Disorganized infant attachment strategies and helpless-fearful profiles of parenting: Integrating attachment research with clinical intervention

Abstract

In this article, recent research on parenting behaviors associated with infant attachment disorganization is summarized and applied to a parent–infant psychotherapy case. Both hostile/self-referential and helpless-fearful patterns of parenting are described and viewed theoretically as alternate aspects of a single hostile-helpless internal working model of attachment relationships. The case material focuses on the more subtle and harder to identify manifestations of a helpless-fearful parental stance. Some attachment-related treatment guidelines for working with a hostile-helpless parenting stance are suggested, including challenging the hostile-helpless model implicitly in the qualities of the therapist's approach to the parent, explicitly articulating the hostile-helpless bind with the parent, increasing the parent's openness to a wider range of affective experience, differentiating attachment-related needs from other communications of the baby, and developing new skills for balancing the needs of the self and the needs of the other in interaction with the baby.