ABSTRACT
This chapter stems from recent advances in attachment research by Mary Main and her associates, which began in a search to understand infants whose strange-situation behavior with either mother or father was ‘unclassifiable’, that is, it did not fit any of the A, B, and C patterns identified by Ainsworth (e.g. Ainsworth et al. 1978). These infants constituted 13 per cent of Main’s Berkeley sample. A follow-up in the children’s sixth year was undertaken to learn more about them and how they differed from secure infants and from other insecure infants, (1) in their strange-situation behavior with each parent at 1 year of age, and the strategies these reflect, (2) in the nature of their attachment to parents in their sixth year, and (3) in their parents’ attachment histories. 1 Main and Solomon (in press) re-examined the strange-situation
behavior of the unclassifiable infants in great detail. They found no one clear-cut fourth pattern of behavior, but a variety of behaviors that had in common that they signified disorganization and/or disorientation. They categorized infants displaying such behavior as ‘D’.
