Attachment, communication, and affect: Implications for psychotherapy.
Item
-
Title
-
Attachment, communication, and affect: Implications for psychotherapy.
-
Identifier
-
AAI9986315
-
identifier
-
9986315
-
Creator
-
Costello, Peter Claver.
-
Contributor
-
Adviser: Steven Tuber
-
Date
-
2000
-
Language
-
English
-
Publisher
-
City University of New York.
-
Subject
-
Psychology, Clinical | Psychology, Developmental | Psychology, Personality
-
Abstract
-
This theoretical study examines the relevance of attachment, communication, and affect to an understanding of psychopathology and clinical process and derives an attachment-based psychotherapy from the theoretical and empirical literature on these fundamental processes.;The processes that constitute a psychodynamics of attachment are emphasized, rather than the study of attachment classifications per se. The goal of the attachment behavioral system is enlarged to emphasize the achievement of a coordinated interactive state with the caregiver rather than the achievement of proximity. Bowlby's theory of defensive processes is emphasized and related to the literature on affect and affective communication. The implications of these defensive processes are considered in terms of the extent to which an individual's access to a range of emotions, cognitions, percepts, and self-states may be constrained as the individual shapes himself to the responsiveness of the caregiver, and the extent to which such constraints may distort motivation, behavior, thinking, and relationships.;A model of pathology and then psychotherapy is elaborated around the proposition that what cannot be communicated to an other cannot be fully experienced and known by the self. To the extent that such affective self-experience is necessary and adaptive for the real events of an individual's life, the individual loses cognitive, emotional, motivational, and relational coherence.;Therefore, the attachment-based psychotherapy described in this study emphasizes the central role of the communication of anxiety-inhibited emotions, percepts, and cognitions to a "trusted companion" as the basic process that is countervailing to defensive exclusion and distortion. This permits more complete and accurate affective self-experience and more adaptive behavior.
-
Type
-
dissertation
-
Source
-
PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
-
degree
-
Ph.D.
