Disorganised attachment
An infant pattern in which the child shows contradictory, frozen or dazed behaviour towards the carer under stress: approaching with head averted, stilling mid-movement. Seen when the carer is a source of both comfort and fear.
What drives it
There is no workable strategy when the person you would run to is also the alarm. In adults the trace shows as lapses in reasoning when loss or trauma is discussed, dissociation under relational stress, and controlling or caretaking reversals.
How it shows
Work
No adult workplace label applies; the closest analogues are freezing or blanking when confronted by authority, sudden incoherence when an old fear is touched, and anxious caretaking of a volatile boss's moods.
Relationships
Older children often become controlling: bossing or looking after the parent. Adults may be frightened by the people closest to them, go far away during fights, and switch states abruptly.
Self
Going blank or distant in conflict with someone close; your account of a parent suddenly losing coherence, jumping tense or trailing off mid-sentence.
What tells it apart
Fearful-avoidant attachment: Fearful-avoidant is a stable self-described profile of wanting and fearing closeness; disorganisation is a moment-to-moment breakdown of strategy, visible as approach and avoidance happening at once.
Dissociation (including depersonalisation and derealisation): Dissociation can follow any trauma and appear in any setting; disorganisation is specific to the attachment figure and shows in how the person approaches them.
A test
In an adult, listen while they discuss a loss or frightening experience for lapses in reasoning or discourse, such as speaking of the dead as alive or sudden shifts into eulogy; don't hunt for a style label.
Questions to carry
- When a loss or a frightening time comes up in talk, where does the telling lose its thread?
- Which subject makes my words scatter or go blank whenever I start to talk about it?
How strong the research is
moderate. Reliably coded in infants by trained raters and linked to later dissociation and behaviour problems; researchers warn against using it as a label for adults or as a screen for maltreatment.
Where it comes from
Mary Main and Judith Solomon, 1986 and 1990; Mary Main and Erik Hesse, 1990
On the family tree: Mary Main
Sources
- Mary Main and Judith Solomon, Procedures for Identifying Infants as Disorganized/Disoriented during the Ainsworth Strange Situation (1990)