There are variants of avoidance upon reunion with mother, ranging from conspicuous dismissal of attachment to mixed responses of approach and withdrawal. No rigid formula should be assumed, but Crittenden’s diagram (see fig. 1) of children’s integration of affect and cognition helpfully shows gradations of attachment, around the circumference of a wheel, from “integrated, secure” at the top (degrees of true cognition and affect) to descending degrees of pathological affect labeled “coercive”, “punitive” and, “helpless” and completing the circle, to avoidant “compliant”, “caregiving” and “inhibited” cognition. When applied to adolescents and adults, the affectively “co-/ Cl-2 '
' A2 Inhibited
TRUE
COGNITIO
Bl-2
Reserved
Integrated
(Secure)
Comfortable/
Reactive
TRUE
AFFECT
Threatening / Disarming^--
(Defended)
Compulsive
C3-4
Aggressive
(Coercive)
C5-6
Compulsive
Compliant/
Punitive/
Seductive
FALSE
AFFECT
/ AS-6
/ Isolated/ Promiscuous,
C7-8
Menacinj
Paranoid
FALSE
COGNITION
Anti-Integrated
(Psychopathology)
1. Defended/coercive; 2. Anxious Depressed; 3. Anti-integrated AC.
Figure l.Patterns of Adolescent and Adult Attachment (used with permission of Patricia
Crittenden)
ercive” gradation is from “threatening/disarming” to “aggressive/helpless” to “punitive/ seductive” and finally “menacing/ paranoid”. In the cogni-tive-defended range, we find “inhibited”, “compulsive care-giving”, “compulsive compliant” and “isolated/promiscuous”, all pointing to an anti-integrated A/C psychopathy. There seems more on Crittenden’s theoretical circle to be worried about than to be encouraged by. But the anxiously depressed, and the avoidantly defended/ coercive (obsessively controlling) A/C structures, are not all bad. While they are products of combined affective and cognitive distortions, arising from emotional mismatching with mother or care giver they can have adaptive utility in truly dangerous situations that threaten safety. They may also be the motivating forces of creativity. Efforts towards “earned security” are possible.15
It is no simple matter to integrate Crittenden’s theory into narrative psychobiography, but the attempt must be made. Her idea of variably “defended” psyches, depending upon specific mother-infant/ child interactions, is necessary to reconsidering what is meant by “human nature”. With the deep pessimism of Freud’s and Melanie Klein’s assumption of a primal “death wish” still haunting psychodynamic theorizing, it is important to introduce recent empirical work disproving such a notion. Dogmatics about supposed infantile paranoid schizoid states, greed and envy towards the maternal breast, have caused more strife than enlightenment among child therapists. When Bowlby rebelled against the dogmatics of infantile fantasy and failure to look squarely at the behavioural actualities of mother-infant interactions, he caused a shift towards psycho-biological enquiry that has engaged some of the best minds and research talent in contemporary psychology.
While consensus is still imperfect among these experimentalists as to the geneses and descriptions of secure, avoidant and ambivalent attachment styles, or how they elaborate in individuals over time, enough is established to prompt re-thinking the best way to write psychobiography. The craft of psychobiography needs grounding in the human sciences, although psychobiography itself cannot be a science. That Crittenden’s meaning of the defended “A” category is broader than Ainsworth’s or Main’s, and that it links to cognitive reality testing, should not deter us from considering its utility in psychobiography. Bowlby left it to others to describe exactly what “internal working models” of inter-personal relations may be, and to ground them in experimental observation. The result has been an extraordinary efflorescence of possibility given methodologically exacting testing to sort out what may legitimately be called “human nature”. It may still be a long stretch to a settled view of attachment-based human nature, but it is important at this stage to try out some applications in the biographies of creative persons to show just what possibilities lie ahead. While I would like to see Crittenden’s schema of the A/C defended condition more closely reconciled with Main’s most recent AAI findings, I cannot fret over critical work yet to be done. It is enough here to show the radical reorientation of thinking about human development that calls for reconsideration of how psychobiography is written. Each person’s defensive tactics are a kind of automated interactive survival system created between mother, and infant. Their exacting description and understanding are essential to making sense of why and how individuals address other persons and ob-jects-in-the-world—of what they take reality to be and how they set about dealing with it. A single, comprehensive style of creativity can no longer be assumed, but a range of contingent creative styles, amongst which the Avoidant, found in a substantial minority of infants and children worldwide, should be recognized for its relevance to creativity.
To give a clearer idea of how creativity may function in the lives of A/C persons, the question of mood regulation needs discussion. Again, this is a complicated and demanding area of research of which only the briefest summary can be given. Much reporting of affect regulation concerns brain biochemistry which is beyond our scope. As Allan N. Schore writes, “Attachment theory, as first propounded in Bowlby’s (1969) definitional volume, is fundamentally a regulatory theory. Attachment can thus be conceptualized as the interactive regulation of synchrony between psychobiologically-attuned organisms. This attachment dynamic, which operates at levels beneath awareness, underlies the dyadic regulation of emotion”.16 Differences in dyadic regulation (sometimes called attunement) are what attachment research sets out to measure and conceptualize. While about 50% of infants are securely attached, enjoying restorative homeostatically regulating signals from their mothers when over- or under-stimulated, the rest are not so favored. It is this portion of infants, who do not enjoy a “secure base” experience and are therefore at risk for more or less severe mood dysregulation, which is most likely to produce “artists”. Artists, I believe, are most valued among those persons who resort to auxiliary means (creativity) to regulate mood when the natural interactive means in the course of being mothered and parented, are inadequate or break down. They are most valued for public display of struggle using symbolic objects. This is of serious concern because psychopathology awaits persons who fail to acquire automated homeostatic emotional regulators during the developmental processes. Society, and “cultures” within it, supply all sorts of auxiliary regulators of emotion, some of them constructive, some not, but it is better for people whose in-built mood regulators can be relied upon to see them through the stresses of life. We will look at artists who struggle compulsively with states of mood dysregulation that do not yield to the usual interpersonal means of correcting towards a norm, and which in turn are adversely affected by dysregulatory malaise