ABSTRACT
Many family therapists work directly with mutually entrapping behaviour without speculating on what may be happening in the unconscious mind. Attachment theory began as an exploration of the survival of primate infants and of their emotional development. The attachment dynamic enables three necessities for survival and reproduction in proto-humans and humans: adequate care in infancy balanced against, the enabling of safe exploratory behaviour and the development of a working ‘map’ of the world. The attachment dynamic contributes to the emergence of consciousness in several main ways. First, it connects an evolutionary imperative with both relationships and feelings about relationships. Second, because of the vital importance of group relationships, it shows how cognitive and emotional intelligence applied to internal images of the outside world is as likely to be subject to evolutionary influences as any other set of adaptive instincts.
