The Family Relations Institute is a collaboration of researchers and clinicians (click here for details) interested in the development of attachment theory and its applications to service delivery, including psychotherapy, early intervention, social work, and health services.

The approach is a dynamic-maturational perspective on change and continuity in developmental pathways, particularly those that are associated with risk for dysfunction or psychopathology. The primary activities of the institute are:

1. courses in attachment theory,
   
   
2. development of and training in assessments of patterns of attachment that reflect the dynamic-maturational expansion of attachment theory, and
   
   
3. research.

A central focus is the development of theory and assessments that are generalizable across cultural and linguistic boundaries. To this end, teaching and data gathering are carried out in a variety of cultures and in several languages.

Overview:

The Dynamic-Maturational approach to attachment theory emphasizes the dynamic interaction of the maturation of the human organism, across the life-span, with the contexts in which maturational possibilities are expressed around the functions of self-protection, reproduction, and protection of progeny.

• Maturation is both neurological/mental and physical and also involves both the increase in potential during childhood and adulthood and the ultimate decrease in potential in old age.
• Contexts include both the people and places that affect development, e.g., family, school, and also the intra- and interpersonal challenges of different periods of the life-span. These challenges include:
  1. preschoolers' need to learn safe forms of self-reliance for short periods of time;
  2. school-aged children's need to establish symmetrical attachments with best friends while concurrently maintaining affiliative peer relationships;
  3. adolescents' need to transform these same-sex attachments into heterosexual, reciprocal attachments with a sexual component;
  4. adults' establishment of symmetrical and reciprocal spousal attachments that foster both partners' development, the nurturance of children in non-reciprocal, non-symmetrical attachment relationships in which the adult is the attachment figure;
  5. attachments in later life when the adult is becoming less physically and mentally competent and in need of protection once again.
  The outcome of this interaction is the organization of mental and behavioral strategies for protection of the self and progeny, i.e., patterns of attachment.

The Dynamic-Maturational approach hypothesizes that, as maturation makes new and more complex mental and behavioral processes possible, changes in context provide the occasion for using these processes. Specifically, there is a need for maturing individuals to attribute meaning to ambiguous, incomplete, and deceptive information in ways that promote self-protective behavior; the interaction of maturation with experience provides a basis for this. The particular organization of self-protective behavior that develops reflects the strategies that most effectively identify, prevent, and protect the self from the dangers of particular contexts while concurrently promoting exploration of other aspects of life.

Because exposure to danger differs by age as well as by person, family, and cultural group, individuals' patterns of attachment will reflect:

• individual developmental history (with individual periods of change in pathway alternating with periods of stability and distributions of patterns differing by developmental period);
• familial and cultural influences (with the distributions of patterns varying by family and culture).

The five figures below provide a model of the increasing array of possible strategies that individuals may use at varied periods of development. (Click each model for a larger version.)