Towards an integrative neuroscientific and psychodynamic approach to the transmission of attachment

Developed by Bowlby in 1969, the concept of attachment led to significant breakthroughs in the exploration of subjective and intersubjective developmental processes. Defined as an innate behavioral system that enables an infant to regulate his closeness to his mother, attachment lies at the crossroads of psychoanalytical and cognitive neuroscientific theories. Standardized instruments for assessing the quality of attachment helped to validate the hypothesis that a variety of attachment patterns exist in mother–infant dyads and are underpinned by mental representations known as Internal Working Models. Research has also shown that most of these attachment patterns are transmitted by the mother to the infant. These results increased researchers’ interest in the concept of transgenerational transmission of attachment patterns that might be considered as a stepping stone of transgenerational transmission. Starting with hypotheses on the transmission of attachment, this article underlines that despite conceptual differences between the psychoanalytical and the developmental theories, they agree on the major mediating role of behaviors (micro-behaviors in situations of interaction) in the transgenerational transmission of attachment. Relying on the concept of mirror neurons and on research revealing their role in the embodied cognition of one’s own and others’ intentions, this article leads to a hypothesis regarding the biological mechanisms that are likely to be involved in the transmission of attachment. A two-stage transformation (from the mind to the body of/in the mother, then from the body to the mind of the infant) is hypothesized to occur through the embodied neurological imitation of the mirror neuron system and to facilitate the transmission of the attachment pattern through the same mechanism involved in the transmission of other significant mentalized representations.