Attachment Strategies of Adults Who Attended Independent Boarding Schools Compared with Those Who Attended Independent Day Schools
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1 Balanced, Avoidant or Preoccupied? Attachment strategies of adults who attended independent boarding schools compared with those who attended independent day schools Judy Faulkner A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Psychoanalytic Studies Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies. University of Essex November 2018 2 Attachment theory and psychoanalysis are both based on object relations and psychoanalytic principles such as the early influence of the parent on the child (Freud & Breuer, 1895), that a child creates expectations of parental behaviours and responses (Freud, 1917) and internalises them in attachment terms as working models and finally, that fear of loss or anxiety provoking situations trigger attachment responses of some kind (Bowlby, 1960) 3 ABSTRACT The aim of this research was to assess the attachment styles of two groups of people from the same socio-economic categories 1 and 11 as defined by the Standard Occupational Classification system produced by the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys 1991. These two categories reflect backgrounds of professional, managerial or technical members of the middle class. The two groups attended either a fee-paying boarding school or remained at home, attending a fee-paying day school. A review of the literature indicated positive opinions from those who run private schools but the real-life experience of those who attended boarding school, rather than private day school was less than positive. Following a review of the assessment of attachment methodologies, this research utilised the Adult Attachment Interview with twenty-six people who were educated at independent fee-paying schools: fourteen ex-boarding school and twelve ex-day school adults. Their attachment strategies were classified according to the Dynamic Maturational Model of attachment as developed by Crittenden from her doctoral thesis (1983) following her work with Bowlby’s colleague, Mary Ainsworth. This thesis also acknowledges the link between attachment and psychoanalytic theory and draws on examples from both The findings were interesting in that only people in the boarding school group who had received therapy took part. While both groups used a similar attachment strategy, the boarding school group were more likely to be reorganising towards a balanced, secure attachment style than the day school group suggesting perhaps a positive outcome for therapy. However, the research findings demonstrated that the boarding school group had experienced more traumas both prior to and after being sent to boarding school than the day school group did. These findings are discussed together with the limitations of the study and suggestions for further research 4 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I have to thank my supervisor, Bob Hinshelwood who tolerated with good grace my leaning towards a cognitive psychological perspective rather than a psychotherapeutic psychoanalytic one. I hope by using Attachment Theory that I have been able to keep a balance between psychology and psychoanalysis. I also need to thank my supervisory board of Chris Nicholson and David Millar who helped me to work out what my focus was and to keep that focus when my tendency to self-sabotage kept rearing its head. My gratitude also goes to Pat Crittenden and Andrea Landini who tried to teach me to classify transcripts. I can confidently say that learning to classify Adult Attachment Interviews was for me like learning quantum physics while not being able to do maths! Thanks also to the people in my training groups, to those who classified my interviews and Robbie Duschinsky who was so generous in providing me with papers from his research on Main, Crittenden and Attachment Theory. My thanks also to Rob who told me that the chapters he read were good when they probably were not good enough and to my friends, Jo, Libby, Liz and Lucie (in alphabetical order) whose positive attitude pushed me to keep going despite my doubts. Thanks too to Karen and my cousin Dawn for transcribing the interviews. Finally, my thanks to those brave people who allowed themselves to be subjected to what is, after all, a rather lengthy interview, in their own free time. To those who went to boarding school and could not bring themselves to participate, I hope you find help to manage the painful feelings associated with what can only be felt as rejection and abandonment. If anything can be taken from this study, it seems to me that therapy has been a great help to those who went to boarding school and perhaps it can be to you too. 5 CONTENTS Page Chapter One: Introduction and background to this study Autobiographical positioning 9 A brief overview of the literature 10 Change of approach 13 Structure of the thesis 13 Chapter Two: Private Education Introduction 16 A historical view of Independent boarding schools 19 More recent writing on independent boarding schools 22 Summary 26 Chapter Three: The Child’s Documented Experience of Boarding School Introduction 28 Boarding schools 28 Summary 42 Chapter Four: From psychoanalysis to the Dynamic maturational model via John Bowlby Introduction 43 Freud onwards 43 Biological basis 51 Anxiety and maternal deprivation 52 Research 55 Attachment over time 62 Summary 62 From Ainsworth to Crittenden 63 Attachment theory’s applicability to this study 65 Chapter Five: Assessing Attachment Introduction 69 Assessment 70 6 Forced choice 71 Likert rating scales 72 Questionnaires 72 Projective tests 73 Observational methods 74 Interviews 75 The Adult Attachment Interview 79 Attempts at convergence 87 Summary 88 Chapter Six: The Dynamic Maturational Model of Attachment Introduction 90 The DMM and Main & Goldwyn approach 90 Concepts used in the DMM 96 a) Unconscious, pre-conscious and consciousness 96 b) Information processing 98 c) Memory Systems 99 d) Transformation of information 106 e) Dispositional representations 107 Summary 108 Chapter Seven: The Research and Findings Introduction 110 The context for this study 110 Research Design 113 Hypotheses 114 Null hypothesis 114 Research question 114 Methodology 114 The Interviewees 115 Ethical Considerations 116 Procedure 116 Refusers 118 Participants 119 7 Findings 120 Trauma: unresolved & resolved 123 Resolved trauma 127 unresolved trauma 125 disorganised trauma 131 other traumas 133 Attachment strategies and modifiers of the strategies 134 Modifiers of the strategies 145 Summary 148 Chapter Eight: Discussion of Findings Introduction 150 The role of therapy, or lack of it, in this research 151 Discussion in relation to the research question and hypotheses 156 Summary 163 Trauma 164 Mourning not homesickness 167 Further questions raised by the findings 169 Families 172 Relationships 178 Sex 180 Summary 181 Chapter Nine: Conclusions Introduction 183 Overview 183 Reflections on the research 187 Limitations of this research 188 Suggestions for further research 188 Summary 190 Chapter Ten: Self Reflections 191 Appendices Appendix A: Oxford economics report 192 8 Appendix B: DMM Research studies 194 Appendix C: Technical terms, their meanings and how attachment styles are expressed through language 197 Appendix D: Examples of How Type A and Type C mothers describe how they murdered their children 203 Appendix E: Demographic information and full classification 204 Appendix F: Information letter and consent form 206 Appendix G: Written description of DMM attachment strategies 208 Appendix H: Glossary of traumas 211 LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES: TABLES Table number Title Page Table 1 The number in each 120 group in terms of the classifications, including modifications. Table 2 Allocates the 120 attachment strategies and reorganising Table 3 The number of people 124 with unresolved traumas across both groups Table 4 Number of traumas 124 under age 13 yrs Table 5 Type of response to 124 traumas across the two groups FIGURES Figure number Title Page Figure 1 The Dynamic 94 Maturational Model of Attachment 9 CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND TO THIS STUDY Aristotle wrote that every child should be cared for by its mother because she would ‘be more careful, loving and attendant than any servile woman or such hired creatures; this all the world acknowledgeth’ (cited by Winnicott, 1965 p 23). So why is it that children are not always cared for by their mothers? At different times in history, some affluent Mothers have given over the early care of their children to wet nurses and nannies. Perhaps this was either to be more available to the father of the child so that he would stay at home and fend for them rather than stray, or the mother perhaps preferred to live her own life unencumbered by the demands of a child so dependent on her. Sometimes, the mother has been unable to care for the child because of illness or some other unpreventable reason and the child has then been sent to boarding school. Sometimes if a parent had employment that took them from home regularly, or was part of the armed forces, the child was sent away to boarding school. Children have also attended boarding school as part of the socio-cultural demands for a perceived superior education and social training for the child’s good in order to prepare them for leadership either in government or business, or historically, in the case of women, to make them suitable to be wives and mothers (Schaverien, 2015, p 34). Autobiographical positioning My original idea for this study came from my experience of working with prisoners as a forensic psychologist. Prisoners had often been in care, looked after by local authorities, mostly against their and their parents will. They spoke of rejection and abandonment when their parents had failed to retrieve them from care. I subsequently, having trained as a cognitive analytic psychotherapist, worked in a clinic in Harley Street, London. Harley Street is well known as being a centre of private medical practice and attracted people, on the whole, from the opposite end of the social spectrum to prisoners.