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Sessions:
Attachment
Jeffery Smith, MD
jssmith@me.com
Course Overview: (Preliminary outline subject to modification)--
Reading: Becoming Attached, Robert Karen, PhD. Oxford University Press, 1998. Atthment Theory and Psychoanalysis, Peter Fonagy, Other Press, New York, 2001. Materials on Reacitve Attachment Disorder and on Neurophysiology will be in article form. Peter Fonagy et al, Affect Regulation, Mentalization, and the Development of the Self.
Written Assignments: After each session, please write a 1 page response to "What struck you about this reading." Please bring your paper to share at the beginning of class.
Session 1, Overview: Slide talk with videos of Bowlby, Ainsworth and Harlow as well as the main points of the course.
Session 2, Bowlby Before Ainsworth: The Early Battles. Read the first section in Karen's book. We will discuss Bowlby's work in context, up to his report for the WHO of 1951.
Session 3, Ainsworth and the Strange Situation: How research added to and limited Bowlby's work.How the Attachment field was influenced and had an impact on Ethology, Cognitive science, Behaviorism and Social Policy.
Session 4, Mary Main and Contemporary Research: The Disorganized response to the Strange Situation, the Adult Attachment Interview and more recent findings on attachment.
Session 5, Cozolino: Neurophysiology of Attachment: Neurotransmitters, brain structures hormones and phermones: The physical basis of attachment for non-science majors.
Session 6, Reactive Attachment Disorder and Change: Orphans, delinquents and trauma survivors: Effects on attachment and strategies for change.
Session 7, Tronic: Now Moments and Implicit Relational Knowing. Conceptualization of how change takes place in the non-verbal sphere of implicit knowledge of relationships and how they work.
Session 8, Attachment, Neutrality and the Superego. Thoughts on the need for connection, how it drives the interaction of psychotherapy, how neutrality frustrates this drive and how the internalization of superego contents is driven by the need to belong.
Session 9, Fonagy and Psychoanalysis: Mentalization, the capacity to observe ones own mind and imagine others' as the centerpiece between psychoanalysis and attachment.
Session 10. Relating Attachment to Practice: Further discussion of Fonagy and how attachment theory and thinking connects with clinical practice.