Attachment Theory and Mentalizing Professor Peter Fonagy Research Department of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology, University College London, UK Dr Chloe Campbell Research Department of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology, University College London, UK Contact address: Professor Peter Fonagy Research Department of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology University College London Gower Street London WC1E 6BT UK e-mail:
[email protected] 1 Introduction Attachment theory was pioneered by the British psychiatrist and psychoanalyst John Bowlby. Its fundamental tenet is that in order for an infant’s healthy emotional development to take place, they need to have a secure relationship with at least one primary attachment figure – a consistently present and emotionally available caregiver. Bowlby was medically and psychoanalytically trained, but he was significantly informed and inspired by evolutionary thinking and ethology. It was this integration of an evolutionary and biological approach with a psychoanalytic one that has made Bowlby’s work both so powerful, and at times controversial. He described attachment as a universal, evolved process, that infants are innately programmed to form attachments. The attachment created between the infant and carer early in life not only provides the basis for physical protection and care, it also meets the infant’s essential emotional needs, allowing him or her to acquire the capacity for mentalizing (the imaginative interpretation of others’ and one’s own mental state), and for the infant’s sense of self-agency. As attachment work has developed, many of its findings have proved congruent with our growing neurobiological understanding of the brain, as well as new thinking on how young children learn, both about the world at large and about their own inner, emotional world.