Crittenden's Dynamic–Maturational Model of Attachment and Adaptation

Mary Main and Patricia Crittenden were both students of Mary Ainsworth. Their graduate study occurred almost exactly a decade apart: Main was with Ainsworth at The Johns Hopkins University from 1968 to 1973, whereas Crittenden was at The University of Virginia from 1979 to 1983 (Landa & Duschinsky, in press). The addition by Main and colleagues of the “disorganized/disoriented” classification of attachment to Ainsworth's three-category system has become widely accepted, especially over the past 15 years. Solomon and George (2011, p. 3) have described how the construct of disorganization “amounts to a paradigm shift” in attachment research and “is now well integrated into the lexicon of clinicians, especially those involved in providing infant mental health.” Yet Crittenden's dynamic–maturational model of attachment and adaptation has emerged as a competing paradigm and has been met with some excitement, especially among health and social care professionals in Europe. Crittenden has been described as “a radical and a pioneer, and academically speaking very courageous” (Vetere, 2004), and Pocock (2010, p. 305) has enthused that “the Dynamic- Maturational Model (DMM) is beautiful.” Milan, Snow, and Belay (2009, p. 1031) have wondered whether, compared with mainstream attachment theory, “Crittenden's system may be better suited to studies of clinical phenomena, such as depression, because of the conceptual model from which it was developed.”

Yet despite repeated calls for exposition and analysis of the dynamic–maturational model, identifying its differences from mainstream attachment theory (e.g., Robson & Wetherell, 2011; Schuengel, 2001), to date, no article undertaking this work has emerged. This gap is surprising and significant, given that the dynamic–maturational model is seeing widespread use as a psychological theory, informing clinical and social interventions as well as research. In part, we suspect that attempts at neutral survey or comparison have been stalled by the contention between the attachment paradigms. Another contributory to the lack of commentary on the dynamic–maturational model has been that the theory is elaborated across an enormous number of widely diffused texts. Wilkinson (2012), for example, claims that there is urgent need for a review of the dynamic–maturational model, but feels that Crittenden's dispersed arguments make it difficult to identify her position on key issues such as the meaning and consequences of trauma. Our response to this issue has been to collect and draw upon every text Crittenden has put in the public domain across her career, considering both the development of her ideas over time and the intellectual infrastructure that has animated and organized her approach. We therefore present an original account of the divisions that led to the emergence of the dynamic–maturational model and the first integrated analysis of Crittenden's work as a psychological theory. However, because we are not trained in the assessment measures developed by Crittenden or their alternatives from within mainstream attachment theory, we will not address their respective utility in this article (see Farnfield et al., 2010; Spieker & Crittenden, 2010).

We shall argue that the core of the dynamic–maturational model as a research program is the information-processing model. This was first developed in Crittenden's doctoral research under Mary Ainsworth in the early 1980s, to explain anomalous infant behavior in the “Strange Situation Procedure.” We shall therefore begin our review by identifying how this model led to disagreements with Main about the meaning of such anomalous behavior, and hence the cognitive and behavioral processes and consequences of child maltreatment. We draw on Ainsworth's unpublished letters to Bowlby, available in the Wellcome Trust Archive (London, United Kingdom), to clarify the theoretical stakes of these disagreements. The argument between Main and Crittenden is widely and incorrectly believed to lie in Crittenden's rejection of the idea of attachment “disorganization” in infants. In the place of “disorganization,” Crittenden is understood to instead consider infants displaying such behaviors to be showing “organized” combinations of avoidant and resistant attachment strategies (e.g., Van IJzendoorn, Schuengel, & Bakermans-Kranenburg, 1999). In fact, we show that the divergence is better understood to lie in the different meanings Main and Crittenden give to the concepts of “attachment organization” and “adaptation.”

Crittenden's information-processing model is quickened as a psychological theory by her integration of insights from cognitive science and developmental psychology regarding the role of different memory systems and maturation on information processing. The range of topics that have been addressed by Crittenden and other researchers affiliated with her International Association for the Study of Attachment (2012) is vast. We will consider two in the remainder of the article. First, as an illustration of the acuity of the dynamic–maturational model, we will examine Crittenden's insights into the behavior and information processing of maltreating parents. Second, we will consider the account of trauma presented by Crittenden, for the interlinked reasons that there have been calls for clarification on this topic, it brings into relief key differences between Main and Crittenden, and it has been an area of recent conceptual innovation. Our review will close by discussing concerns that have been raised regarding the evidence base and exhaustiveness of Crittenden's account of behavioral strategies, which are perceived to limit the persuasiveness and effectiveness of some aspects of the dynamic–maturational model. Although partially accepting these concerns, we shall show how they do not invalidate Crittenden's work as an exciting and sometimes uniquely insightful contribution to psychological theory.

Disorganization

To understand the forces that have animated and organized the dynamic–maturational model, it must be understood that two inescapable and surprising findings confronted Mary Ainsworth's doctoral students. The first was that Ainsworth's ABC classification of infant behavior in the Strange Situation Procedure appeared to account for the overwhelming majority of middle-class infants. The Strange Situation Procedure was first used by Ainsworth and Wittig (1969) to assess individual differences in the responses of 56 middle-class nonclinical infants aged 11 months to the departure of a caregiver. Infants classified as “secure” (Type B) used the caregiver as a safe base from which to explore, protested at their departure, but sought the caregiver upon his or her return. Infants classified as anxious–avoidant (Type A) did not exhibit distress on separation and ignored the caregiver on their return. Separation of an infant from her caregiver was theorized by Bowlby (1960) to necessarily evoke anxiety as a reaction hardwired by evolution, as the infant cannot survive without the caregiver. Hence, the apparently unruffled behavior of the Type A infants was understood by Ainsworth as a mask for distress, a point later evidenced through studies of heart rate (Sroufe & Waters, 1977). Infants classified as anxious–ambivalent/resistant (Type C) showed distress on separation, and were clingy and difficult to comfort on the caregiver's return.

A set of protocols for classifying infants into one of these groups was established by Ainsworth's influential Patterns of Attachment (Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, & Wall, 1978). Main (1990), Crittenden (1995, p. 368), and other students of Ainsworth were therefore brought to ask, “Why are there only three patterns of attachment when mothers are highly varied?” The fact that these three patterns appeared so widely suggested that, on the one hand, the activation of the attachment system when an infant is anxious appeared to be an innate psychophysiological mechanism. On the other hand, this finding implied that the quality of the attachment behavior elicited by this anxiety differed in systematic ways as a function of the infant's caregiving environment. A second recurring finding that confronted Ainsworth's students, however, was that not all infants could be classified using Ainsworth et al., (1978) protocols for classifying infant behavior in a strange situation. This was especially the case with children from maltreatment samples, but it also occurred in samples of infants from middle-class homes.

Ainsworth's first doctoral student, Sylvia Bell, observed cases in which the infant showed “signs of disturbance, such as inappropriate, stereotyped, repetitive gestures or motions. He may show some resistance to his mother, and indeed he may avoid her by drawing back from her or averting his face when held by her” (Ainsworth et al., 1978, p. 62). Ainsworth advised Bell to code such infants as a subtype of the Type B (secure) pattern. Ainsworth's second doctoral student, Main, also found several infants who showed unclassifiable behaviors, including “hand-flapping; echolalia; inappropriate affect; and other behaviors appearing out of context” (Main, 1977, p. 70). In particular, several infants showed reunion behavior that combined an attempt to approach the caregiver with signs of fear and avoidance. Main relates that, from graduate school, she “had already been intrigued by odd-appearing behaviors of animals in conflict situations and—after observing one ‘unclassifiable’ infant in her doctoral study fling her arms about her head while in an anomalous position on parent entrance—Main continued to pursue the problem of ‘unclassifiable’ infants in this light” (Main, Hesse, & Hesse, 2011, p. 435). On February 1, 1974, Ainsworth wrote to Bowlby,

We have found plenty of evidence that the mothers of A babies dislike physical contact, and that it is through behavior relevant to physical contact that they (at least in large part) express rejection. Mary's theory is that this puts babies in a double bind, for they are programmed to want contact and yet are rebuffed (or at least have unpleasant experiences) when they seek it. Mary's hypothesis is that the avoidance (detachment-like) defensive behavior characteristic of A babies stems from the double-bind (Ainsworth, 1974).

During these years of Main's doctoral work, Ainsworth (1972) deployed a technical definition of attachment “organization” as behaviors oriented toward proximity with the caregiver when the attachment system is activated by anxiety. Following this emphasis, Main focused on physical proximity with the caregiver as the set-goal of the activated attachment system (Main, 1977). Based on this assumption, Main (1977) proposed that avoidance serves proximity in two ways: It keeps the caregiver relatively near without alienating him or her through approach behavior; it helps the infant “gain control over, that is, flexibility in his own behavior, a thing he will not have should he …break into disorganised distress” (p. 55). As such, Type A behavior is “a search for control when disorganisation threatens” (Main, 1981, p. 685).

Yet Main began to note that avoidant infants can at least direct their attention away from the conflicting demands of the attachment system to both approach and flee from the caregiver. By contrast, other infants appeared so overcome by this conflict that they could not develop any coherent strategy for achieving proximity with their caregiver in the strange situation. Hence Main began to reconceptualize cases in which the infant would approach the caregiver with their head averted, not as an extreme form of avoidance but as an effect of behavioral breakdown: a “disorganized” attachment pattern. This new attachment pattern included a variety of behaviors, including freezing, rocking, disorientation, crying at the departure of the stranger, and showing confusion or fear on the return of the caregiver. These behaviors did not need to last more than a moment to be an indicator of disorganized/disoriented attachment, and an infant could be placed in the classification if they scored 5 or more on a 9-point scale of such behaviors (Main & Solomon, 1986, 1990).

The Effects of Maltreatment

Ainsworth was initially skeptical of Main's introduction of the “D” classification, wondering whether it was partly operating as a residual category (Landa & Duschinsky, in press). Yet Ainsworth came to be “impressed with the need for adding a new ‘D’ or disorganised category to the classification system” (Ainsworth, 1985a). As she learned about Main's theories and assessment measures over the course of 1985, Ainsworth remarked to Bowlby, “You were right that I am in a sense a student of Mary Main's” (Ainsworth, 1985b). Yet as well as being impressed by Main's evidence for the need for a “D” classification, in 1985, Ainsworth was also giving support to Crittenden's “excellent research on maltreated children” (Ainsworth, 1985c, p. 788), despite the fact that Main and Crittenden were already generating quite different interpretations of the effect of adverse conditions on attachment behavior.

In 1979, the same year that Crittenden began her graduate studies, Ainsworth returned from a trip to England with some of the early chapters from Bowlby's forthcoming book Loss, published in 1980. She announced to her students, “Here is chapter 4 of the Bible” (Crittenden, 2012). This Chapter 4 was Bowlby's account of information processing, and it formed the bedrock of Crittenden's subsequent thinking. In this chapter, Bowlby (1980) argued that, “given certain adverse circumstances during childhood, the selective exclusion of information of certain sorts may be adaptive. Yet, when during adolescence and adult the situation changes, the persistent exclusion of the same forms of information may become maladaptive” (p. 45). Though otherwise tending to be hostile toward what he saw as the imprecision of Kleinian concepts, Bowlby (1980, p. 68) identified that Melanie Klein's concept of “splitting” could helpfully identify the way in which motivational dispositions, feelings, and memories could also suffer exclusion as an adaptive response to adverse circumstances. The result would be that particular behavioral systems, and their associated motivational dispositions, feelings, and memories, could be “segregated” (Bowlby, 1980, p. 59). For instance, Bowlby observed that a child or adult might keep their anger at someone they depend upon away from consciousness, and find it expressed out of context under calmer circumstances.

Crittenden's dissertation, submitted in May 1983, was a study of 73 infants and toddlers. Most of this sample had experienced severe maltreatment. Like Ainsworth's previous doctoral students, Crittenden (1983) found that “not all infants can be placed easily into the three categories described above” (pp. 14–15). Drawing inspiration from Bowlby's chapter on information processing, Crittenden proposed that the A and C responses could be regarded as excluding “some classes of information” relevant to “the activation of the attachment system” (p. 18), and proposed that both A and C behaviors should be seen as strategies for maintaining the availability of the caregiver by “interfering with one's ability to process different kinds of information” (p. 18). For example, some of Crittenden's sample, particularly as they approached 18 months, appeared to display false positive affect in the Strange Situation Procedure. Although they “tended to be difficult with their mothers until about 1 and a half years of age” (Crittenden, 1992b, p. 339), by 18 months, Crittenden (1983) observed that these children were

unusually accommodating and can only be classified as cooperative. These babies pose some very interesting questions. Why are these children cooperative when their experience with their mother should provoke a passive or difficult response? And why do so many of them seem concurrently ill at ease? (p. 66)

Subsequent scholars arguing both for and against the dynamic–maturational model have generally presumed that Crittenden rejected the “disorganized” pattern and instead proposed that such infants were displaying extreme forms of “organized” A and C behavior (e.g., Holmes, 2004; Holmes & Chimera, 2010; Van IJzendoorn et al., 1999). Yet it is important to note that between the 1970s and 1980s, Ainsworth had changed the meaning she was giving the term “organized” (Landa & Duschinsky, in press). She still maintained that proximity may be the set goal of attachment at 11 months. However, her correspondence with Bowlby led to the conclusion that this proximity seeking is a special case of the more general goal of the attachment system, which is to maintain the availability of the caregiver. Citing these letters, Ainsworth (1990, p. 474) would write that “Bowlby (personal communication, 1987) holds that ‘availability of the attachment figure is the set-goal of the attachment system in older children and adults.’”

Ainsworth, therefore, in this period, changed her usage of the term “organization” to mean behavior that, under conditions of perceived threat and the activation of the attachment system, is oriented toward maintaining the availability of the attachment figure. Crittenden followed Ainsworth in this changed usage, applying it also to infancy. Whereas Main saw physical proximity as the set goal of the attachment system, and hence behavior oriented toward proximity as “organized,” Crittenden took the availability of the caregiver as the set goal of the attachment system when activated by the perception of threat, even in infancy. Although attachment behaviors would not necessary always succeed, Crittenden theorized that the behaviors instigated by the attachment system would aim, when possible, to maintain the availability of the attachment figure as a source of protection. Only those that could not be seen as aiming at this possibility were regarded by Crittenden as “disorganized.”

This conclusion was also shaped by differing accounts of the term “adaptation.” Main's (1979) had restricted the term “adaptive” to explanations of why behavioral systems might have evolved for a species. Main emphasized proximity-seeking behavior as adaptive for humans in potentially dangerous situations. Behavioral breakdown at the level of an individual infant, although it might indeed have some beneficial effects, was not perceived by Main to not be an expression of a species-level adaptation to achieve proximity in conditions of perceived threat. Crittenden, by contrast, used the term “adaptation” as a heuristic for interpreting what function a behavior may have for maintaining the caregiver's availability.

To illustrate this difference between Main and Crittenden: one of the “direct indices of disorganised attachment” for Main and Solomon (1990, p. 139) was an infant's hand-to-mouth gesture on reunion with the parent. This act was understood by Main and Solomon to signal behavioral breakdown under conditions of experienced fearful confusion, as it did not serve to facilitate the proximity expected of attachment behavior. By contrast, Crittenden's perspective would conceptualize a child using the hand-to-mouth behavior to stifle a cry of distress as an adaptation to a rejecting or insensitive caregiving environment. It could then be understood as a more extreme form of Type A behavior than noted in the Ainsworth et al. (1978) coding protocols. Hence, those using the dynamic–maturational model have perceived such hand-to-mouth behavior to stifle a scream as “organized” because, in such cases, the child can be understood as working to maintain the availability of their attachment figure through an act of self-regulation, which constricts negative affect (e.g., Svanberg, 2009, p. 105).

Hence whereas Main saw combinations of A and C behavior as “disorganized,” because they appeared to evidence behavioral breakdown instead of a coherent strategy for seeking proximity, Crittenden considered such combinations “organized” “adaptations,” as a result of her different definition of both terms. Crittenden noted that abused and neglected cases tended to “show an A/C pattern as do a few who are only abused and also a few who only neglected” (1983, p. 71): The combination of frightening and inconsistent caregiving makes both avoidant and clingy behaviors adaptive for these children as they attempt to maintain their caregiver's availability. Yet Crittenden certainly did not argue that all infants who fell outside the Ainsworth et al. (1978) patterns would necessarily be A/C. For example, Crittenden (1983) notes that one abused infant was classed as B by her undergraduate coders because her strange situation behavior was “without either avoidance or ambivalence, she did show stress-related stereotypic headcocking throughout the strange situation. This pervasive behavior, however, was the only clue to the extent of her stress” (p. 75). Main and Solomon (1990, p. 143) themselves acknowledge that Crittenden was the first to identify these headcocking forms of strange situation behavior, which all agree is not a strategic behavior but an “indicator of stress.” To take another example of nonstrategic behavior, Crittenden (1997a) noted that for the children of some “unipolar depressed and neglecting parents, nothing that the children do changes the probabilities of their parents’ behavior. These children appear to use scraps of the strategies in a self-soothing strategy” (p. 60).

This review now places us in a position to clarify the distinction between the paradigms. Social workers in particular have purveyed a mischaracterization of the “disorganized/disoriented” pattern, which Main calls “widespread” and “dangerous,” which takes her to believe that maltreatment will always be associated with behavioral breakdown in an infant's behavior in the Strange Situation Procedure and vice versa (Main et al., 2011, p. 441). Crittenden has likewise suffered a widespread and deep mischaracterization that suggests that the perception of threat will always cause a child to adopt an A, B, C, or A/C attachment strategy (McMahon & Ward, 2001, p. 61, is an exception). A close examination of both paradigms indicates that Main and Crittenden agree on the fact that “with extreme threat, everyone panics or freezes. Moderate threat best displays the strategy” (Crittenden, 2008a, p. 277). Both theorists believe that not all maltreated infants show a lack of a coherent strategy in the Strange Situation Procedure—though many do momentarily and sometimes as an enduring response. Both Main and Crittenden have argued that nonstrategic behavior can be caused by multiple factors, though it is true that, since the 1990s, Main has particularly emphasized frightening or dissociative parental behavior as “one highly specific and sufficient, but not necessary, pathway to D attachment status” (Hesse & Main, 2006, pp. 310–311). Rather, the actual difference between the two theories lies in the fact that Crittenden's focus on availability, rather than proximity, as the set goal of the attachment system leads her to identify intensified patterns of Type A and Type C information processing in cases where Main perceived behavioral breakdown. This led to a divergence in the interpretation of Type C behavior in infancy, the significance of which cannot be overestimated in understanding the split between paradigms and the emergence of the dynamic–maturational model.

Main's focus was on finding coherent strategies for proximity seeking as the criterion for “organization.” Main (1981, p. 681) theorized, therefore, that “behavior can be called disorganised when it vacillates between opposites without reference to changes in the environment” and that it “appears in infants reunited with their mothers while still in the stages of protest or despair and in the ambivalent infants in the Strange Situation.” Hence, the behavior of many infants that the Ainsworth et al. (1978) protocols might have classified as C tended to be understood by Main through the concept of “disorganization.” Looking back, Main, Hesse, and Kaplan (2005, p. 259) reflect that

following the advent of the disorganized infant attachment category … the ambivalent category and its adult equivalent, insecure-preoccupied, have become rare. This is because many individuals previously classified as insecure-ambivalent in infancy or preoccupied in adulthood have been found to be disorganized.

Crittenden, however, had both a wider and different concept of “organized” behavior. She was therefore brought to ask, “Through what process could these ambivalent/resistant attachment behaviors be serving to maintain the availability of the caregiver?” Addressing this question, as we shall now see, would lead Crittenden to interpret the difference between Type A and Type C as reflecting the fact that the basic components of human experience of danger are two different kinds of information.

Information Processing

Despite the fact that Main and Crittenden differed in their interpretation of behaviors discrepant to Ainsworth et al.'s (1978) classificatory protocols, Ainsworth supported work in both paradigms. Even while serving as Main's research assistant on a project to evidence the association between a parent's experience of unresolved loss and “D” behaviors in their infant (see Ainsworth & Eichberg, 1991), Ainsworth was urging Bowlby to listen, in person, to Crittenden's intriguing and audacious theorizing about information processing. Following Crittenden's visit to see Bowlby in London, Ainsworth wrote that she was pleased “that you had the opportunity to hear about her ideas. I myself think she is top-notch, and is making an important contribution” (Ainsworth, 1988).

By 1988, Crittenden had begun to go beyond Bowlby in conceptualizing Type A and Type C attachment behaviors as the effect of different forms of information processing. Her starting point was the near universality of Types A, B, and C attachment behavior, alongside the fact that behaviors discrepant to Ainsworth et al.'s (1978) protocols were especially common in her maltreated doctoral sample. Crittenden (1992c) worked from “a basic premise of ethology—that universal behaviors often serve functions that promote survival” (p. 210). She proposed that the basic components of human experience of danger are two kinds of information (see Strathearn, Fonagy, Amico, & Montague, 2009): 1

Affective information: the emotions provoked by the potential for danger, such as anger or fear. Crittenden termed this “affective information.” In childhood, this information would include emotions provoked by the unexplained absence of an attachment figure.

Crittenden proposes that both kinds of information can be split off from consciousness or behavioral expression as a “strategy” to maintain the availability of an attachment figure. The term “strategy” is used by Crittenden (1992b) not in “the narrow sense of a cognitive plan, that is, a response to an articulated problem preceded by a conscious analysis of behavioral alternatives,” but as a transformation of information regarding danger that occurs without conscious thought (p. 330).

Crittenden proposed that Type A strategies split off emotional information about feeling threatened and Type C strategies split off temporally sequenced knowledge about how and why the attachment figure is available, whereas Type B strategies effectively utilize both kinds of information without much distortion. We shall attend to each of these patterns of information processing in turn.

Type A behavior in the Strange Situation Procedure is interpreted by Crittenden as an effect of a process of “splitting.” When an infant is faced with insensitive or rejecting parenting, one strategy for maintaining the availability of their attachment figure is to try to exclude from consciousness or from expressed behavior any emotional information that might result in rejection. Under such conditions, emotional information is then termed by Crittenden “negative affects,” not because emotions like anger or fear are “negative” in themselves but to highlight that the child splits them off because they might be seen as “negative” by an attachment figure and thereby reduce their availability. Crittenden argues that splitting off emotional information allows an infant facing insensitive caregiving to simplify the complexity of the situation with the neurological means at their disposal: They avoid expressing “negative” emotions when they are anxious and, in doing so, avoid antagonizing or alienating their attachment figure. However, the segregated affects may find expression within another behavioral system, such as play, when the infant is not anxious and the attachment system is therefore idling (Crittenden, Partridge, & Claussen, 1991, p. 497).

Crittenden perceived Type C behavior as representing the opposite strategy. Type C strategies distort causal or other temporally ordered knowledge about the potential for safety or danger. If knowledge regarding the behaviors that indicate an attachment figure's availability as a secure haven is subject to segregation, then the infant can try to keep the attention of their caregiver through clingy or aggressive behavior, or alternating combinations of the two. Such behavior may increase the availability of an attachment figure who otherwise displays inconsistent or misleading responses to the infant's attachment behaviors, suggesting the unreliability of protection and safety. Type C behavior in the Strange Situation Procedure is interpreted by Crittenden as an effect of this form of information processing. The state of affective arousal of the Type C infant is interpreted by Crittenden (1992a, p. 581) as distinct from, but by degrees continuous with, disorganization—because the infant adopting this strategy is both “distressed and unable to process information” about the causality of caregiver availability.

From 1988 to 1992, Crittenden worked on the development of her Preschool Assessment of Attachment. From this close observation of preschool-aged children, Crittenden (1992c, p. 221) added a further element to her theorization of Type A and Type C behavior. She proposed that a child develops the neurological maturity not only to deny negative emotions, as in infancy, but also to display “false positive” emotions as a Type A strategy. Such false displays of emotion might include, for example, overbright caregiving or solicitous behaviors toward the attachment figure. A child might display such behaviors with a withdrawn caregiver; the strategic goal of such behavior would then be to try to ensure that the attachment figure remains engaged and therefore available as a source of care and protection. Crittenden also added to her account of Type C the observation that toddlers increasingly have the neurological maturity to deploy disarming and/or aggressive behaviors as a strategy to coerce their caregiver. The caregiver is distrusted, and the self treated as wronged. Crittenden observes that these coercive behaviors, although sometimes deployed by all preschoolers (the “terrible twos”), will particularly dominate the behavior of children who experience their caregiver as otherwise unpredictable or untrustworthy in their availability to answer the child's needs.

Whereas Type A strategies split off negative affects and Type C strategies split off causal knowledge about how and why comfort or abandonment occur, Type B strategies effectively utilize both kinds of information without much transformation. Crittenden therefore calls the Type B strategy “balanced.” In the Strange Situation, this strategy therefore implies protest on the caregiver's unexpected departure, and the capacity to be comforted on his or her return without clinginess or aggression. Crittenden (1992c, p. 230) proposes that as a child develops, however, the primacy of a Type B strategy will also permit them to flexibly draw on Type A and Type C strategies as the situation demands, but without compulsion. Crittenden does not perceive Type A and Type C strategies as in themselves problematic, so long as they are not misapplied through too general an application. For example, the individual “balanced” in terms of affect and cognition can both respond merely “fine” to being asked “how are you?” in the course of a passing encounter, and also allow a close friend access to their inner fears, aspirations, and reflections. Crittenden (1992a) concludes, therefore, that “these alternative styles of processing information appear to match fairly well the secure, ambivalent, and avoidant patterns of attachment identified in infancy by Ainsworth” (p. 581).

Memory Systems

After information processing, the next crucial component of the dynamic–maturational model is memory. The reason for this is that if human experience of danger is comprised of two kinds of information, the ways in which we store and retrieve this information become crucially important. They not only will shape what information from the past is available to the acting subject but also will profoundly alter how new information is interpreted:

Storing information of different types (e.g., behavior sequences, generalisations, episodes) creates the possibility of multiple perspectives on reality. In a sense, the mind has available a multimethod experiment regarding the nature of reality. The experiment succeeds to the extent that discrepancies among memory systems are noticed, evaluated and resolved. (Crittenden, 1992a, p. 579)

The best of these multimethod experiments are available to “balanced children” (Type B), who

automatically and preconsciously use new and discrepant information to revise existing internal representational models to yield progressively more accurate models. Although, at any given moment, the changes are likely to be minor and nondisruptive, the sum of this activity is the ongoing reorganization. (Crittenden, 1995, p. 383)

In deepening her analysis of the effects of the Type A and Type C distortions on information processing, Crittenden drew upon the work of Schacter and Tulving (1994) to distinguish between four memory systems. Though Crittenden later attends to other memory systems as well, these four are the most significant for understanding the effects of alternate forms of information processing. Two are implicit forms of memory, primarily available preconsciously to the acting individual; two are explicit forms of memory, available consciously to the reflecting individual: 1

Procedural memory—contains information about preconscious sensorimotor behaviors and the patterns of stimuli that serve as cues for such behavior. Developed and elaborated from infancy, this procedural knowledge organizes most of our actions most of the time.

Crittenden (1995) noted that the A and C strategies of information processing result in different access to these types of memory. The utilization of Type A strategies encourages individuals to privilege causal information about the availability of an attachment figure and to split off emotional information. Crittenden therefore argued that the mobilization of a Type A strategy by an individual facilitates a prioritization of the storage and recall of semantic memory—descriptions and prescriptions about how the world should operate. (Crittenden occasionally implies that Type A strategies may also facilitate the storage and recall of procedural memory, in which this information is especially relevant to contingencies regarding the availability of safety or danger e.g., Crittenden, 1992a, p. 291). Yet as well as privileging such causal information, Type A strategies involve splitting off negative emotions, with the goal of maintaining the availability of protection. As a result, therefore, the affective intensity of imaged and episodic memories may mean that these are not stored or available for recall. This produces the effect that psychodynamic theories conceptualize as “repression,” though Crittenden qualified that some experiences may not have been stored in a retrievable way in the first place (Crittenden, 1997c, p. 51). With a reduced ability to access episodic or imaged memories, or integrate them with semantic knowledge, the price of Type A strategies is that they reduce the ability of an individual to “provide true explanations for their behavior” (Crittenden, 1995, p. 385).

By contrast, use of Type C strategies encourages individuals to privilege the storage and recall of imaged information and the affective components of episodic information. However, they exclude causal information and, as a result, their thought processes and verbal descriptions of events tend to be messy and unordered. Episodes they relate therefore tend to be ordered primarily by affective associations, rather than in terms of temporal succession or consequences. Hence, Crittenden (1995) observed that those who are dependent upon Type C strategies can be observed as showing “a ‘lack of recall’ when asked to provide (semantic) adjectives regarding their attachment relationships and when asked to access episodic memory through these semantic adjectives. Once in episodic memory, however, there should be little evidence of failure to recall” (p. 386), though these attachment-related episodes will tend to lack temporal order as a result of the distortions of causal information enacted by the Type C strategy.

Maturation

Crittenden built upon not only Bowlby's account of information processing but also his insight that development is best conceptualized using the metaphor of “pathways.” This metaphor emphasizes two points. The first is that a strategy is likely to change over time as the child matures and circumstances change. As a result, “a given pathway may continue straight or may branch in ways that may lead to other pathways” (Crittenden, 1997b, p. 51).

This potential for change in strategic functioning, as a result of maturation or changing circumstances, has two dimensions for Crittenden. A first dimension is “reorganization.” On the basis of her account of Type B as balanced between the alternate forms of information, and the potential at each stage of development for reorganization, Crittenden contests Main's emphasis on continuity in a Type B classification as necessarily optimal. Although maintenance of Type B from infancy to adulthood may well be the most comfortable state, and may be associated with many positive outcomes, the capacity to achieve an “earned” B status through reorganization has its own potential. From late childhood, and particularly when an individual has been supported in learning to reflect, deliberate reorganization may occur through metacognitive reflection on potential discrepancies between memory systems (Crittenden & Poggioli, 2012, p. 395). In this way, the opportunity is opened for noticing and correcting distortions in how we process or store our experiences.

For instance, old relationships may change, and new relationships occur throughout maturation and may be the basis for reorganization if an attachment relationship is formed with this figure or if they serve to facilitate or provoke reflection. Such a new relationship may be with a clinician or other professional. Hence, “observing videotaped parent–child interactions with the parent and discussing these observations from the parent's perspective can be a powerful means of creating communication between procedural and semantic memory systems” (Crittenden, 1992a, p. 593). Or psychotherapy may reveal the continued role played in an individual's present by imaged or episodic memories of danger in childhood situations in which they were told by their attachment figures that they should experience comfort. Crittenden (1997a) identifies that metacognitive reflections on the self can lead to an increase in the repertoire of strategies available to a person, and, in the process, can be the basis for wisdom and a tempered creativity (p. 83).

A second dimension of this potential for change is that information processing may become further distorted as neurological development progresses or as experiences of inadequate caregiving continue or intensify. In particular, Crittenden emphasizes the neurological changes associated with the change from infancy to preschool age and from school age to adolescence are periods of particular, predicable opportunities for change in an individual's strategy. As we have seen, for example, the Type A strategy in infancy involves the exclusion of negative affects—as an adaptation to a caregiving environment that is unresponsive to or rejecting of the infant's attachment behaviors. However, by preschool age, a child also has the neurological tools at their disposal to also use false-positive affects, with the goal of maintaining the availability of the caregiver. Addressing adolescence as another important period of neurological change, Crittenden (1997a, pp. 54–55) proposed that “after puberty species-specific patterns of sexual behavior (mental and physical) become powerful influences on behavior.” Further distortions of information processing that occur in adolescence can therefore lead, for example, to dangerous sexual entanglements as an individual excludes the negative emotions associated with such encounters (a Type A strategy). Crittenden thus contrasts the developmental focus of her dynamic–maturational model of attachment and adaptation with the approach of Main, which does not specifically integrate the potential for sexuality and reproduction that develops during maturation.

Crittenden also emphasizes that as information processing becomes more distorted, the strategy is applied more uniformly in response to anxiety-provoking situations. The most distorted forms of Type A or Type C transformation of perception and behavior become increasingly generated and maintained by the self rather than strategic adaptations to circumstances (Crittenden et al., 1991, p. 495). Yet no matter how intensely a strategy is deployed, Crittenden asserts that there is always the potential for “reorganization”—a movement toward balanced (Type B) strategies. This would mean, as we have seen, both a reduction in the distortion of information and flexible access to Type A or Type C strategies as the situation warrants. To illustrate, a toddler may have come to depend upon a Type C strategy of tantrums in aiming to maintain the availability of an attachment figure whose inconsistent availability has led the child to distrust or distort causal information about their apparent behavior. This may lead their attachment figure to get a clearer grasp on their needs and the appropriate response to their attachment behaviors. Experiencing more reliable and predictable information about the availability of their attachment figure, the toddler then no longer needs to use coercive behaviors with the goal of maintaining their caregiver's availability. Instead, they can experience and utilize both or either emotional and sequential information about potential dangers to interpret their experiences.

Knowledge and Maltreatment

With Crittenden's information-processing model integrated with an account of the effects of maturation and her interpretation of Schacter and Tulving's work on memory systems, we now have the three core components of the dynamic–maturation model in place. What can it do? Perhaps one of the most distinctive applications of the dynamic–maturation model has been Crittenden's sustained effort to make sense of the experiences of maltreating parents. In a remarkable study, Crittenden, Lang, Claussen, and Partridge (2000) explored the semantic knowledge about caregiving of abusing, neglecting, and adequate mothers. The research found that abusing and adequate parents were found to have the same level of explicit knowledge about how to meet the needs of their child. By contrast, neglecting mothers were found to have dramatically lower levels of parental reasoning. Furthermore, they found that “there were no effects for parenting intervention” on parental reasoning or on the child's attachment classification; “although this is disappointing, the results of this study may shed light on the problem. The mothers were all given the same parenting intervention, which consisted of information about child development and parenting strategies” (Crittenden et al., 2000, p. 233).

Crittenden's integration of an account of memory systems and developmental pathways into her foundational information-processing model offers predictions about the role played by distortions of information in causing harmful behavior. She concludes that the abusing parents are not accessing their semantic memories containing descriptions and prescriptions of how to care for their children when engaged in caregiving. Instead, “the behavior of the abusing mothers appears to be affectively triggered through imaged and episodic representations of previous affectively similar experiences” (Crittenden, 2000, p. 230). By contrast, the behavior of the neglecting parents is understood by Crittenden (1993) as caused by “preconscious exclusion from perception of information that elicits affect” (p. 33), which may further cause these parents not to perceive or act upon their semantic information regarding caregiving. One reason for this may be “depression,” a term that Crittenden means in the technical sense of a “failure of the strategy to resolve to problems to which the strategy is applied, combined with … awareness of this” (Crittenden, 1995, p. 398; Crittenden & Landini, 2011, p. 257).

Hence, increasing the knowledge of either the abusing or the neglecting parents about child development therefore has no effect, for different reasons, on the likelihood of abusing and neglecting behaviors. The striking implication is that “many parents and almost all troubled parents will be unable to tell accurately why they did what they did when they did it” and that “therefore, it will usually be futile—and often be misleading—to ask the parent directly why they did what they did” (Crittenden, 2008a, p. 124). The dynamic–maturational model offers three mechanisms that explain the fact that individuals may act upon information from other memory systems that in fact run counter to their own semantic descriptive and prescriptive knowledge of themselves and their lives.

The first can occur with individuals utilizing either Type A or Type C strategies. Crittenden notes that anxiety can short-circuit information processing. In doing so, she argues against a tendency within some branches of attachment research to treat an individual's representational models “as ‘things’ that a person ‘has’ and that ‘contain’ information” (Crittenden & Landini, 2011, p. 64). Instead, she contends that we have a variety of different information about our attachment figures, which takes the form of a disposition for a certain kind of action or lack of action when we are anxious. Given time to process our response to a situation, we can integrate these different sources of information into a considered response. However, when we are anxious, there is a pressure to short-circuit this integrative processing and just go with the behavior that seems most appropriate in the moment. Crittenden and Landini (2011, p. 64) observe that, without reflection, “the ‘strongest’ dispositional representation active at that moment would regulate behavior.” This dispositional representation could come from any of the memory systems, but because higher-level representations such as those from semantic or episodic memory “require more extensive processing (and therefore more time), early termination of processing will result in a bias toward enactment of procedural and imaged dispositional representations” (Crittenden & Landini, 2011, p. 64). This judgment will be powerfully influenced by the kinds of imaged and procedural memories available to the individual from their childhood (Crittenden, 2008b), but may also be impacted by other processes that change information processing, such as drug use (Crittenden & Claussen, 2002).

A second mechanism potentially causing behavior to run counter to semantic descriptions and prescriptions of how one should act is intensive use of Type C strategies. The Type C strategy facilitates an individual to omit semantic information about the temporal sequences and, in doing so, to experience exaggerated feelings of anger and/or fear. In adulthood, Crittenden theorizes that the strategies are concerned not only with self-preservation but the protection of offspring from potential threats. However, the distortion of information processing associated with this strategy can cause an individual to unduly interpret the behaviors of their offspring as threatening. Hence, applied as an approach to parenting, a Type C strategy may lead an adult to false reasoning about the meaning of their child's behaviors. For example, an infant's cries may be interpreted as deliberate attempts to annoy the caregiver. These interpretations may be intensified by the unpredictable upsurges in “invulnerable feelings (anger) or the vulnerable ones (fear and desire for comfort)” (Crittenden, 2008a, p. 210) characteristic of a Type C strategy, in which one affect or the other has been split off (see Hautamäki, Hautamäki, Neuvonen, & Maliniemi-Piispanen, 2010).

A third mechanism that can cause behaviors that run counter to semantic knowledge is the intensive use of Type A strategies. As we have seen, Crittenden built her information-processing model on the foundations laid by Bowlby's (1980) account of “segregated systems.” Bowlby predicted that motivational dispositions, feelings, and memories could be “segregated” if they were understood to interfere with the likelihood of being protected. Although kept from consciousness or expression in behavior under situations of anxiety, these split-off elements could reappear another time when evoked by some aspect of the situation. Anger evoked by rejection by an attachment figure when a child feels potentially threatened and is anxious may, on another occasion, be expressed at a playmate or sibling. When these occur without the individual's volition, such out-of-place reappearances of affects or dispositions to act are termed by Crittenden as “intrusions” into a Type A strategy. Crittenden and Landini (2011, p. 269) observe that

children placed in care, especially more than once, often have intrusions. In video SSP, they tend to occur when a rejected/neglected child approaches the stranger in an intrusion of desire for comfort, then loses muscular control and falls to the floor, overwhelmed by the intruding fear of the unknown … person.

Crittenden and Landini (2011, p. 269) suggest that intrusions are particularly common in two circumstances. First, intrusions may occur when the segregated affects are especially powerful and little integrated, and the ongoing work of keeping them at bay is disrupted—for example, by social or developmental transitions. Second, intrusions may function to generate a feeling of vitality in individuals who have compulsively deadened their feelings. Illustrative of both points, Crittenden (2008a, pp. 193–195) gives the example of a woman, Kate, who, since the birth of her second son, had been hearing voices telling her to cut herself and dreams of chopping up babies. Crittenden identifies the Type A strategies that Kate had used, growing up in a children's home and in a failed foster placement, to maintain the availability of someone attentive to her needs. Looking back across Kate's history, Crittenden (2008a, pp. 195–196) notes different forms of intrusion:

In the past, these were excitingly promiscuous and dangerous sexual encounters, but now, desire for pain (expressed as cutting) fulfilled the function of generating arousal. The repeated instances of cutting functioned, however briefly, to increase her arousal, to cause others to express extreme distress, and to attract others, especially professionals, to care for her.

Crittenden (2008a) notes that “dangerous as cutting is, it can function to reverse equally dangerous low arousal” and “it gave Kate access to professional caregivers in institutional settings. These, of course, had been her secure base since infancy” (pp. 195–196). Crittenden and Newman (2010, p. 435) therefore hypothesize that, in some cases they observed, “depression and intrusions appeared to work in tandem regulating arousal” in the absence of other functioning forms of emotion regulation.

Trauma

Though Crittenden has long been interested in trauma, the issue has received further elaboration in recent years. Attending to this topic can help further draw out the precise conceptual and terminological differences between Main and Crittenden, and Crittenden's distinctive concern with “how disturbed individuals use information, rather than simply finding that they are not integrated” (Crittenden & Landini, 2011, p. 7). By “trauma,” Crittenden refers to the psychological experience of emotionally or physically threatening circumstances that cannot be subjected to effective information processing. This information-processing perspective makes sense of the fact that children are especially vulnerable to trauma: They are “less able to understand” the meaning of experiences of danger than adults and “less able to store, retrieve, and integrate” the meanings they do derive (Crittenden & Landini, 2011, p. 250). It also makes sense of the fact that “threats to safety and reproduction more often yield trauma then other sorts of threat,” because “the brain has ‘hard-wired’ preferences regarding attention; in all species, these function to identify information relevant to danger and reproduction” (1997c, p. 36). Trauma results in entrenched, systematic errors in processing with the result that “either too much irrelevant information is retained (and used to organize behavior), or too much relevant information is discarded, or other errors of thought are made regarding the dangerous event” (Crittenden & Landini, 2011, p. 236). Any of these outcomes make maladaptive behavior in the present more likely.

One possibility is that that the trauma will result in an intensification of a Type C strategy. If causal descriptive or prescriptive information is disregarded or imaged, or episodic memories are overemphasized, then a more intensive Type C strategy may be the result. Crittenden (1997c, p. 52) calls this outcome “preoccupying” unresolved trauma, and notes that it may turn out to be adaptive if the rumination leads to an integrative reorganization. A second possibility is that trauma will result in an intensification of a Type A strategy. If affective information is disregarded, imaged or episodic memories are not processed, or semantic information overemphasized, then the result will be a more extreme form of Type A thinking and behavior. This would reinforce tendencies to exclude the emotional significance of the unresolved trauma, producing what Crittenden calls “dismissed trauma”—a possibility she feels is insufficiently considered in Main's work (Crittenden & Landini, 2011, p. 240).

Yet it is also possible for information processing and behavior to become “nonstrategic for at least a while” (Crittenden & Landini, 2011, p. 254). A key form of “broken” strategy addressed by Crittenden (2008a, p. 102) is “disorientation,” a state in which an individual suffers from “confusion of information from different sources (e.g., the self now, the self in the past, one's mother, one's religious guide, etc.).” Crittenden (2008a, p. 118) proposes that disorientation is particularly likely as a result of “dismissed childhood traumas.” Signs of disorientation indicate that the individual “is anxious to select an effective strategy and does not know how to do that (and up-regulates arousal)” (Crittenden & Landini, 2011, p. 307). It is very important to recognize, however, that Crittenden means something different by the term “disorientation” than Main. Main and Solomon (1986) identify “disorientation” as a dimension of the disorganized/disoriented “D” classification, in which behavior seems to signal “a lack of orientation to the immediate environment” (p. 97). Yet many of the behaviors Main and Solomon identify as indicative of disorientation in young children are considered to be potentially “organized” by Crittenden—because of her wider and different definition of the term. Momentary signs of what Main and Solomon would call “disorientation” may well, for Crittenden, be strategic if they function to give a child “extra time for information gathering or processing,” perhaps “enabling the child to make transitions from one behavior pattern to another” (Crittenden, 1992c, p. 226).

For example, Crittenden (1992c, p. 226) relates a case in which

in the Strange Situation, the compliant child of a hostile mother was observed actively approaching the door to seek her absent mother. As she did so, the door suddenly opened and the mother appeared. The child stopped very abruptly, froze, recovered her balance, did a cute little “dance,” then turned to pick up a toy and engaged the stranger.

Crittenden observes that within the Main and Solomon (1986) classification, this “would probably be considered evidence of disorganisation,” whereas Crittenden argues that “the child's behavior would be evidence of the highly organized and flexible use of two different patterns of behavior to implement the defended strategy of maintaining access without closeness” (1992c, p. 226). Crittenden suggests that “simply turning away, when she was so obviously approaching her mother, might be perceived by the mother as a blatant rebuff, thereby eliciting the very anger the child was seeking to avoid. Hence the ‘appeasement dance’ before the substitution of an acceptable alternate engagement with a toy and the stranger” (1992c, p. 226). Crittenden therefore concludes that “the appearance of disorganisation occurred because the child needed both to change her behavior and to cover that change in order to avoid appearing to snub the mother” (1992c, p. 226). Hesse and Main (2006, pp. 310–311), in a later formulation, have in fact likewise stated that they did not ever intend to imply that disorientation or disorganization would “necessarily” be the result of frightened, frightening or dissociative processes and that “some D behavior appear[s] to be the outcome of a readily comprehensible conflict, or of simple confusion.”

Critiques

Crittenden identifies subtypes of the Types A, B, and C strategies, running from B1 to B5, A1 to A8, and C1 to C8 (see Figure 1). She places these in a circle, with B3 at the top as a state of undistorted information processing, with A strategies and C strategies of ascending numerals running down either side and representing increasing degrees of distortion.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1

Dynamic maturational model of patterns of attachment in adulthood (adapted from Crittenden, 2008a, p. 70, with permission of the author).

Crittenden identifies two different patterns at each level of information-processing distortion. For Type A, “the odd-numbered patterns increasingly idealize the attachment figure whereas the even-numbered patters increasingly negate the self” (Crittenden & Landini, 2011, p. 42); the Type C patterns “involve an even-odd alternation of displaying angry invulnerability with vulnerable fear and desire for comfort (i.e., C1–2, C5–6, etc.)” (p. 43). If odd and even numbers are taken to be equivalent levels of distortion to information processing, it can be observed that “as the numeral increases, these states are increasingly generated and maintained by the self” and “there is an increase in both the extent of distortion of information and the uniformity with which the strategy is applied to all perceived threats, appropriately and inappropriately” (p. 112). The strategies thus numerically advance, it might be said, from being “states” that occur under conditions of perceived threat, to being stable and entrenched “traits.”

A crucial point is almost universally missed, even by thoughtful commentators on the range of Type A and C strategies presented in the dynamic–maturational model. Schuengel (2001), for example, criticizes Crittenden's proposed additional subtypes beyond preschool age (represented by the numerals A5 or C5 and higher) as lacking evidence. We would somewhat agree with this concern, but argue that this common criticism of the evidence base and exhaustiveness of Crittenden's account of behavioral strategies does not reduce the acuity of the dynamic–maturational model. This is because the subtypes do not organize the fundamental structure of Crittenden's theory. Crittenden did not propose the subtypes with the intention that they be exhaustive, as her critics have generally presumed. For instance, some strategies are understood barely to occur on their own—such as A5 (“compulsive promiscuity”; Crittenden & Landini, 2011, p. 166). Or again, Crittenden (2008a, p. 69) fully acknowledges that she does not yet have studies to support the addition of the A8 category (“externally assembled self”): the success of the dynamic–maturational model does not ride on whether this A8 personality structure is the only possible form of extreme affective distortion.

Ainsworth et al. (1978, p. 235) recall that, in forming the ABC classifications, “the subgroups were identified first, in the process of grouping together strange-situation protocols that were maximally similar … it was through examination of the similarities among members of each subgroup that our attention was first drawn to those variables.” Although following Ainsworth in emphasizing the importance of subgroups, Crittenden does not give them a foundational status within her theory. The point missed by most commentators is that “the patterns are not categorical. To the contrary, they are best described in terms of two dimensions” (Crittenden, 2000, p. 371). Crittenden (1995) explicitly states that “the categories identify areas on the dimensional framework; that is, they ‘tack down’ points defined by the dimensions. Whether any individuals exactly fit these points, especially the extreme points, is not critical to the argument about the dimensions” (pp. 388–389). The key dimension, represented by movement down the circumference of the circle, is the degree of Type A or Type C distortions of information processing. Evidence for the theoretical primacy of the dimensions over the particular subtypes identified within them is that Crittenden herself has used statistical tests (e.g., ANOVAs), which presume that the dependent variable is continuously distributed when assessing the effect of particular factors on the attachment and information-processing strategy used by a sample. In running these tests, odd and even numbers are put together with each a step of distortion, and, in doing so, a 4-point scale is produced. Others using the dynamic–maturational model have also, “with Crittenden's input,” treated the severity of distortion of information processing as “a quasi-continuous variable” (Kwako, Noll, Putnam, & Trickett, 2010, p. 413).

The dynamic–maturational model is an intentionally limited psychological theory: “Development is multidimensional, with factors other” than Crittenden's (1995) “central constructs” of caregiving, information-processing and maturation “affecting variation in developmental pathways” (pp. 388–389). This can be illustrated with the case of the A5 promiscuous strategy, which Crittenden has utilized as an explanation for the sexualized behavior of adolescents (Crittenden & Poggioli, 2012). As social psychologists and sociologists have demonstrated, sexualized behavior must be understood in the context of societal norms regarding the meaning of sexuality. There has been a rise in pressure on women to achieve an ideal of free, self-possessed desirability—“compulsory heterosexuality”—to which women need to aspire for their gender performance to be understood as acceptable. This compulsory heterosexuality, however, intersects with age norms regarding the limited readiness of young people for sexual activity and reproduction (Duschinsky, 2011; Renold & Ringrose, 2011). The dynamic–maturational model can explain what role distortions of information processing may play in facilitating heterosexualized behaviors. Yet the form of such behaviors is indelibly shaped by cultural norms and expectations—for instance, the historically unprecedented acceptance of pole dancing or genital hair waxing as signifiers of ordinary “sexiness” (Cokal, 2007). Crittenden asserts that the dynamic–maturational model “is a metatheory. That is, it integrates the best contributions of other theories (as opposed to competing with them)” (Crittenden & Poggioli, 2012, p. 410). Looking to the future, will the dynamic–maturational model integrate further insights from social psychology and sociology, or will it remain as a powerful integration of developmental psychology with cognitive science?

Conclusions

The dynamic–maturational model brings a rich and systematic interpretive framework to the study of diverse phenomena. It is powered by Crittenden's commitment to the idea that theory that integrates developmental psychology with cognitive science has the potential to make sense of and offer guidance on how to alleviate suffering. The theory at times exceeds the available data and becomes speculative; yet, despite this, psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers are already finding it useful in clinical practice. We would argue that this is because the strengths of the dynamic–maturational model lie in more than its current empirical validity, and rather in the way in which it offers an integrated and suggestive interpretive framework. We therefore agree with Crittenden (1992c, p. 235) that “tested as specified hypotheses using sound research methods,” the dynamic–maturational model of attachment and adaptation “possesses the potential to enlighten the interpretation of data,” whether this is the data of research findings or of clinical experience.