Advance Acclaim:
Assessing Adult Attachment
"In this important volume, Crittenden and Landini present a new coding and classification system, derived from their Dynamic-Maturational Theory on attachment relationships, for the Adult Attachment Interview.
Their provocative theoretical and classificatory approach aims to extend the applications of research on adult attachment to practicing clinicians and to the empirical investigation of child protection issues, mental disorders, and mental health treatment.
This innovative and thought-provoking volume should be read by developmental and clinical psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, and developmental psychopathologists."
"This book brings together a wealth of research, clinical and training experience, offering more than just a manual for the analysis of the AAI. It will be of great value for researchers, clinicians, and trainers."
"This complex, challenging, and compassionate book is as groundbreaking as the Adult Attachment Interview itself was twenty-five years ago. Building on the work of Bowlby, Ainsworth, and Main and applying recent discoveries in cognitive and neuroscience, Crittenden and Landini detail a new path for attachment theory. The Dynamic Maturational Model, applied to the AAI, promises rich rewards to clinicians, basic and applied developmental researchers, and professionals in a variety of fields from child welfare to criminology."
"The book is clear, accessible, and written with compassion. It represents a culmination of thinking and research in the best traditions of both
the scholar practitioner and the scientist research practitioner. The research is verifiable, and promotes theory-practice linking, using the AAI as the tool, and the DMM as the model for formulation practice. The approach helps us understand how people adapt to confusion, uncertainty, and danger within their close relationships, and
how attempts to adapt and survive can also lead to maladaptation.
If I had my way, this book would form
the heart of all psychotherapeutic and applied clinical practitioner trainings!"
Strathearn Lane's introduction to the AAI book and authors Patricia Crittenden and Andrea Landini at a book-signing party in Miami.
Drs Crittenden & Landini autographing copies of Assessing Adult Attachment.
Sylvia Martinez, Udita Iyengar, and Lane Strathearn (the Baylor crowd) waiting for their signed copies.
Pat enjoying a happy moment at the book signing party.
"A wealth of research, clinical and training experience"
The Adult Attachment Interview is a widely-used tool for eliciting information from adults about their early childhood experience. The results can shed light on how exposure to danger in early childhood has shaped behavior and interpersonal relationships later in life, thus providing a powerful basis for therapeutic work.
Here, Crittenden and Landini present a new, expanded method for drawing information from The Adult Attachment Interview that can enable clinicians to define clients' problems in functional ways and select appropriate treatment approaches.
The authors' method - the Dynamic-Maturational Model (DMM) of attachment and adaptation derives information about adults' current response to threats and danger from spoken discourse about family relationships in childhood.
Using the method, clinicians can identify more than 12 self-protective strategies together with many forms of unresolved loss and trauma. The method analyzes discourse through a focus on speech structure, as opposed to content. Because the form of sentences and selection of words to represent ideas is largely a preconscious process, this approach reveals meanings that are not screened by the mind as thoroughly as is the content, which is usually conscious.
The authors offer a fascinating explanation of the neurobiological underpinnings of DMM, grounded in findings from the cognitive neurosciences about information processing. These findings indicate that the mind generates multiple representations of the relation of self to context, and that these representations organize self-protective and progeny-protective behavior.
This gives the DMM discourse analysis special relevance for clinical applications. By working with these representations, clinicians can begin to understand clients' attachment experiences and design interventions to heal the suffering that endangered and uncomforted childhood experience can bring.
Crittenden and Landini address the range of adult experience from normative to very endangered/dangerous, including individuals known to both mental health services and the judicial system, and the atypical behavior that endangers the adults themselves, their partners, their children, or non-familial others.
In this volume, readers have an eminently practical, theoretically-grounded work that is sure to transform many types of therapy.
© 2011 Patricia Crittenden - all rights reserved