The Handy Psychology Answer Book. Lisa J. Cohen

refers to a kind of grasping, possessive love. In this state, we cling to the loved one out of desperate dependency and see the loved one as a means to fill come kind of deficiency in ourselves. B-love, or being-love, reflects a love based on full acceptance of the other person. In B-love, we love other people simply for who they are and not for what they can do for us. Naturally, B-love is seen as the healthier and more sustainable kind of love. Maslow was very focused on the importance of rising above selfish desires in order to embrace other people for their own sake rather than as means to a goal. Interestingly, Maslow described his own mother as an extremely disturbed woman who was incapable of valuing anyone for any reason outside her own personal agenda.

      What impact did humanistic psychology have on the practice of psychotherapy?

      A number of schools of psychotherapy came out of the humanistic movement and many more were influenced by it. Carl Rogers’s person-centered psychotherapy, Fritz Perls’s Gestalt therapy (named after Gestalt psychology but more closely tied to humanistic psychology), Victor Frankl’s logotherapy, and Rollo May’s existential psychoanalysis are all children of humanistic psychology.

      Carl Rogers developed the school of client-centered therapy, which places great value on patients’ subjective experience.

      Who was Carl Rogers?

      Carl Rogers (1902–1987), another key figure in humanistic psychology, has had enormous influence on the practice of psychotherapy. His school of person-centered psychotherapy, originally known as client-centered psychotherapy (and often simply referred to as Rogerian therapy), placed the client’s subjective experience at the forefront of the therapy. He believed the therapist’s role was less to untangle psychopathology than to promote the client’s personal growth through empathic listening and unconditional positive regard. While Rogers has been criticized for a relative disregard of negative emotions and interpersonal conflict, therapeutic empathy is now universally recognized as an essential ingredient of psychotherapy.

      What did Rogers mean by unconditional positive regard?

      Rogers made a distinction between loving a child for his or her intrinsic worth and loving the child dependent upon some condition: “I will love you if you are a good student, beautiful, obedient,” etc. Children who feel loved unconditionally grow up to have faith in their own intrinsic worth. In contrast, children who experienced their parents’ love as conditional, as contingent on some kind of performance, will often suffer long-lasting damage to their sense of self. These notions are similar to Maslow’s concepts of B-love and D-love.

      What contributions to psychotherapy research did Carl Rogers make?

      Rogers was a pioneer in the scientific investigation of psychotherapy. He believed the methods of empirical research could and should be applied to the practice of psychotherapy. He was the first to record psychotherapy sessions despite vehement opposition from the psychoanalysts who believed the privacy of the therapy hour should never be violated. Rogers also systematically measured improvement by administering psychological tests pre- and post-treatment and then compared the results of subjects in therapy with those in a control group. These methods became fundamental tools in psychotherapy research, which has since blossomed into a discipline all its own.

      ATTACHMENT THEORY

      What is attachment theory?

      Attachment theory was one of the first movements to provide empirical support for the key concepts of psychoanalytic theory, specifically that early childhood relationships with caregivers have profound impact on later personality development. Similar to Carl Rogers, attachment theorists believed that scientific methods could be usefully applied to the study of emotional and interpersonal phenomena. Thus attachment theory was the first movement to bring scientific methods to bear on psychoanalytic ideas. Not surprisingly, this occasioned resistance at first but over time attachment theory has been accepted by most psychoanalytic schools.

      Attachment refers to a biologically based drive in the child to form an enduring emotional bond with the caregiver, generally the mother. Attachment theory originated with John Bowlby, who wrote a trilogy of books entitled Attachment and Loss (1969, 1973, 1980). Bowlby’s theory was greatly expanded by Mary Ainsworth (1913–1999), who developed an experimental procedure to study attachment. It was Ainsworth who put attachment theory into the lab.

      Who was John Bowlby?

      John Bowlby (1907–1990) was a British psychoanalyst who became concerned with the devastating impact of early mother–child separations, which he frequently witnessed when working in post-World War II England. Disturbed by the dismissal of real-life events in the psychoanalytic world view, Bowlby’s insistence on the real-time influence of the mother’s presence often put him at odds with his colleagues. Bowlby was also interested in ethology, the study of animal behavior, and eventually synthesized both psychoanalytic theory and ethology into his theory of infant-mother attachment.

      What was John Bowlby’s concept of attachment?

      Generally, attachment is seen as a biologically based, evolutionarily adaptive drive for the infant to seek protection from the mother. When the child is frightened or is separated from the mother, the attachment system is activated and the child will seek proximity or physical closeness to the mother. The child will reach toward the mother, cry to be picked up, or crawl close to the mother. In Bowlby’s view, the child is motivated to attain a sense of felt security, a subjective experience of safety and wellbeing—perhaps a kind of cozy contentment. When the child feels secure, the attachment system is deactivated and the exploratory system is turned on. At these points, the child will venture away from the mother to explore the world, to play. If the relationship with the mother is disrupted through separation or loss, the child will experience great sadness and distress, which can have long-lasting and even lifelong impact, depending on the severity of the loss.

      According to attachment theory, children’s powerful attachment to their caregivers evolved to help keep them safe and cared for while they are too young to take care of themselves.

      What was Bowlby’s concept of the internal working model?

      Although his description of the infant attachment system was largely behavioral, Bowlby addressed the psychological aspects of attachment through the notion of the child’s internal working model of attachment. This is a kind of mental map or script of the caregiver and the self. Through repeated attachment experiences, the child develops expectations about the availability and responsiveness of the mother (or caregiver). The child develops a working model of how the mother-child interactions will play out and then modifies attachment behavior according to these expectations.

      How did Mary Ainsworth create a scientific means to measure attachment?

      Although John Bowlby was always interested in translating his concepts into empirical research, his colleague Mary Ainsworth (1913–1999) is credited with taking attachment theory into the lab. While Bowlby had initially been interested in the universal effect of mother-child separation, Ainsworth was interested in individual differences in the quality of attachment based on the nature of the mother-child relationship. Her initial research was in Uganda, where she had traveled with her husband in 1954. By observing twenty-eight Ugandan babies, she noted individual differences in the quality of mother-infant attachment.

      This research would be further developed in Baltimore at Johns Hopkins University, where she and her husband moved after leaving Uganda. Here she studied mother-child interactions both in their homes and in the laboratory during