario ma lo facciamo ora in un contesto relazionale tra la madre e l’Altro, il pre-edipico e l’edipico, il familiare e lo sconosciuto.

Keywords:

• agency
• attachment theory
• desire
• Oedipal romance
• phenomenology
• semiotics
• taboo
• thirdness

Acknowledgments

This essay evolved from a talk as part of a panel with Bruce Reis and Phil Ringstrom entitled Agency and Attachment Theory: Mutually Informing Constructs in Relational Psychoanalysis at the International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy (IARPP) Conference, Baltimore, MD, Spring, 2008. I am particularly grateful to Michael Macrone for his invaluable editorial help. My thanks also to Mal Slavin, Veronica Csillag, and Sarah Mendelsohn for thoughtful readings of early versions of this essay; to Steve Seligman for sharing his rich knowledge of attachment theory and research; and to Dante Cicchetti for his formative influence on my enduring interest in attachment processes.

Notes

¹ See Galit Atlas (2015) for a recent and compelling analysis of these questions.

² The classification system also has garnered some controversy with respect to its reliability and predictive validity. For example, some studies demonstrate substantial stability over time (Waters, 1978; Main and Cassidy, 1988; Waters et al., 2000), while others demonstrate relatively disappointing (less than 50%) reliability (Belsky et al., 1996; Grossman, Grossman, and Kindler, 2005), However, Main, Hesse, and Kaplan (2005) demonstrated that such changes in pattern “follow ‘lawful discontinuity’ which can be brought about by a change in care giving, caregiver, significantly traumatic events in the child’s life or following therapy in adulthood” (Prior and Glaser, 2006, pp. 36–37).

³ While attachment theory has expanded its domain of interest to the study of the ethological and broader social contexts of attachment (e.g., Belsky, 2005), I restrict my focus to the more traditional (narrower) variables of interest in the mother–infant relationship.

⁴ Expanded definitions of maternal sensitivity lead to quite robust associations. For example, Belsky (1999), reported that maternal sensitivity, responsivity to distress, interactional synchrony and warmth, and moderate appropriate stimulation have been linked to security of attachment across a range of studies. Nonetheless, the specific claim that maternal sensitivity is a primary predictor of attachment security must be viewed as somewhat inconclusive because, in at least a few studies, only relatively weak associations have emerged.

⁵ The interested reader is referred to comprehensive reviews of the empirical connections between maternal variables and attachment security in Cassidy and Shaver (1999), Fonagy (2001), Prior and Glaser (2006), and Mills (2005), among others.

⁶ Of course, in its conception of transference, psychoanalysis acknowledges the relative stability over time of our primary attachment in early attachment relationships. And within self psychology, the primacy of selfobject ties in sustaining psychic equilibrium is definitional. However, even when psychoanalysis attaches primacy to attachment relatedness, it stops short of reconciling this conception with its theory of desire and mutual recognition.

⁷ To a significant degree, the empirical study of what has been classified as “disorganized (D) attachment” styles (and which I’ll explore later in this article) has implicated fear as centrally important in the attachment relationship itself (e.g., because of frightening or negligent behavior on the part of the caregiver; Lyons-Ruth, 1991; Lyons-Ruth and Jacobovitz, 1999). In such cases, the child experiences a profound conundrum with respect to proximity seeking during times of stress given that the attachment relationship is now also a relationship that the child fears.

⁸ The development of the AAI, which relies on coding narrative responses (the degree of coherence, organization, or integration with respect to personal experiences of one’s attachment history), may be seen as representing a partial shift in this direction.

⁹ Eagle (1997) usefully proposed a link between the role of internal working models and Freud’s conception of repetition compulsion.

¹⁰ I thank Sarah Mendelsohn (personal communication, March 2, 2011) for this insight.

¹¹ Elsewhere, I have described these attachments as reflecting an inability to imbue the object (or us as members of the material world) with subjective meaning; that is, they reflect a collapse of Winnicott’s (1951) transitional space. In turn, such a collapse reflects an inability to sustain a visible private/public space in which desire and intent are exposed and owned (Gentile, 2007, 2008b). This perhaps is most challenging in relationships of “extreme” familiarity and in relationships of “extreme” otherness, where the temptations of splitting are greatest.

¹² Morris Eagle (1995) previously highlighted the scant attention to sexuality in attachment theory and suggested that the inability to integrate sexual and attachment needs manifests in adults in a fashion suggestive of insecure attachment.

¹³ What the French call jouissance is a concept central to Lacan’s thought. Briefly put, he defined jouissance as excitement “that is excessive, leading to a sense of being overwhelmed or disgusted, yet simultaneously providing a source of fascination” (Fink, 1995, p. xii). Lacan (1959–1960) associated jouissance with the unmediated (mother–infant) relationship.

¹⁴ Morris Eagle (2007) regards this antagonism as something of a “default” condition that may operate independently of universal incestuous wishes to account for the split between love and desire.

¹⁵ Lacan (1955–1956) speaks of the function of the phallic signifier or “Name of the Father” (le nom du père) as the key third term in an otherwise undifferentiated tie between infant and mother. For Lacan, this mediation is introduced by the father’s most characteristic utterance: “No,” which marks a boundary and rupture, providing a symbolic function that instantiates the subject’s space for desire.

¹⁶ Dylan Evans (1996) explains that the “Thing” (interchangeably referred to as la chose in French or das Ding, in German) is a central theme in Lacan’s seminar of 1959–1960. According to Evans, the Thing refers to what is “entirely outside language, and outside the unconscious” but also to the originary (lost) object of desire “which must be continually refound, it is the prehistoric, unforgettable Other” (1996, p. 207).