A return to Bowlby: assessment, boundaries, and inner working models

Abstract

This article provides an overview of some fundamental aspects of practice within an attachment-oriented view of therapy. The article presents a scholarly approach to understanding the mainstream contribution of the Bowlby–Ainsworth model of attachment as exemplified in the empirical literature (Ainsworth et al., 1978; Owen, 2017). The article starts with a brief conclusion on what John Bowlby argued should be the core aspects of therapy. It connects these ideas to the work of Robert Langs, arguably the one person most responsible for the idea of boundaries and guidelines in contemporary practice since the 1990s. For attachment-oriented practice, the psychodynamics of supplying and receiving care is a central dynamic in therapy. In the case of individual work, there are the countertransference and counter-resistance problems that therapists bring. On the client side of the relationship, there are the problems of what Freud called resistance, a shamefaced inhibition of speech and self-disclosure, plus transference, understood in a broad sense of making assumptions, plus misunderstanding and mis-empathising the intentions of therapists because of clients' personal histories. Bowlby identified the inner working model as explicit or implicit procedural and affective memories that are the link between the onset of an attachment process and its contemporary effects. Attachment is a developmental hypothesis about learned motivation and meaningfulness between the alleged distal causes of proximal events (Bowlby, 1973, p. 44). These topics are discussed in a wider understanding of what it means to provide good enough care.