Bowlby's Monotropic explanation?of attachment contains several ideas which have become crucial to our understanding of how early attachments can impact later relationships.

These are:

• The Critical Period
• The Internal Working Model (IWM)

The critical period

• This is the idea that an attachment has to take place within a certain time scale, otherwise, it will never happen for the infant
• It is based on the biological idea of time scales in the physiological development of a fetus
• For example, the limbs of a fetus need to be shown to be developing in the fourth week of pregnancy: After day 28 if this has not happened then it will not
• Bowlby?believed the same could be true for psychological development, hence the critical period for attachment
• Bowlby?strongly felt that an infant needed an attachment to develop in the first 2.5 years
• If it did not it would be very difficult, if not impossible for it to develop afterward, leading to problems in later childhood and adulthood

The issues with the critical period

• Rutter (1998)?found, in his study of Romanian orphans that the children had been kept in horrendous conditions, with minimal contact with adults
• Their ability to form attachments had been limited as a result
• However, it was found that when they were adopted into stable homes, attachments did begin to form, even though some of these children were a lot older than the 2.5 years?Bowlby?discussed
• Rutter?admitted that it took time and was more difficult the older the child was, however, attachments were still made with children as old as 7 or 8
• Bowlby's?theory of the critical period was severely challenged

The sensitive period

• As a result of these controversies as well as other research indicating Critical was too strong a concept,?Bowlby?amended the theory
• He renamed it Sensitive Period
• The sensitive period means it is?ideal to attach in the first 2.5?years but it is not essential
• It is possible to attach later, as?Rutter?demonstrated

The Internal Working Model (IWM)

• Bowlby?was a Psychodynamic psychologist for most of his career
• Although his monotropic theory takes a lot from biology and evolutionary ideas, we can see traces of his background in his work on IWM and Continuity
• The notion that your early childhood has an impact on later relationships is highly psychodynamic in nature

The background-continuity

• Strongly linked to the idea of continuity and the fact that the early relationships that we have as an infant will have an impact on our later relationships
• It has already been shown that attachment Type B's tend to have the more secure and stable relationships whereas Type A tends to be aloof and Type C clingy, leading to problems in romantic relationships and friendships alike
• There is a wealth of evidence from Hazan and Shaver through to McCarthy
• This idea also has face validity as it seems to make logical sense

IWM

• The IWM is an internal representation of how we see ourselves as well as how we expect others to react to us
• It is like a schema of ourselves: A packet of knowledge on how we view ourselves, how worthy as a person we feel we are and how we expect others to see us
• These mental representations are formed in our early childhood, mostly through our interactions with our Primary Care Giver (PCG)
• It will impact how we interact with others and form relationships for the rest of our lives as well as explain why we all react and behave so differently to others: Our early experience shapes us

Secure attachment and IWM

• If an infant has a secure attachment, then they grow up feeling loved by their PCG and knowing they are worthy of love
• Their IWM will be positive and tells them they have worth and are lovable
• In later life they expect people to treat them well as this is what they experienced as an infant
• If someone treats them badly, they find it easier to cope with this as they can accept it may not be their fault
• They are worthy of love, and so if someone rejects them they can accept it and see that it may not be due to them: They can move on

Insecure Avoidant Attachment and IWM

• If an infant has had an insecure-avoidant attachment, then they will feel ignored by their caregiver and so will ignore them back as a means to protect themselves from getting hurt
• This will continue into adulthood
• Their IWM will lead them to expect that they will be rejected by others and they have little self-worth
• To protect themselves from hurt, they will remain aloof and not really be able to get close to others
• If they feel they are about to be rejected by someone, they will probably end the relationship first (reject first) so they can deal with the loss more easily: It was me not them
• As a result, the IWM makes it hard for them to have fulfilling relationships with others

Insecure Resistant Attachment and IWM

• If an infant has had an insecure resistant attachment then they will have grown up believing they had to make a fuss to get attention
• As they had a PCG that was ambivalent, one day loving and the next cold, they learned that crying and making a fuss was a good way to gain attention
• Their IWM will form so that they believe this is how they must be in later relationships: Clingy and possessive to keep the person interested, just as they behaved to get the PCG's attention
• This will make later relationships problematic as they will be too clingy and possessive and so likely drive people away from them
• Yet when they are 'rejected' their IWM will make them believe that they need to try harder to 'win' the person back: In reality, this will probably make things worse

Evidence for IWM

• This largely comes from the studies into continuity, which back up the issues that people have in later relationships
• Mary Main?interviewed a lot of participants about their childhood and their later relationships
• From this, she developed a theory of adult attachment styles
• Main?found that there is a link between childhood attachment styles and adult attachment styles, so supporting the IWM