Stanley I. Greenspan, M.D.
Dept. of Health & Human Services

Alicia F. Lieberman, Ph.D.
University of California, San Francisco

Attachment patterns in infants have been of enormous interest to clinical
and research psychologists because of the patterns' importance in under-
standing human survival, coping strategies, and psychological health and
illness. How infants learn to relate to others and organize emotional expe-
riences of these relationships may be viewed from a number of different
perspectives. These perspectives include the way in which the infant and
caregiver initiate their relationship in terms of individual differences in
sensory, motor, cognitive, and affective patterns; the manner in which the
relationship is sustained and recovered from disruptive stresses (e.g., sepa-
rations, illness, etc.); the range of affects incorporated into the relationship
pattern (e.g., the degree and balance of pleasure, assertiveness, anger, sad-
ness, etc.); and the emerging unique character or identity of the
relationship pattern (e.g., preferred affects and themes). Various clinical
and research approaches derived from differing theoretical assumptions
have focused on one or another of these perspectives, sometimes with the
assumption that one perspective is a window on others. This chapter dis-
cusses these various approaches to attachment patterns in the context of:
its broader clinical roots (in the context of infant psychopathology), cur-
rent definition of attachment, and the current empirical literature on one
well-studied type of attachment pattern. It also presents an integrated
developmental model that can incorporate both clinical and research per-
spectives. In this model, attachment is viewed as an ongoing process that
has specific attributes related to the challenges of each developmental
phase in the first 4 years of life.

-387-