Practitioner Review: Clinical applications of attachment theory and research for infants and young children.

摘要

Study of attachment in the 1970s and 1980s focused on operationalizing and validating many of the tenets of attachment theory articulated in Bowlby's landmark trilogy, Attachment and Loss (Bowlby, 1982, 1973, 1980), robustly underscoring the central role of child to parent attachment in the child's development and mental health. Attachment theory and its implications have long interested clinicians, though determining how best to translate complex theoretical constructs and research methods into the clinical arena has been challenging. Nevertheless, well-defined landmarks in early childhood attachment are clinically useful, and the emergence of interventions drawn from systematic research is promising. The purpose of this paper is to summarize salient issues from attachment theory and research and discuss how these issues inform clinical work with infants and young children.