Attachment theory and research: Resurrection of the psychodynamic approach to personality

Since the rise of the social-behaviorist approach to personality and its elaboration with cognitive concepts following “the cognitive revolution,” psychodynamic theories, usually identified with Sigmund Freud, have taken a beating. This makes it easy for mainstream personality-social psychologists to brush the psychodynamic approach aside. At the same time, researchers in both developmental and personality-social psychology have made great progress in testing and elaborating ideas presented by John Bowlby in his famous trilogy on attachment and loss. What outsiders to that perspective may not realize is that Bowlby was a psychoanalyst who saw himself as retracing Freud's steps but with the advantage of new theoretical and empirical strategies. In this article, we conceptualize attachment theory as a contemporary psychodynamic approach, show how this theory has helped to bring psychodynamic psychology back to life, and review empirical evidence from our laboratories that supports many of the psychodynamic hypotheses advanced by Bowlby.